Using genealogy, oral history, family stories and DNA analysis to trace lineage through American history and back to Africa, the series provides a life-changing journey for a diverse group of highly accomplished African Americans: a neurosurgeon, a TV host, an astronaut, a music entrepreneur, a sociologist, a movie star, a minister and a comedian. Renowned scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. hosts the series.

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In the first episode, Listening to Our Past, Gates begins to piece together the family histories of four of the participants. The episode explores the post-World War I "Great Migration" of African-American families from the South to northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, as well as the experiences of those who stayed in the South during the period of Jim Crow segregation. Gates also begins to examine his own family's past, recounting the discovery of a box of photographs and heirlooms that sparked an obsession with his ancestry.

Episode two, The Promise of Freedom, travels back from the early 20th century to the end of the Civil War to look at how African Americans defined their freedom after slavery. Dr. Gates learns that courthouse records of land acquisitions, documents from the Freedmen's Bureau and the 1870 census - the first in which African Americans were counted as citizens, not property - all prove important resources for tracing the participants' lineage through Reconstruction. Gates' personal story continues as he seeks genealogical research to confirm a family legend - that a white slaveholder is one of his 19th-century ancestors.

Dr. Gates finds his genealogical research becoming even more difficult in hour three, Searching for Our Names, as he continues from the Civil War back through the Colonial period of American history. War service records and ways of recording property during slavery's apogee - such as inventories and sales or gifts of slaves - help fill in the participants' family trees. In West Virginia, Dr. Gates learns from a court transcript about the legal struggle of his ancestor Isaac Clifford, a free man who was kidnapped and accused of being a runaway slave.

Having traveled genealogical trails until the paper trail ran out, Dr. Gates visits scientists who are using DNA analysis to trace ancestral roots in the final hour, Beyond the Middle Passage. Among them is Dr. Rick Kittles, who is building a DNA database of present-day African populations, against which he compares the genetic signature of the series' participants. With their DNA results and genealogical research in hand, Dr. Gates meets with leading historians of the slave trade. Along the way, he learns several stunning facts about his own ancestry. Finally, Dr. Gates and one participant journey to Africa, where they visit the West African port from which the participant's patrilineal ancestor was most likely shipped into slavery and meet local tribal elders, whose DNA suggests they are the participant's long-lost cousins.

Not currently scheduled.

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