Finding Your Roots — Season 1, Episode 6: Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal

Episode synopsis

Many American descend from a dense soups of European ethnicities; we could call them mutts, with ancestral roots across every country in Europe. Actors Robert Downey, Jr. and Maggie Gyllenhaal are textbook examples of Americans with a rich tapestry of European immigrant stories making up their family trees. We delve in to their deep American roots in early colonial communities, and we meet their Eastern European Jewish ancestors, who share almost identical migration stories From the Mayflower to Ellis Island, we journey through centuries of immigration that shaped and built our melting pot nation.

About Finding Your Roots

Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

More episodes from Season 1

• E1Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.
• E2John Lewis and Cory Booker
• E3Barbara Walters and Geoffrey Canada
• E4Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
• E5Rick Warren, Angela Buchdahl and Yasir Qadhi
• E7Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice and Ruth Simmons
• E8Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho and Sanjay Gupta
• E9John Legend and Wanda Sykes
• E10Adrian Grenier, Michelle Rodriguez and Linda Chavez