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Sunday’s season finale of “Finding
Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” on PBS focused on the Hispanic genealogy
of political analyst Linda Chavez and actors Michelle Rodriguez and Adrian Grenier.

The trio shares Hispanic heritage, but each thought of him- or herself differently:

• Chavez considered herself of mixed European heritage. She had roots in Spain’s New
  World colonies going all the way back to the 1590s,  when an ancestor sailed
  to Mexico. In a surprise discovery, she learned many of her family were “conversos,”
  Jews forced to convert to Catholicism, many of whom continued to practice Judaism
  in private. A large number of conversos left Spain during the Inquisition.
  Her grandmother’s custom of turning a religious statue to face the wall hinted at
  the surprise—you
  can read more about this custom in Chavez’ essay here.

• Grenier, who’d always identified with American Indian roots because of a story in
  his mother’s family, discovered he had a conquistador ancestor in Don
  Juan de Oñate

  ‘s army (kind of the opposite of having American Indian roots).

  Grenier seemed shaken when his connection to American Indian heritage was in question,
  but Gates’ team did find a 1663  record at the New
  Mexico state archives identifying an ancestor as “Indio.” So he does have American
  Indian roots, just further back than he’d believed. I wonder if he’ll still identify
  himself as being American Indian?>

• Rodriguez is Puerto Rican through her father and Dominican through her mother. Gates
  described her tree as a “tangled web,” provoking a hilarious reaction from Rodriguez.
  Her father’s family intermarried repeatedly, likely in an effort to preserve “pure”
  bloodlines. Three of her third-great-grandfathers were brothers, and her great-grandparents
  were first cousins.

  Her surprise came on a trip to the Dominican Republic to learn more about her mom’s
  family from a great-aunt. The aunt’s parents—Rodriguez’s great-grandparents—weren’t
  married, it turns out. Her great-grandfather had a legal wife, and the two women raised
  the children together.

As in other episodes, DNA tests revealed guests’ percentages of maternal ancestry
from various parts of the world. You can read
more about the tests and each person’s results on the Your Genetic Genealogist blog.

Also as before, Gates emphasized that mixing between ancestral groups or “races”—in
this case, colonial Spanish and American Indian peoples—was common. This is part of
what makes the definition of American really pretty broad.

Good news: From Lisa
Louise Cooke’s interview with Gates in her Genealogy Gems Podcast, it sounds like
a second season is already in production.

Watch the full episode
on the “Finding Your Roots” website.