GATES: I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."
In this episode, we'll meet
comedians Carol Burnett and Niecy Nash,
two women whose family trees have been obscured
by profound mysteries.
BURNETT: Why would my mama name me
Carol Creighton Burnett if she was a Milton?
GATES: Right. Hmmm
BURNETT: I hope you find out.
NASH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, my grandmother,
she was already married?
GATES: She was a newlywed.
NASH: So, Mr. Jackson came around to the house
a time or two?
GATES: Well, we don't know if he came to the house or
she came to his house.
NASH: Ooh, dirty pots and pans!
GATES: To uncover their roots, we've used every tool available.
Genealogists combed through paper trails stretching back
hundreds of years, while DNA experts utilized the latest
advances in genetic analysis to reveal secrets that have
lain hidden for generations.
NASH: What do you have, spies working for you?
How did you find this?
GATES: And we've compiled everything into a book of life.
BURNETT: Oh my goodness!
GATES: A record of all of our discoveries...
NASH: Do you see my head blowing off?
GATES: And a window into the hidden past...
BURNETT: Oh my gosh.
GATES: This was like a soap opera.
BURNETT: My heart is going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
But I'm glad I know.
Yeah. Thank you.
NASH: You know, this is one of the best things
I've ever done, uhm, in my life.
GATES: Uh-huh.
NASH: Even with the hard parts, there's some,
there's an add value to the knowing.
GATES: Niecy and Carol came to me with fundamental questions
about their parents, as well as their grandparents.
In this episode, we're going to give them
the answers they've been searching for,
through a pioneering combination of genetics and genealogy,
revealing for the very first time
where their roots really lie.
(theme music plays).
♪ ♪
(chatter)
GATES: Carol Burnett is a living legend.
From her iconic variety show...
BURNETT: Thank you, I saw it in the window and
I just couldn't resist it.
GATES: To her best-selling memoir,
to her innumerable performances on stage and screen,
Carol has been delighting audiences
for over seven decades.
But the woman who has brought so much joy to so many people,
has a personal story that's almost unbearably sad.
Carol was raised in Los Angeles by her maternal grandmother,
whom she called "Nanny",
because her parents could not support her.
Her mother and father,
tragically, were both alcoholics.
Drinking cost them their careers,
as well as their marriage,
and their erratic behavior left deep scars
on their daughter.
BURNETT: My mother was not an amiable alcoholic.
She could be very angry and nasty and so my grandmother
and she would fight all the time over the lack of
money and the booze.
Daddy was an alcoholic, was a drunk Jimmy Stewart.
GATES: Uh-huh.
BURNETT: Sweet.
Nobody sweeter.
And, uh, so sometimes he'd come over to see me.
He'd be a little okay but he would give Nanny a dollar and
then she'd let him come in to see me.
(laughing)
GATES: Price of admission, price of the ticket.
BURNETT: That's right.
And then he got sober for a year when I was 11 and
he lived with his mother, my paternal grandmother.
And I'd come and visit them every weekend in Santa Monica
and he'd take me to the place where we'd go on
a Ferris wheel and we'd go to a movie every Saturday night.
It was so wonderful.
I just loved him to pieces and then she died...
and he came to the apartment.
And he was weaving.
GATES: Oh.
BURNETT: It broke my heart.
GATES: The hardships of Carol's youth left her with
ambitions that were, initially, quite practical:
after high school, she enrolled at UCLA,
intending to become a journalist.
But then she joined a musical comedy workshop,
and fell in love with it.
Carol knew that the odds were stacked against her.
But one evening, her workshop was invited to perform
at a party, and those odds changed forever.
BURNETT: So we did our scene.
All the kids did our scenes and the audience,
the people there, were sweet and
I'm at the hors d'oeuvres table and I have my purse and
I'm looking and I put a napkin in my purse
and I'm stealing hors d'oeuvres to
take home to Nanny.
GATES: Oh, that's sweet.
BURNETT: And there's a tap on my shoulder and I thought,
"Oh", I'm busted.
GATES: You're busted.
BURNETT: "Oh God." And I turn around,
there's this gentleman and his wife, you know, standing there.
And he said, "We really enjoyed your work."
And I said, "Thank you very much."
He said, "So what do you want to do with your life?"
And I said, "Well, I'm hoping that I,
I want to go to New York.
I want to be on the musical comedy stage like
Ethel Merman and Mary Martin."
He said, "Why aren't you there now?"
I said, "Well, I'm hoping someday to save up enough
where I can."
He said, "I'll lend you the money."
GATES: Hmmm.
BURNETT: And I thought that was the champagne talking.
And his wife said, "No, he means it."
He says, "Here's my card.
Meet me a week from Monday in my office
and I'll lend you the money."
GATES: God.
BURNETT: He said, "There's stipulations.
You pay it back if you can. No interest.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: You must use this money to go to New York.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: You must never reveal my name.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: And if you are successful, you must promise
to help others out."
GATES: Oh my goodness.
BURNETT: "That you believe in."
Now I go home and I've got all this cash and I said,
"Nanny, look," and I threw the cash on the bed.
