GATES: I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Welcome to "Finding Your Roots."
In this episode, we'll meet actor Ed O'Neill and
musician Sammy Hagar,
two men who are about to discover that their seemingly
ordinary ancestors concealed some extraordinary stories.
O'NEILL: I always wanted to know this.
Ever since I was a little kid, I'd ask everybody.
GATES: But they didn't know.
O'NEILL: It went way into the murky past and it was gone.
HAGAR: There was a lot of secrecy going on with them.
And now I see it. I totally see this now.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
HAGAR: They didn't talk about anything.
GATES: To uncover their roots,
we've used every tool available...
Genealogists combed through the paper trail
their ancestors left behind,
while DNA experts utilized the latest advances in
genetic analysis to reveal secrets hundreds of years old.
And we've compiled everything into a book of life...
A record of all of our discoveries...
O'NEILL: Oh my God! That's amazing!
HAGAR: I don't know if I'm ready for this.
GATES: And a window into the hidden past.
O'NEILL: That's really something.
GATES: That's when they stopped being Europeans
and became Americans.
O'NEILL: Well, I never thought I'd see it.
GATES: What's it like to find this out?
HAGAR: Oh, it's crazy.
This is lunacy, man. This is so beyond my...
This is like trying to think about black holes and stuff.
O'NEILL: It's this old story, you know, of America and
the immigrants and the struggle.
GATES: They didn't succumb.
O'NEILL: Boy, I'm glad I came here today.
GATES: My two guests are tied together by a common thread...
Both descend from ancestors who hid the most
basic details about their lives from their families,
leaving their descendants to wonder who they really were.
In this episode,
we're going to reveal what has been hidden for generations,
forever altering how Sammy and Ed see themselves.
(theme music plays)
♪ ♪
(book closes)
♪ ♪
GATES: Ed O'Neill is living proof that you can have
a second act.
In 1987, he came to fame as the star of
“Married with Children”,
one of the most popular sitcoms of all time...
Almost two decades later, Ed did it again,
starring in “Modern Family”
another groundbreaking and enormously successful hit...
Along the way,
Ed also found time for Hollywood movies,
and Broadway dramas...
A body of work that is truly amazing...
But, to hear Ed tell it,
his entire career has been a string of happy accidents,
stretching back long before he even thought about
a career...
Ed grew up in Youngstown, Ohio,
in the shadows of the steel mills where
his father worked...
There were no actors in his family or artists of any kind,
but, as a young boy,
Ed found himself drawn to the local movie theater,
where he discovered that he had a unique gift.
O'NEILL: I remember we would go on Saturdays because
they had a cartoon festival.
There'd be twenty cartoons.
GATES: "Tom and Jerry".
O'NEILL: Yeah. "Casper the Friendly Ghost".
GATES: Yeah. O'NEILL: It was all that stuff.
And then there was usually a, a feature film,
whatever that would be.
If it was "Spartacus" or it was a John Wayne,
it was a cowboy or whatever it was.
And often I would come back to the neighborhood and
I would tell my friends the movie.
I would act it out for them, often.
GATES: Huh.
O'NEILL: And, and then, if they went to see it,
usually they'd come back and they'd say,
"It wasn't that good."
(laughter).
GATES: “We liked your version better.”
O'NEILL: I, you, I would improve on it somehow.
GATES: Perhaps unsurprisingly,
Ed's acting talents would initially remain untapped.
Growing up, his main focus was football, and,
for a time, he excelled...
He was a star defensive lineman at Youngstown State University
and was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers after
his senior year.
But that was as far as football would take him,
he was cut during his first training camp and found himself
back in Youngstown,
aimless and struggling until a chance encounter with
his city's playhouse gave him a new direction.
O'NEILL: I had a pretty rocky patch for a while.
I was drinking and I was getting in fights in bars...
GATES: Uh-huh.
O'NEILL: And being kind of reckless in that way.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
O'NEILL: And then I saw an ad in the "Youngstown Vindicator"
for tryouts for a play.
And I think it was "The Rainmaker".
And I had seen the movie with Burt Lancaster.
GATES: Right, right. O'NEILL: So I went out.
You know, and I went in and they had tryouts and
I know that I imitated Burt Lancaster.
It was terrible. I know I was.
And of course that these plays at the Playhouse,
I found out much later when I started working there,
that they were precast.
They had a group of actors that they...
GATES: Sure.
O'NEILL: They built their season around.
They have to.
GATES: Right.
O'NEILL: And the director said, you know,
they don't get many guys like me out there,
so he said,
"You know, we're doing Antigone,"
which was that Greek classic.
GATES: Yeah, of course. Yeah.
O'NEILL: I was a spear. I held a spear.
I was a Greek soldier. I did that and I loved it.
And I watched the ones with the big parts with all,
you know, the scenes and the dialogue.
And I thought, “Man, I like this.”
GATES: That realization changed Ed's life.
he soon returned to Youngstown State,
this time to study acting.
