An NBC Today Show/Yahoo News! article about actor Joe Manganiello’s appearance on PBS’s Finding Your Roots, featured an interview with Manganiello discussing what he’s done with the knowledge he gained from his appearance. His appearance was on Season 9, Episode 6, “Lost and Found” with American football player Tony Gonzalez, and was the 92nd overall episode of PBS’s popular genealogy program.
I’m sure a lot of us wonder if any of the celebrities on Finding Your Roots or the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are (or the various spinoffs in other countries) actually do anything with the genealogy research that is presented to them, and in Manganiello’s case, he did:
“It’s opened up this whole world,” he tells TODAY.com. “I’ve hired several historians to continue the work. I continued taking genetic tests. I made my Ancestry.com and fleshed out the entire family tree. I started writing messages to people who were connected to me. I’ve found very, very close family members.”
…In the episode, Manganiello told host Henry Louis Gates he felt newly grounded by what he learned. “If I’m a tree, the tree has roots for the first time. It’s not gonna blow away. I know what it is and I know who the people were that were involved, and I know where I came from,” he says. “It’s really about understanding what I am a part of instead of wondering.”
You can learn more on the official PBS site: https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/