GATES: Wow.
BURNETT: She went, "Oh my God," and she was like,
"Oh, what we can do with all this money."
I said, "no, uh-uh, I have to go to New York."
GATES: Carol's life was utterly transformed by
that stranger's gift.
But before she could make her trip to New York,
she had to make a far more difficult journey to visit
her dying father...
A visit that still haunts her today, serving as a painful
reminder of a past that she could never truly outgrow.
BURNETT: He had tuberculosis and he was
in a charity hospital.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: So I went to see him for the last time you know,
and I said, "I'm going to be going to New York."
And he said, "Oh, you know, I'm doing okay."
he said, "If everything's clear,
I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to...
Maybe I'll come and see you in New York", you know.
And I kissed him goodbye.
Again, he's in a room with all these other people,
coughing away.
And as I was leaving, he said, "Carol," and I turned around
and he said, "I wish I could have given you the money."
GATES: Oh my goodness.
BURNETT: That was August 1954 and he died in November.
GATES: Of '54, yeah.
And your mom died four years later.
BURNETT: Yeah. Both in their 40s.
GATES: But he sounds like a good man.
BURNETT: He was. He just had that disease.
GATES: My second guest is Emmy-award-winning actor
and comedian Niecy Nash.
Much like Carol, Niecy overcame daunting obstacles
on her path to success.
Indeed, she even found her calling
in the wake of the worst of them.
In 1993, when she was 22-years-old,
Niecy's younger brother was murdered,
and Niecy sought to comfort her mother,
in a surprising way.
NASH: My mother said I'm getting into bed,
and I'm never getting back up.
GATES: Mm-hm.
NASH: And I did not know what to do at such a young age,
but I knew I could make my momma laugh.
GATES: Right.
NASH: So I started to perform at the foot of her bed every day.
And I would tell her jokes and stories, and do my bits,
and she went from laying down to sitting up in the bed.
GATES: Hmm.
NASH: I got my peanuts in my water, go on and do your
rendition of things.
And then, I remember coming to her house one day, and
she wasn't in the bed, and I'm like the car is out there,
we're in here, and I'm like, who is we?
Well, I went across the street and I got the neighbors,
and I told 'em you was funny, get that karaoke microphone and
tell these people some jokes.
So, I'm standing on the fireplace with
the karaoke microphone.
And I'm saying, is this thing on?
How's everybody doing, in the living room?
And that's when I said, oh, this is something.
GATES: This revelation would change Niecy's life.
Following her brother's death, she finished college,
with a degree in theater arts, and began auditioning for
roles in Hollywood.
She spent years struggling even to get small parts,
but she was sustained by an unwavering belief in herself.
Niecy knew that she had a gift,
even if it was an unusual one.
NASH: I think the thing that made me stand out was that
I did not have a care
about what other people thought about me.
GATES: Really?
NASH: Yeah, you know, typically, you care.
GATES: Right.
NASH: You want to be liked, you want to fit in...
GATES: Yeah.
NASH: You want to do all the things, uhm, and I just,
I just didn't care.
GATES: Uh-hum.
NASH: I was very loud, I mean, I spoke loud.
Just because I wanted to be heard.
"Hey y'all, what's going on?"
Just loud for no reason, and I know people used to say,
they hated my guts, but nobody ever really pressed me about it
because they knew I didn't care.
GATES: How did you envision your future, back then?
NASH: Bright.
I, I would have to put sunglasses on just to
even think about it.
GATES: Niecy's confidence would pay off in a big way.
In 2003, her career exploded when she landed recurring roles
on "The Bernie Mac Show" and Comedy Central's hit series
"Reno 911",
she's been a mainstay of American comedy ever since,
even branching out into drama.
And through it all, Niecy has remained intensely devoted to
the woman who first encouraged her: her mom.
NASH: You know, I don't know that I would have been able to
do anything were it not for my mother.
Any way she could provide provision for the vision,
she did that.
GATES: Uh-hum.
NASH: You know, even way back in the day, she said,
"You know, you're real funny, but if you gonna do this thing,
you going to need to work on a drama.
Momma gonna get you some classes,
give me my checkbook."
You know, so...
GATES: That's great.
NASH: All of the way up and through now, she will still say,
"How can I help you? What can I do?
What do you need?"
GATES: Hm. Oh, that's beautiful.
NASH: Yeah.
GATES: Yeah, to be able to count on that.
NASH: Oh, yeah.
GATES: Niecy and Carol both overcame extreme obstacles
to reach extraordinary heights.
Along the way, they had little time to explore their roots,
so both have much to learn,
even when it comes to family members
whom they thought they knew well.
I started with Carol, and with her maternal grandmother,
Mae Jones.
Mae helped Carol endure her traumatic childhood,
and the two shared an intense bond.
Carol even famously ended every episode of her show
by tugging on her ear.
A secret symbol to her grandmother.
How did the signal come about?
BURNETT: Oh, that came about when I got my very first
television job in New York.
It was the Paul Winchell kiddie TV show.
GATES: Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney.
BURNETT: I was the girlfriend of Jerry Mahoney, the dummy.