He was among the oldest students in his class and
he was out of sync with his department's schedule,
but he wasn't about to let that stop him...
O'NEILL: So I had missed the first semester where they had
"Beginning Acting."
This was "Advanced Acting."
But I talked 'em into letting me into the, I said,
"Oh, I'm at the Playhouse.
I do plays."
I didn't tell 'em it's this, you know...
(mimes holding a spear).
GATES: “I've studied Burt Lancaster.”
O'NEILL: Yes.
And so I went there and you have to learn monologues,
and you have to do scenes.
And I was awful.
But I kept at it.
GATES: Yeah.
O'NEILL: And I progressed really quickly.
You know, and then I started doing the leads.
GATES: Yeah. So what'd your parents say?
O'NEILL: My mother loved it,
but I was already like 24, now 25.
GATES: Yeah. And your dad?
O'NEILL: He was like this, you know?
(scratching).
GATES: Yeah. But would he go see you?
O'NEILL: No. GATES: No.
O'NEILL: He was working. GATES: Yeah.
O'NEILL: So, and I think my mother only went to a few,
but I didn't need any of that.
I didn't care...
GATES: Right.
O'NEILL: Who went to see it, I liked it.
GATES: My second guest is Sammy Hagar,
the legendary rock star and former lead singer
of “Van Halen”
Blessed with an infectious enthusiasm and
seemingly boundless energy,
Sammy has sold millions of records,
packed stadiums all over the world,
and is still going strong after all these years.
Accomplishments that are all the more impressive given how
he started out...
Sammy was born in Salinas, California,
where his parents were itinerant farm laborers.
When he was two years old,
the family moved to the nearby city of Fontana
so his father could take a job at a steel mill...
It seemed like a move towards stability,
but Sammy's father was bringing demons with him.
HAGAR: The home life was pretty rough.
My dad's boss was an alcoholic like my dad,
and they went to AA together and they'd get sober...
and then my dad would go on a drunk first,
and Huey wouldn't fire him because he felt sorry for him,
because it, you know, he had the same problem.
And so it seemed like my dad never would lose his job.
He would go on a drunk for a month.
And he was a violent drunk.
He'd beat my mom up, beat the neighbors up.
Never the kids. He never touched the kids...
GATES: Mm-hmm.
HAGAR: But he would, he would beat anybody else up.
Cop would pull him over,
he'd beat him up, and, you know, drive back home.
They'd come and knock on the door and he'd get up and
fight them again out in the...
I mean, he was a complete madman.
GATES: That had to be hard, though, man.
HAGAR: It, it was hard. GATES: Yeah.
HAGAR: So my mom would have to leave.
And, you know, some relatives would take us in,
and if they didn't, we'd sleep in the car.
GATES: Sammy's mother did her best,
but his father would eventually lose everything,
including his life, to alcoholism...
Yet Sammy did not let his parents' struggles destroy him.
He found salvation in music.
he had no training, but he had a powerful voice,
and his friends soon noticed that he also possessed
a special skill...
HAGAR: We'd go to the beach and they'd turn on the radio and
I could sing to every song on the radio.
I knew the words.
Just, and I still do not use a teleprompter.
I've written 400 or 500 songs.
I can sing damn near every lyric without...
For some reason, I'm good at that.
So I'd, my friends used to go,
"Oh man, how do you know that song?"
I'd say, "I just know it."
You know, I'd say, "Oh yeah, turn the radio up.
Hey, how about this one?"
So I'd play that, that tune.
I'd start singing the song.
And then one of my friends became a,
got a guitar, and he was saying,
"Hey man, you be the singer, I'll be the guitar player."
I said, "Okay" and then I started learning to play guitar.
GATES: Mmm.
HAGAR: And what I found was we would play in our garage
and some friends would come over,
and they would stay.
You know, they'd sit and watch us play,
and they liked it, you know?
We'd know three songs and play them over and over again...
And they just thought it was so cool.
And then they'd go around telling people about us.
Like, "Oh man, Sammy's in this band.
But you guys should hear them. They're really good.
Let's hire them for a party.
We're going to have a party and make them play."
And I start feeling like I was somebody...
GATES: Right.
HAGAR: Because at that stage,
I knew what was going on in my world.
I had nothing.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
HAGAR: But that changed everything right there.
GATES: This band was the launch pad for a journey that
is still unfolding.
After more than five decades in the limelight,
Sammy is still touring and recording.
And, perhaps most significantly,
he hasn't lost his passion along the way.
Indeed, he still retains the boyish enthusiasm
of his youth, and even credits much of his success
to the lessons he learned,
for better or worse, from his parents...
HAGAR: My father made me driven that I don't ever want
to be poor and be embarrassed ever again in my life.
So, it drove, it drove me to be,
to elevation, to, uh, enlighten myself.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
HAGAR: And my mom taught me how to make
something from nothing.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
HAGAR: My mom was just frugal, man.
She, you could not...
if you said, "Mom, uh... hey mom,
we got nothing to eat,"
she'd say, "Get in the car."
We'd go out, drive around.
