In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (Hardcover)

~ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this companion book to a two-part PBS series, Gates (Colored People) combines rigorous historical research with DNA analysis to recreate the family trees of African-American celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, as well as intellectuals, authors, comedians, musicians and athletes. Most of the subjects knew very little about ancestors as recent as grandparents, to say nothing of the information DNA results provided about their African and European ancestry. Gates connects gaps in ancestral knowledge to the fundamental evil of the American slave era, when slave owners and sellers purposely robbed black human beings of... all aspects of civilization that make a human being 'human': names, birth dates, family ties. Though the book relies too heavily on the notion that knowing one's ancestry leads to a better understanding of aspects of one's own personality, Gates proves in case after case that the past brings itself to bear on the present. In Chris Rock's case, had he known he had a 19th-century ancestor who had served as a South Carolina legislator, it might have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Following up on the PBS series tracing the genealogy of 19 prominent African Americans, Gates details the long and arduous efforts given the abrupt disruption of the Middle Passage and the secrets created by illicit race mixing during and after slavery. In each chapter, he highlights the personal family history of each subject and the particular challenges of tracing the family’s roots. Photographs and personal recollections of family stories add to the fascinating detail as Gates reveals to the subjects the results of searching genealogical records and using DNA testing to find their specific African origins. Among those whose roots he traced are Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, Quincy Jones, and Peter Gomes, all of whom recall cherished family legends and intimate secrets. Gates puts each search in the broader context of African American and American history with an appreciation for the texture of the lives of ordinary people in contributing to the history of a nation and the complexity of race. The final chapter offers sound advice and insight on conducting genealogical research. Gates’ famous enthusiasm for history and African American genealogy is evident throughout this fascinating book. --Vanessa Bush

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (January 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307382400
• ISBN-13: 978-0307382405
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #306,749 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #17 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > African American > Gates, Henry Louis

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Valuable but not error-free, March 6, 2009

By	Richard Carlson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I found this collection of genealogies and family histories of 19 African Americans to be both fascinating and moving. The family histories explore many different aspects of African American history and the black experience in the US, always tying individual stories to broader historical themes in a way that was generally successful, if sometimes repetitive and often lacking in detail. Therefore, despite the criticisms outlined below, I think this is a valuable book, and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in African American history or genealogy.

That said, I was troubled by the factual errors and questionable interpretations that riddle the book. Gates is neither a historian nor a geneticist by training, so these lapses are perhaps unavoidable, but they detract from the book's overall impact. Perhaps most troubling is Gates's problematic use of DNA evidence. DNA evidence is particularly important in African American genealogy because it is almost always the only way descendants of slaves can find a direct, albeit generalized, connection to their African ancestry. But DNA test results are not as straightforward as Gates presents them. In the admixture test, for example, two siblings might have quite different results, despite having identical ancestors, because each sibling is the product of a different recombination of their parents' DNA. A brief section explaining exactly what DNA tests can and cannot tell us about our ancestry, and more careful wording when describing DNA test results, would have improved the book.

The book also contains several factual errors. Among the ones I found: the 1870 census doesn't list birthdays or family relationships (it lists ages, and family relationships were not recorded until the 1880 census) (p. 8); Harris County, Georgia, is on the Alabama border, not "near the South Carolina border" (p. 198); and the slave schedules in the federal census were made in 1850 and 1860, not 1840 and 1850 (p. 420). While each error in itself is minor, the errors combine to suggest a degree of carelessness in research or editing that weakens the book's overall message. This is unfortunate, because it's an important message.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A helpful and inspiring book, March 24, 2009

By	HRW "RodneyRaw" (CONNECTICUT) - See all my reviews

Henry Gates' book, IN SEARCH OF OUR ROOTS, gives much more information than its accompanying PBS documentary, "African American Lives," and lays out the processes used to gather that information. This book is most relevant to those who have done or plan to do serious genealogy. It would also be of interest to those who are admirers of the people it covers. I have been obsessed with trying to trace my family into slavery and beyond for the past eleven years. I started this project in 1996 after reading Edward Ball's book, SLAVES IN THE FAMILY, because it struck a note which resonated with certain of my family's oral history.

I began my search before census data was digitized and searchable on the internet. Countless hours were spent going through microfilmed records and traveling to local archives. At that time DNA testing seemed only used to prove or negate paternity.

It's been said that black genealogy is very difficult but not impossible. Early mentors told me that if you cannot trace your people as humans, you must trace them as property. In this process you come to many dead ends where the line(s) just die out. Gates' book shows this and I found it to be a help in showing how his genealogists dealt with some of the barriers. Their use of conjecture was informative. For example, a simple thing such as searching for a slave owner in another state based on the last name of the former slave in the slave schedules had not occurred to me. If I did not have a record with the slave owner's name in the county where the ex-slave was living I assumed that there was no further information.

I am envious of the army of professional genealogists, historians and archivists that Henry Gates had at his disposal for this project. He also seemed to have had a huge budget for DNA tests. I entered his contest to pick a "regular" person to be included in the "African American Lives" project to have some of these resources placed at my disposal, but it was not to be. Previously I was able to do some limited DNA testing which was helpful in showing that I had none of Native American blood spoken of by my father's family and now could abandon time wasting searches through Indian records. The book was helpful in describing the DNA heritage of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, with whom I share the L3d haplogroup. I had been researching East African slavery to figure out how my ancestors ended up as slaves in South Carolina and Virginia from areas where slaves to the Americas were not taken. I did not have the $400 to test African ancestry of tribes and even if I did, I did not have the historians to interpret the results with tribal warfare and migration patterns.

On my own I have taken my and my husband's family back six generations. I have accumulated a sizable collection of genealogy books. Gates' book is very good in that it is informative and inspires one to go forward with a very difficult search. I can overlook the "factual errors and questionable interpretations" that were mentioned in other reviews because I was experienced enough to immediate recognize that they were errors. Either Gates did no genealogy himself or he did not write or have a knowledgeable person proof read those sections.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Slavery's Impact on Family Heritage, February 16, 2009

By	Sacramento Book Review "SacramentoBookReview.com" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

A follow-up to the PBS documentary "African American Lives", Gates goes further into historical, genealogical, and genetic research with nineteen famous African Americans, finding new and interesting details of their ancestors, going past the Civil War and using DNA, their African roots. Many of his subjects are high-profile media figures--Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Oprah Winfrey--others are exception members of their chosen careers - Mae Jemison, the first black astronaut, Benjamin Carson, head of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins University--and high-profile pastors--Peter Gomes and TD Jakes. There is a short biography of each, but the bulk of each chapter is on what Gates' research found regarding their families. Again and again, the point is made that how much slavery removed people's heritage, keeping them from knowing those ancestors that provide the "family history" you hand down to each new generation.