And so I called Nanny and I said, "Nanny, I'm going to
be on the Paul Winchell show tomorrow."
And she said, "Well, say hello to me."
I said, "I don't think they're gonna let me say hello, Nanny."
And so we figured out that I would pull my ear,
which would mean, "Hello, Nanny. I love you. I'm fine."
And then I always say later on, when I got successful,
it would be, "Hello, Nanny. I love you. I'm fine...
Your check's on the way."
GATES: While Mae provided Carol with love and stability,
she had a complicated past,
and Carol came to me asking some very basic questions
about her grandmother's romantic life.
BURNETT: Nanny often said that she'd been married three times.
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: To Mr. Creighton, which is my middle name...
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: To Mr. Melton...
GATES: Mm-hm.
BURNETT: And to Mr. White.
But there was a scene with my mother, at one point when...
My mother and my grandmother used to argue a lot,
and my grandmother left the room, and my mother said to me,
"She was married six times."
GATES: Six times, okay.
BURNETT: And she made it sound like she was an ax-murderess.
So a few years ago, about 30 years ago,
I was writing a memoir.
So I called my cousin, Janice.
I said, "Cuz, I want to get all these husbands you know,
straight and everything.
I said, "Okay now, Nanny was married to Mr. Creighton
first, and he had your mother", we called her "Aunt Dodo",
"He had Dodo first, and then my mama later and
my cousin said, "No,"
I said, what?
She said, "No.
Your mama was my mama's half sister,
and that your mama was Mr. Melton's daughter."
GATES: Oh my goodness.
BURNETT: Well, I said, "That can't be" you know
"I never knew."
She said, "Oh, everybody knew."
But why would my mama name me Carol Creighton Burnett...
GATES: Right.
BURNETT: If she was a Melton?
GATES: Right.
BURNETT: Which then made me think,
"Did my mother know that she wasn't a Creighton?"
So I kind of just would love to find out
if I'm a Creighton or a Melton.
GATES: To answer Carol's question,
we turned to the archives.
We saw that Mae was born in Belleville, Arkansas
in July of 1885.
She married William Creighton when she was 20 years old,
and gave birth to Carol's mother, Ina,
roughly six years later.
Since William and Mae didn't divorce until Ina was four,
it seemed likely that William Creighton
was Ina's father.
But then we read the transcript of William and Mae's divorce.
BURNETT: "William H. Creighton denies that he
abandoned plaintiff.
Plaintiff has bestowed her love and affections and
her person, as defendant verily believes,
on numerous other men.
Kept up a correspondence with them, entered into
questionable relations of undue intimacy with them.
Whoa.
Represented herself as being a widow.
Made love and became engaged to diverse and sundry men and boys,
all of this while the wife of and receiving
support from the defendant.
Oh my God, that she has been engaged in correspondence and
an undue familiarity with a young man at Belleville and
they have engaged to become married as soon as she is
released by divorce."
Woo.
She was a trip.
GATES: The young man mentioned in William's testimony
was Herman Melton, whom Carol's grandmother
did indeed marry almost immediately
after divorcing William.
Herman was 24 at the time, six years younger than Mae,
and while it's possible that he had an affair with Mae while
she was still married, and fathered Carol's mother,
no records could tell us that.
Moreover, it seems that Herman and Mae had
troubles of their own.
BURNETT: I had heard that Herman's mother and father
did not like the fact that Nanny married their son.
And the mother went to San Antonio, when they moved to
San Antonio, and she grabbed Herman, they said, by the ear
and brought him back to Arkansas.
GATES: Said are you crazy?
BURNETT: So it's evident, that's what I heard that his
parents stepped in and got him away from Nanny.
GATES: Well, we wanted to see how that marriage went.
Would you please turn the page?
BURNETT: Oh-oh.
GATES: Carol, this is a record from Yell County, Arkansas,
dated November 13th, 1919.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
BURNETT: "My name is Herman D. Melton,
I am the plaintiff...
(laughing)
Sorry.
I have to laugh or I'll cry.
I'm the plaintiff in this case.
I was married to the defendant and lived as husband and wife
until September 1918, at which time I left the defendant.
I was good and kind to her, but she did not seem to love me.
She told me that she married me just to spite my father and
mother, and she also informed me that she did not love me,
and that the only man that she ever loved was her
former husband, whom she had separated from
before she married me.
During the fall of 1918,
this first husband, Creighton, died,
and she made a trip of several hundred miles to
attend his funeral.
While at the services, declared that he was the
only man she ever loved."
Wow.
GATES: Yeah, there you go.
BURNETT: Wow. Wow.
At this point, we didn't know who Carol's grandfather was.
Though the paper trail made William seem more likely,
we couldn't rule Herman out.
So we turned to DNA.
We compared Carol's genetic profile to that of millions of
other people in publicly available databases.
When we found matches,
we compared their family trees to hers,
trying to see how they might be related.
And, eventually, we made a breakthrough.
BURNETT: Wow.
GATES: So with DNA alone, we were able to solve this mystery,
we found out which one is your biological grandfather.
