Do ‘Finding Your Roots’ Celeb Guests Give DNA? Questions Answered About the PBS Series

Fresh off its first Emmy nomination — a 2024 nod in the Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special category — the PBS series Finding Your Roots is coming back for Season 11 on Tuesday, January 7, 2025.

On deck for genealogical research this season are celebrities like Joy Behar, Kristen Bell, Laurence Fishburne, Debra Messing, Melanie Lynskey, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Amanda Seyfried, Dax Shepard, Sharon Stone, Chrissy Teigen, and even host Henry Louis Gates Jr. himself.

“Our ancestors’ genetic legacies cascade down the branches of our family trees, informing who we are,” Gates says in a press release about the new episodes. “As Finding Your Roots enters its eleventh season, the team and I cherish deeply the bond we have with our guests and viewers to explore the history we have in common through personal stories of those who have shaped our world, one generation to the next. It’s a special honor to have our home on PBS, and we can’t wait to share this season’s amazing slate of guests with our audience.”

And judging by PBS’ trailer for Season 11, we can expect one jaw-dropping revelation after another, and that’s a credit to the hard work of Gates and all the genealogists who toil for hours behind the scenes. Read on for answers to frequently asked questions about Finding Your Roots’ production.

How does the show choose its celebrity guests?

Gates said in a 2023 Q&A with PBS Standards & Practices that Finding Your Roots casting is a “multifaceted process” with many factors at play.

“At its core is our desire to tell a rich range of stories that reflect the diversity of both the human experience as well as of the American people, as seen in the history of immigration to the United States,” he explained. “We work toward this goal by sending invitations out to a broad range of compelling individuals, without prior research about their family trees. Once a person has agreed to be in the series, only then does our research into their ancestry start.”

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How long does it take to research a guest’s ancestry?

Finding Your Root’s researchers spend an average of 200 to 300 hours looking into the genealogy of each guest, and sometimes more, as the late Johni Cerny, the show’s chief genealogist from 2012 to 2019, explained to Family Tree Magazine in 2013.

And though the researchers sometimes feel like they’re getting nowhere, they “[eventually] find something interesting for just about everyone, but only after adding hours of intensive research into obscure records,” Cerny added. “We could probably do a great series on the unsolved genealogy mysteries of our former guests.”

Do guests have input in the research process?

The research team asks guests for family stories they know and for genealogical questions they’d like solved, as genealogist Kimberly N. Morgan explained to Emmys.com this April.

And those questions and goals sometimes steer the research, director and senior producer Sabin Streeter told Family Tree Magazine in 2020. “We don’t want to tell them stories they already know,” Streeter said. “We want to excite them or engage them intellectually. If the guest says, ‘My grandmother had such an impact on me: I want to know about her ancestors,’ we follow up.”

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Does the research ever turn up revelations too personal to air?

The Finding Your Roots team told Family Tree in 2020 that their research has uncovered family secrets they deemed too sensitive for broadcast. In one case, for example, they learned a guest’s dad was not his biological father.

“We stopped production,” genealogist Nick Sheedy recalled. “Dr. Gates called the guest directly to break the news. This was life-changing to our guest and his family. We’re looking for great stories to tell on TV, but we are sensitive to the significant impact this could have. We would not blindside a guest with a revelation like this. We’re not Jerry Springer.”

Do celeb guests give DNA samples to the show’s researchers?

Potential Finding Your Roots guests complete questionnaires about their family information and take multiple DNA tests, Emmys.com reports. “Over 45 million people have taken direct consumer DNA tests,” DNA expert CeCe Moore told the site. “That means that when someone’s DNA is added to that database — like our guests’ are — if there’s a mystery in there, we’re very likely going to uncover it.”

Have the researchers found they’re related to the celeb guests?

In a 2021 YouTube Q&A, Sheedy revealed that he’d learned that he was related to Finding Your Roots guests Neil Patrick Harris, Bill Hader, Billie Jean King, and Ted Danson. “I’m probably related to 10 to 15 of our guests that I know of, especially our white guests that have deep, colonial ancestry,” he said. “John Waters is related to my Grandma Betty on both sides of his family. So, yes, it is a small world. … We like the stories, and the stories are what makes this history come alive and connects us to it so that we have some context [about] where we fit into this history, this family history and this global history.”

Would the show ever research the ancestry of regular folks?

After years of finding the roots of the rich and famous, the PBS show turned the spotlight on three everyday people, selected through a nationwide search, in its Season 10 finale. That lucky trio: Terrie Morrow, a travel agent and school bus driver from Alabama, Megan Robertson, a speech therapist from Pennsylvania, and Joyce Willis, a civil servant from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The title of that episode? “Viewers Like You.”

Finding Your Roots, Season 11 Premiere, Tuesday, January 7, 2025, PBS