Cover image of "Faces of America," which includes sketchy biographies supplemented by genealogical and genetic research

A decade and a half ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. co-produced and narrated a four-episode series on PBS, reporting on the findings he and his team came up with from studying the family history and genetic profile of 12 famous and near-famous Americans. Faces of America aired in 2010, and the companion volume of the same title appeared the same year. It’s a remarkable testament to how much information dogged researchers can turn up about our genealogy. And as Gates demonstrates, every one of his 12 subjects was surprised by what they learned from the exercise. Furthermore, the sketchy biographies Gates includes in his portraits hold up remarkably well despite the passage of time since the publication of the book.

12 outstanding Americans portraying our diversity

The 12 men and women who participated in the study were poet Elizabeth Alexander, who read her work at the inauguration of President Barack Obama; chef Mario Batali; comedian and television personality Stephen Colbert; writers Louise Erdrich and Malcolm Gladwell; actress Eva Longoria; cellist Yo Yo Ma; writer and director Mike Nichols; former monarch of Jordan Queen Noor; surgeon and author Dr. Mehmet Oz; actress Meryl Streep; and Olympic gold medalist and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. No doubt many of these people were better known when the show was produced and the book published than they are today, when memories may have faded. But if you’re over 40, you should recognize most or all of the names.

Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered their Pasts by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2010) 289 pages ★★★★★

Photo of Yo-Yo Ma with his cello. He's one of 12 Americans included among the sketchy biographies in this book
The renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma performing with his cello. Ma is one of the 12 famous and near-famous Americans whose family histories and genetic heritage Henry Louis Gates and his team studied in the television series and companion book reviewed here. Image: Silkroad

Sketchy biographies fleshed out by intensive research

Gates’s subjects were all surprised by the findings he and his team brought to light. So was Gates himself, who presents as African American. As he reports, “I’m actually quite a lot more white, genetically, than I am black. As a matter of fact, I am 56 percent European and only 37 percent African—with a sprinkle of Asian/Native American ancestry (7 percent), much to my cousins’ collective delight.” Others among the 12 learned from the genetic studies that their background was similarly diverse. Few were predominantly of one “race” only. Like so many other studies, Gates’s give the lie to the very concept of “race.”

The combination of genealogical and genetic research Gates employs enabled some of his subjects to trace their ancestors to the distant past. Louise Erdrich is the most extreme example. “Louise is directly descended on her mother’s line from Alfred the Great, king of England. He is her thirty-fourth-great-grandfather, born in the year 848 in Berkshire, England. His wife was Ellswith, queen of England, born in 852 in Kent. And their lineage ties Louise Erdrich to roughly twenty English and Scottish kings and queens, just as with Queen Noor.”

If nothing else, Faces of America is immensely entertaining.

About the author

Photo of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of the sketchy biographies included in this book
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 2016. Image: Britannica

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. holds an endowed professorship at Harvard, where he is also director of the Center for African and African American Research. He is best known for his many articles and books on African American history, especially for his discovery of the earliest novels by slaves and freed slaves, and on Black life in the contemporary United States. But he has attracted the most widespread attention for his several documentary programs on the BBC and PBS.

Gates was born in West Virginia in 1950. “His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Yale and gained a fellowship to study English literature at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received both an MA and a PhD. Gates has been on the Harvard faculty since 1991. He is the father of two girls with his first wife before they divorced in 1999. He remarried in 2021.

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