Are you ready to meet your grandfather?
BURNETT: Yeah.
GATES: Could you please turn the page?
BURNETT: William Henry Creighton.
GATES: William Henry Creighton,
is in fact your biological grandfather.
BURNETT: Whoa.
GATES: There is no doubt about it.
BURNETT: Wow. I'll be darned.
GATES: You came by your middle name honestly...
BURNETT: Honestly. Yeah.
GATES: Could you please turn the page?
BURNETT: Uh-huh. There's Bill Creighton.
GATES: There's your grandmother and Bill Creighton.
Those are your grandparents.
Those are your biological grandparents.
What's it like to see that now, knowing that this
mystery, finally has been put to rest?
BURNETT: I'm still, my heart is going
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
But I'm glad I know.
Yeah.
Thank you.
GATES: There was a final beat to this story.
As we combed through records in Texas and Arkansas,
we discovered that, all told, Carol's grandmother was
married at least five different times,
including three times between the years 1922 and 1926.
BURNETT: Wow.
GATES: I mean, she's like a Hollywood actress.
BURNETT: It's like Elizabeth Taylor.
GATES: Yeah, you got it.
BURNETT: Yeah.
GATES: But think about this, think about your mother.
BURNETT: Momma, yeah.
GATES: Your mother was a child when this was happening,
between her 10th birthday and her 14th birthday,
her mother married three different men.
BURNETT: Right.
GATES: Does learning all of this change anything about
how you think of your grandmother?
BURNETT: No.
Well, I didn't know she was quite as friendly as they
make her out to be, but that's about the only thing.
You know, I knew she was pretty...
You know, she was pretty...
She was still flirting with people when I was grown up.
I remember when I came from New York at one point to
visit her and she was in an apartment, I moved her to.
And she had a green lantern over her couch,
you know, like a Japanese kind of thing.
And I wanted to show her some pictures I had of
my new daughter.
And I said, "Nanny, can I take this off,
because the light is inside."
Because she said, "Don't touch that.
It's my love light."
(laughing)
GATES: Whoa.
BURNETT: So, I'm not surprised.
I'm not really surprised.
But it doesn't change my feelings toward her because
she was wonderful to me.
There for me.
GATES: No, of course not.
BURNETT: That's the one.
GATES: Just like Carol, Niecy Nash was about to
confront a mystery that was hidden in her own chromosomes.
When we tested her DNA, we saw that she didn't have any
matches to anyone related to the man who she believed to
be her paternal grandfather.
Meaning that Niecy's father did not know the true identity
of his own biological father...
It was such a deeply personal discovery that I called Niecy
before our interview, so that she could convey the news
to her father in private.
So, what was it like when I told you this on the telephone?
(laughing)
NASH: I was in a state of shock.
I think I said "Uh say what now?"
Uhm "What exactly does that mean?",
Um, and then I realized
what you were saying was that the man that not only
I believed to be my grandfather on my father's side but it's
also the man that my father and his twin brother believed
was their father, and now that whole theory was defunct.
GATES: Right. That's right.
Their daddy wasn't their daddy.
NASH: Yeah.
GATES: And I said to you, we got to let him know because
this is not "Jerry Springer",
he can't be sitting watching the show.
NASH: Yeah, and when you said we got to let to him know,
I didn't think you meant me.
And you did, and I was like, oh, I got to call him and
tell him, oh jeesh.
GATES: Perhaps unsurprisingly,
Niecy did not call her father immediately,
her parents had separated when she was a child,
and her mother had been
the dominant force in her upbringing,
so when she was done talking to me,
Niecy turned to her mom.
NASH: I had to call the rock first.
And then, I called my father.
GATES: Okay. What did your mom say?
NASH: Uhm, uhm, uhm, what you say?
What?
You know they thought, you know they thought
your father's daddy was a big deal.
Ain't that something.
I said, girl, you are no help at all.
Let me call my daddy and I'll call you back.
GATES: Your mom's sticking pins in that balloon.
Boom, boom, boom.
NASH: Yes, I'm like what are you, what is happening?
So that was that on that, and then I called my dad.
GATES: Can I ask you: dad says, "Hello?", what do you say?
NASH: I said, what I'm going to do is rip this Band-Aid.
I said, "Hey listen."
I said, "The people from the show called.
And what they say."
And he said, "What?"
And I said, "Uh-hum."
I mean, that was, that what they said, and then I quickly
was like, "And they said you can call."
GATES: Yeah.
NASH: "The people say you can call."
I, I, I, I, and I was just kind of stumbling a little bit.
GATES: Sure. Sure.
NASH: And he said, "Let me call you back in 15 minutes."
GATES: Uh-huh.
NASH: And then, that was the longest 15 minutes of my life.
Uhm, I don't even know what he did in that 15 minutes,
but he did call me back, and he said,
"Well Pumpkin, the journey continues."
GATES: The "journey" would lead us back to the
DNA databases.
Our genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, discovered that
Niecy had numerous matches to people who could only be related
to her through her unknown biological grandfather.
Sifting through them, CeCe then noticed something else:
one of these matches shared enough DNA with Niecy to be
her second cousin.
