'Finding Your Roots' Host Shares Celebs' Family Secrets (and How He Made Sharon Stone Cry)

Isn’t Joy Behar lucky to be here to host The View, since her ancestor narrowly escaped death?

Her third great-grandfather, Giuseppe Occhiuto, miraculously survived a massive 1783 earthquake that devastated Southern Italy, destroying entire towns, claiming lives of tens of thousands of people, including Joy's fourth great-grandfather, whose name was Saverio Occhiuto. And she had no idea. These stories are buried with their ancestors, and our job is to resurrect the stories.

Didn’t Michael Imperioli’s family have some mob connections he didn’t know about? 

Michael was delighted to learn that his maternal great-grandfather, Raffaele Segno, was a thing, and more in common with the character Michael played on The Sopranos than he ever imagined. Raffaele emigrated to America from Italy in 1903 at 19, and ran a tavern in Yonkers, New York. We found evidence that he was a bootlegger who was cited at least twice for prohibition violations, and had numerous run-ins with the law. He was on the edge of being with the mob.

Michael Imperioli

Courtesy PBS

It’s funny that Raffaele ran what was allegedly a “soft-drink establishment,” but somehow a still blew up on his premises. 

I think that he was spicing the soft drinks with a little hard alcohol.

What did The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan learn?

Her 22nd great-grandfather, born in the 1100s, was the founder of the Yong clan, and we were able to show Amy where the clan first settled in her ancestral hometown in Guangdong Province, which borders Hong Kong and Macau. Her family's ancestral hall is emblazoned with a poem. And the poem, much to Amy's delight, encourages clan members to honor their ancestors by pursuing the arts. And that's what Amy did, all these centuries later. It's quite miraculous, really. 

Amy Tan

Courtesy PBS

Tan’s novels are rooted in her family stories, but she didn’t know how far those stories go back. 

Despite the fact that she was unaware of them, they helped to influence the choices that she made unconsciously. I think that we inherit through our ancestors, even though we don't know their names, a certain family culture, and that culture is like the air that we breathe. It ends up shaping the choices that you make in a marvelously mysterious way. And I think that's one of the reasons that Finding Your Roots is so popular: people want to see these mysteries solved, and how they relate to the person I'm interviewing across the table.

AARP members can get a discount on Ancestry.com, where they can research their family. Isn’t this the golden age for genealogy — and is it high time we all dove into our history?  

Yeah! Two things make it a golden age: DNA and the digital revolution. It used to be, to do this work, you’d have to travel around to archives. Now, just sitting at your computer, you could do in minutes what it would take months to do when we were we were students. On FamilySearch, which is free, and Ancestry.com (full disclosure: they're our lead sponsor), it’s easy. You type the name of, say, your grandfather, and it connects you to all the records in the database with that person's name. There has never been a better time or an easier time to find your roots. And that's what we do.