Which meant that Niecy's grandfather and one of
this person's grandparents were siblings.
The solution to our mystery was at hand.
Please find your new cousin at the bottom center of the page.
Okay? You see him?
NASH: Yes.
GATES: Now follow the boxes up to your cousin's grandparents.
Do you see that name?
NASH: Lesley Jackson.
GATES: You got it.
Lesley Jackson had a brother, and his brother is your
biological grandfather.
NASH: Shut the front door.
GATES: That is, it, that's how we do it, then when you turn
that page, you're going to find out his name.
You ready to meet him?
(laughing)
NASH: Yes, this is crazy town.
GATES: Please turn the page.
Niecy, would you please read the name of your biological
grandfather, your father's father?
NASH: Oh my god.
My grandfather is...his name is Frank Jackson.
GATES: Frank Jackson is your father's father.
NASH: Frank.
GATES: You just met your biological grandfather.
NASH: Frank Jack... ol' Frank Jackson.
GATES: What's it like to see this?
NASH: So many things are going on in my mind, right now.
I'm like, I wonder if my father ever met him or
if he ever knew him, in his life, you know.
GATES: Uh-hum. Sure.
NASH: I, I, I wonder...
If he ever saw him before in his life.
GATES: Right.
NASH: Wow.
Frank Jackson.
GATES: There's no evidence that Niecy's father ever met
Frank Jackson, but we have a theory as to how Frank met
Niecy's grandmother, a woman named Alice Mitchell.
In 1944, Alice married a man named Arthur Ensley
and settled in St. Louis.
She gave birth to Niecy's father two years later.
And a map of the city shows that Frank was less than
a mile away.
Take a look at that blue arrow.
That's where your grandmother Alice,
who was about 30 years old,
and Arthur, the man who was presumed to be your grandfather,
were living as newlyweds.
NASH: Ooh.
Oh, oh....
(laughing)
GATES: And...
NASH: Oh, Lord have mercy.
GATES: And Niecy?
NASH: Uh-hum. Uh-hum.
GATES: Do you see that red arrow?
NASH: I see it. I see it.
Mr. Jackson was right on up the way.
GATES: That is...
NASH: Right, right, right around the way.
GATES: That is where your biological grandfather
Frank was living.
They were living very close.
NASH: So, but wait, wait, wait, let me just make sure,
let me just walk this down to make sure I, I'm following it.
GATES: Okay.
NASH: When my grandmother, when my nanny, was living on,
uh, Dickson Street...
GATES: Right.
NASH: She was already married?
GATES: She was a newlywed.
NASH: She was a newlywed.
And, and the, and the, and the, and the...
GATES: The red arrow...
NASH: That's where Mr. Jackson lived.
GATES: That's where Mr. Jackson lived.
NASH: So, Mr. Jackson came around to the house
a time or two...
While she was already married to Arthur?
GATES: Well, we don't know if he came to the house
or she came to his house.
NASH: But they, they met on up.
GATES: They met, they met somewhere.
NASH: Ooh, dirty pots and pans.
(laughing)
GATES: Niecy wondered if Frank had any other children besides
her father and his brother.
We aren't certain.
Her grandfather was difficult to research, because he had
a common name and he left few records behind.
We were, however, able to uncover a few crucial facts
about his life.
We know that Frank served in World War I.
Later he worked in a garage,
then as a scrap metal dealer in St Louis.
And we also know that he had a difficult childhood.
In the 1900 census for Tennessee, we found Frank,
a four-year-old boy, boarding on a farm with his father,
his younger brother, and a 23-year-old woman named
Charity, Frank's new stepmother.
NASH: Wow.
GATES: So, Frank had lost his mother by the time he was
four, if not earlier.
NASH: Wow. Okay.
GATES: What's it like to learn this?
These are your father's people.
NASH: This is a mind-blowing experience.
It really, unlocks so many thoughts, and ideas,
and I don't know, things are just spinning so fast.
I mean, I'm, and I'm a visual person...
GATES: Sure.
NASH: So, I'm trying to imagine this house and you know
and this baby and losing a mom, you know, his mother,
and you know what I mean,
here comes this girl nothing but 23.
GATES: I know
NASH: Now, she got this man with these,
with these young babies, you know.
GATES: That's right.
NASH: This is just crazy.
GATES: Moving back from Frank, we were able to trace Niecy's
newfound family two more generations, introducing her
to Frank's father, and then to his grandfather, a man named
Ruffin Jackson.
Ruffin is Niecy's great-great-grandfather,
the earliest ancestor we could name
on her direct paternal line.
He was born around 1824, likely in Virginia, and as we
researched his life, we found something precious.
NASH: Ooh.
GATES: It's the oldest document that we could find on
your Jackson family line.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
NASH: Ruffin Jackson and Hanna Jackson, December 1866.
GATES: That is the marriage certificate for
your great-great-grandparents,
a year after the Civil War ended.
NASH: That's my family getting married.
GATES: Your great-great-grandparents
getting married, Ruffin and Hanna.
(sighs).
NASH: I love it I love it.
Oh, wow, it's, it's a beautiful thing.
It's a beautiful thing.
GATES: And look at that handwriting, I mean,
these are handwritten documents.
NASH: I'm blown away.
GATES: Does it change the way you see your father now
knowing his true biological ancestry back 200 years?
(sighs).
NASH: You know, my father has had many jobs in this life,
he's done a little bit of everything, uhm, and you know
to be able to look back and look down the line, and, and,
and the other thing about it is, is it's so interesting
because it's a line we didn't know we needed to look down.
GATES: Absolutely.
NASH: So, you know, a lot of that part is still buffering.
GATES: Of course.
NASH: You know what I mean, but I'm looking at where his, uhm,
the people in his family, what, what kind of work they did,
and you know.
GATES: Yeah.
NASH: What kind of life they lived, and you know, so it's
interesting because it, it was just a space
no one knew to look.
GATES: Right, it wasn't there on the map.
NASH: No.
That his destiny was really, uh, less than a mile.
From where he was born.
GATES: Right.
NASH: Do you see my head blowing off?
GATES: We'd already identified Carol Burnett's
maternal grandfather,
solving a mystery that had haunted her for decades.
Now we turned to a man who will remain a mystery forever:
Carol's own father, Joseph Burnett,
who struggled for most of his adult life
with a drinking problem,
and died penniless when he was just 47 years old.
Carol will never know the source of her father's demons,
but she still feels a deep affinity for him,
and was eager to note their similarities.
BURNETT: I sound like I'm bragging, that's the thing.
I'm easy going and he was easy going.
GATES: You are not bragging. You're being descriptive.
BURNETT: Well, you know, it sounds like...
You know?
GATES: Well, how are you different?
BURNETT: How am I different?
GATES: Mm-hmm.
BURNETT: Well, not an alcoholic.
GATES: Right. Yeah. Thank God.
BURNETT: Um...
I don't think I'm a lot different in a way.
I'm open. He was open.
You know.
And uh, friendly.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
Do you know anything about his roots?
BURNETT: No, not really.
He had an older brother.
He was rich because he had a job.
GATES: I understand that.
A paycheck.
BURNETT: Yeah. And his nickname was Tex.
Tex Burnett.
But that's, that's about all I know.
GATES: So, let's see what we found.
Our search soon focused on Bell County, Texas,
where Carol's father was born.
In the 1880 census for this county,
we found Carol's grandfather, Joseph Hiram Burnett,
living with his parents,
John H. Burnett and Mahala Davis.
Have you ever heard of these people?
BURNETT: No, no.
GATES: Well, your great-grandfather John had a
very interesting life.
As you can see, he was born in New York around the year
1835 and moved to Texas as a young man.
By 1860, he was living in Austin.
A year later, the Civil War broke out.
John was 26 years old.
He had a wife and a young child.
Let's see what he did next.
BURNETT: Turn the page?
GATES: Turn the page, please.
This is a muster roll dated November 26th 1861.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
BURNETT: "Confederate."
GATES: Mm-hmm.
BURNETT: "J.J.H. Burnett, private, Texas Infantry
Camp Hebert near Hempstead, November 26, 1861."
GATES: John served in the Confederate army.
What's it like to know that?
BURNETT: I'm not thrilled.
GATES: But you must have suspected because
you were Southern.
BURNETT: Southern. Yeah.
GATES: Well we wanted to see how he fared.
No family stories about any ancestors.
BURNETT: Never.
GATES: Okay. We're going to find out.
BURNETT: Okay.
GATES: Could you please turn the page?
Carol, this is another muster roll taken
in the summer of 1863.
So the war was two years in.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
BURNETT: "John J.H. Burnett, July 30th 1863.
Deserted."
GATES: Deserted.
Your great-grandfather deserted.
BURNETT: Oh my God.
GATES: When John deserted,
his regiment was stationed in southern Louisiana,
about 400 miles from his Texas home.
But Carol's great-grandfather wasn't alone.
During the war, more than 100,000 confederates soldiers
deserted, roughly 10% of their entire army...
BURNETT: Oh my God.
Yeah.
GATES: We don't know how he did it, but deserting, Carol,
was not easy, soldiers...
BURNETT: Where would he go? Where would he...
GATES: Well, soldiers would drop out of the ranks
while on march.
BURNETT: Yeah.
GATES: Or sneak away from hospitals or camps.
Sometimes they'd hide in the woods or the swamps to avoid
detection and then travel at night to evade patrols.
BURNETT: What would happen if they got caught?
GATES: If...
BURNETT: Would they be executed?
GATES: If John had been caught, he would've faced
either imprisonment, fines or even execution.
BURNETT: Wow.
GATES: Can you imagine?
He must have been very determined to get out of the
Confederate army.
BURNETT: I'll be darned.
GATES: Despite the risk, and the distance he had to go,
John was successful.
Somehow he managed to make it all the way back home
to Bell County, Texas.
But when the war ended, he faced a dilemma,
he found himself surrounded by former confederate soldiers
who were proud of their service.
And he was a deserter.
What kind of story do you think he's telling?
BURNETT: I have no idea.
Did he keep quiet?
GATES: Well, let's see.
Carol, this is a page from a book on prominent
citizens from Texas.
It was published in the year 1893, when John was about
58 years old.
We believe that either your great-grandfather or
his family provided this information firsthand.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
BURNETT: "During the Civil War, Mr. Burnett was among
the first to enlist in the Confederate service.
He was with the forces that operated west of the
Mississippi and acted the part of a brave soldier all through
that struggle.
At one time he was captured in Louisiana and taken to
New Orleans.
After the close of the war, he returned to his home
and family in Texas."
GATES: According to that biography,
your great-grandfather didn't desert the army.
It says he was captured.
So what do you make of that?
BURNETT: What can we believe?
GATES: Well, Carol, we believe much of that was fabricated.
(laughing)
And it seems that John came home from the war and
made up that story.
BURNETT: Sounds like Nanny. GATES: Yeah.
As it turns out, John wasn't the only soldier in
Carol's father's family tree,
nor was he the only one
challenged by a moral dilemma...
Carol's 4th great-grandfather, Lambert Burget, was born in
the colony of New York around 1760, so, as a young man,
he was prime age to fight in the Revolutionary War.
What do you think he did?
Did he join George Washington and the Patriots, or was he
loyal to King George III?
BURNETT: Oh, I hope he joined the Patriots.
GATES: All right. Let's see.
BURNETT: Let's turn the page.
GATES: Let's turn the page.
Carol, this is a record from the National Archives of
Washington DC, would you please read the transcription?
BURNETT: "Lambert Burget of Steuben County in the state of
New York, who was a private in the company commanded by
captain Miller and of the regiment commanded by
Colonel Willett in the New York militia line for
22 months, 17 days."
GATES: Your ancestor was a Patriot.
Lambert enlisted in May of 1780 in Columbia county, New York,
and served almost two years as a private.
When you were studying the American Revolution in school,
did it ever occur to you that you had an ancestor who was
there fighting with George Washington...
BURNETT: No. No.
GATES: And Alexander Hamilton?
Isn't that amazing?
BURNETT: Wow. That is great.
GATES: What's it like to learn that?
BURNETT: I love it. I love it.
GATES: Mm.
BURNETT: Oh, you see, I never knew...
Once mama and, they got divorced.
Nanny was never a Burnett fan.
GATES: Right.
BURNETT: You know, so I hardly knew anything about them and
daddy, I mean he didn't say much.
I don't know.
It just never occurred to me.
GATES: Right.
BURNETT: But this is really fun.
GATES: According to his pension file, Lambert was
stationed in upstate New York throughout the war, near the
site of a number of battles, some of them quite fierce.
When the fighting stopped, Lambert remained in the army,
and briefly served directly under George Washington.
He then became a farmer, and lived roughly 60 more years!
BURNETT: That's old.
GATES: Old?
Revolution ends in 1783 and he died in 1848.
BURNETT: It was old age when you were 40 back then.
GATES: Yeah, that's right.
BURNETT: Wow.
GATES: What would your father say?
BURNETT: I think he'd be very proud.
GATES: Yeah. That he knew he had a Patriot ancestry...
BURNETT: A Patriot ancestry.
GATES: And who hung out with George Washington.
BURNETT: Oh my gosh. Knew the president.
GATES: Yeah.
BURNETT: Oh, that's lovely.
GATES: Because of this ancestor,
you are eligible for membership in the
Daughters of the American Revolution.
BURNETT: No kidding. Oh, I love it!
GATES: Yes. We've done all the research.
So I can nominate you if you would like to be
a member of the DAR?
BURNETT: I would love it.
GATES: It would be my honor.
BURNETT: Oh. Thank you.
GATES: DAR time, baby.
BURNETT: Hello?
GATES: Turning back to Niecy Nash, we had another
piece of hidden history to share, albeit a tragic one.
In the 1870 census, we found Niecy's
fourth great-grandfather, Aaron Cobb, living in
Union County, Arkansas.
Moving back a decade, we saw that the 1860 census for this
same county contained a "slave schedule"
for a white planter named Azariah Cobb.
The enslaved people on this schedule
are not listed by name.
But even so, we wondered:
could Azariah have owned Aaron?
We found our answer in the estate records of
Azariah's father-in-law.
NASH: "I, Joel Brazeal being in a low state of health
but in perfect mind, do make and publish
my last Will and Testament in manner following,
I give and bequeath unto my daughter
Roseanna Cobb one Negro boy named Aaron."
I'll be damned.
Uhm, uhm, uhm.
GATES: So, we could confirm with that will what you were
seeing without names on the previous page.
NASH: That's them.
GATES: This will was written by a planter in
Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.
His name was Joel Brazeal.
It bequeaths Niecy's fourth great-grandfather Aaron to
Brazeal's daughter Roseanna,
who had married into the Cobb family.
NASH: Just passing people around.
Passing them down.
GATES: And he was just a child.
NASH: He was a child.
That is heart, it's heartbreaking.
GATES: Uh-hum.
NASH: You know?
I don't know, it's kind of like, and it's weird because
you grow up knowing what slavery is...
GATES: Uh-hum.
NASH: You grow up knowing the institution, you grow up still
feeling the ripple of what it is for us in today, but
somehow, when you can go back and read this actual document,
it still feels like a gut punch.
GATES: Well, it's personalized.
NASH: Yeah.
GATES: You have DNA from Aaron.
It's not some abstract concept anymore.
NASH: No. No, no, no.
GATES: No.
NASH: It's right here.
GATES: Uh-hum, it's right there.
NASH: Wow.
GATES: Digging deeper, we discovered that Joel Brazeal
was originally from what was known as "Pendleton District"
South Carolina, and in the 1820 census, we saw that he
owned a boy, who almost certainly was Aaron...
GATES: And on your left, you can see a map of
Joel Brazeal's land in 1825.
Niecy, we believe that that's where your
fourth great-grandfather Aaron was born, right there,
in Pendleton District.
NASH: Wow.
GATES: And that area experienced the cotton boom
during the late 18th and early 19th century, and the enslaved
people on Joel Brazeal's plantation likely worked from
sunrise to sundown, and once your fourth great-grandfather
Aaron reached the age of 8, he would've most likely
joined them, out in the fields.
NASH: Yeah.
Wow.
Mmm.
GATES: Mmm.
There is a grace note to this story.
In the 1870 census, we found Aaron living near his son Henry,
and we noticed something incredible about Henry:
he was a land-owner!
At a time when less than 5% of all Black families living
in the south owned any real estate,
Henry had $850 worth of property,
likely amounting to hundreds of acres.
NASH: Oh man, this is awesome.
GATES: It is cool.
NASH: This is awesome.
GATES: You got it.
Industrious and save money.
NASH: Well, especially when you look at all of the
hardship, all of the pain, all of the experience, all of the
things you're born into, all of the, you know, things that
you've seen, witnessed, you know what I mean?
And you still said, I'm gonna figure out a way to take care
of my family and be successful.
GATES: Right.
What do you think you inherited from them?
NASH: I feel like when you can...
when you can come from something so hard
and that was not just hard because it was hard,
hard because it was meant to destroy you.
GATES: Meant to destroy you.
They made it hard.
NASH: So, I used to, when I first started in
entertainment, the three words that I would live by are
no matter what.
GATES: Hm.
NASH: If I got to go to an audition to be funny and
I'm crying because of this or that, no matter what.
No matter what you, you show up and you pull up,
and I feel like my no matter what of it all has
a different meaning and context when I look at this.
Because this is the no matter what of it all.
GATES: Literally, and if they hadn't embraced that
philosophy, there'd be no Niecy.
NASH: There would be no Niecy.
GATES: Mm-hm. No matter what.
NASH: My god.
GATES: The paper trail had now run out for each of my guests.
It was time to unfurl their family trees...
BURNETT: Oh my God.
GATES: Filled with names they'd never heard before.
BURNETT: That is incredible.
NASH: Wow.
I'm, I, I am, these are happy tears welling up in my eyes.
This is, this is, this is awesome.
GATES: Seeing their roots traced back centuries,
compelled both Niecy and Carol to reconsider
their own identities.
BURNETT: Is it nurture or is it nature?
GATES: Right.
BURNETT: I think the way I was raised, you know,
in that one room apartment with...
I lived in one room and slept on a couch until I was 20.
GATES: Right.
BURNETT: And I don't regret it, but I could have gone
a lot of different ways.
So, I think there's something in your DNA.
GATES: Yeah.
And now you can see the sources of that strength
you inherited through your DNA.
BURNETT: Yeah.
NASH: Mmm, mmm, mmm.
Wh, this, I, I, I, I have never done anything like this
in my life, and I am telling you something, even with
some of the parts that could be, uhm, tricky, you know,
this is one of the best things I've ever done, uhm, in my life,
and you, it is something about knowing.
GATES: Uh-huh.
NASH: Even with the hard parts, there's some,
there's an add value to the knowing.
GATES: I believe so.
NASH: Okay, I don't want my fake eyelashes to fall off.
(laughing)
GATES: My time with my guests was running out, but we had
one last surprise for each of them.
When we compared their DNA to the DNA of other people who've
been in this series, we found matches,
evidence of distant cousins.
For Carol, this meant a new connection to someone
she's known for years.
That's Bill Hader, do you know him?
BURNETT: Bill. Of course.
He was on my 50th anniversary show.
GATES: Oh my God.
BURNETT: Yeah.
GATES: Well, it was a family affair.
BURNETT: Isn't that something?
GATES: Niecy had never met her DNA cousin before, but she'd
been a fan since she was a child.
NASH: I know you lying.
GATES: You are DNA cousins with the activist and author,
and professor Angela Davis.
Isn't that astonishing?
NASH: My mind is blown right now.
GATES: It should be.
(screams).
NASH: I love it.
GATES: That's the end of our journey with Niecy Nash
and Carol Burnett.
Join me next time when we unlock the secrets of the past
for new guests, on another episode of
"Finding Your Roots".