She'd see an orange grove,
"Let's go pick some oranges."
She'd go down, there's a potato,
potato patch that the workers were gone for the day.
"Come on, there's potatoes in here.
Take some potatoes."
I'm dead serious.
And it would be like, "Wow, mom! This is fun."
My whole family...
GATES: “We're going shopping!”
HAGAR: We'd jump out and raid, raid a strawberry patch,
and then we'd go home and my mom would whip something up
and we'd go,
“Man, Mom, that was fun. That was great.”
We'd go fishing.
We'd go up to the little stream up in Lyle Creek where
they used to have little trout.
Me and my brother and my mom would go catch some trout.
I mean, it was, my mom was, man, she was creative.
GATES: Yeah. HAGAR: She was really creative.
GATES: She made a way out of no way.
HAGAR: Yeah, she's an optimist. Completely.
And I'm a complete optimist too, yeah.
GATES: Yeah, me too. Takes one to know one.
(Sammy laughs).
GATES: My two guests are both self-creations...
Nothing in their family backgrounds even
hinted that either of them might be successful.
They did it all on their own.
But as we looked into their roots,
we discovered that each had ancestors who were
self-creations of a different kind...
People who harbored secret identities,
or who reinvented themselves entirely.
It was time to bring their stories to light.
I started with Ed O'Neill and with his father,
a steelworker, and landscaper with an exhausting schedule,
who still exuded a sense of warmth towards his children.
O'NEILL: I remember he would come home from landscaping and
then he might go out on the 11:00 to 7:00 shift.
So he would sleep,
often in the T-shirt and work clothes.
He'd lie on the living room floor and pass out.
My brother and I would play on top of him like he was a fort.
And my mother would say,
"Leave your father alone."
And he'd wake up and say,
"No, it's okay. I like them."
GATES: Yeah, I bet he did.
O'NEILL: Yeah. He liked us around him.
GATES: This attitude was all the more surprising given the
way that Ed's father was raised.
he grew up during the great depression,
in a home that was anything but warm...
O'NEILL: My father was the last of three.
And he was an accident.
GATES: Yeah.
O'NEILL: And they didn't have a lot of money.
And his dad worked in the mill...
GATES: Mm-hmm.
O'NEILL: And I think he suffered from high blood pressure.
And then in those days, they treated it with a pill
that gave you depression.
GATES: Oh, man.
O'NEILL: So I never had a conversation
with my grandfather.
It was just, “Hello.” That was it.
GATES: Your brother told us that your grandfather was like
a “dark cloud.”
O'NEILL: Yeah.
GATES: Ed's grandfather, a man named Joseph O'Neill,
never discussed his job in the steel mill,
much less the impact it might have had on his health,
and there was an aspect of his career that took
Ed by surprise...
Records show that by 1930,
Joseph had worked his way up to being a foreman at his company,
a promotion that likely brought daunting challenges.
At the time, America was in the depths of the great depression,
and steel mills across the country were bleeding money.
According to scholars, between 1931 and 1935,
Joseph's company lost roughly $30 million and soon began to
cut wages and workers...
O'NEILL: I never realized that.
GATES: $30 million in 1935 is roughly $650 million today.
That's serious money.
O'NEILL: I never knew that.
GATES: In response, the mill laid off thousands of employees.
By April 1933, US Steel had half the employees that it did
just four years earlier.
O'NEILL: See, I didn't know any of this history.
I did not know it.
GATES: Your grandfather never talked about,
you never heard stories?
O'NEILL: I never talked to him.
GATES: Well, let's see what happened next.
Please turn the page.
O'NEILL: I mean, I said “Hello”"
GATES: Yeah. O'NEILL: Wow.
GATES: On May 26, 1937,
steelworkers in Ohio voted to strike,
part of a larger action that would soon spread
across seven states...
As a foreman,
Ed's grandfather was management and would have been
charged with keeping his mill secure and running,
in spite of the chaos all around him.
O'NEILL: “More tension developed in the picket lines.
A mail truck was halted at the Center Street Bridge”,
I know where that is,
“and windows in the home of a
Republic labor foreman were smashed.”
GATES: Yep.
And you can see a photo of the strikers at
the plant in Campbell.
O'NEILL: This, this is the Center Street entrance.
GATES: And that photo is where your grandfather worked.
O'NEILL: Yes. That's right. GATES: That's right.
O'NEILL: That's correct.
GATES: And according to this article,
strikers began trying to cut off the food supply
to the men still in the mills.
The picket lines became a battleground.
Can you imagine?
O'NEILL: Yeah. Yeah.
GATES: And the foremen, remember they were company men,
didn't escape the violence.
As you could see in that article,
the windows in the home of a foreman at
Republic were smashed.
Ed, your grandfather likely faced opposition
from his friends, his neighbors,
and employees who worked in the mills.
How do you think he coped with that?
O'NEILL: I can't imagine it. I can't imagine it.
It may have ruined him.
It may have made him what he became.
GATES: Over the course of just a few days,
roughly 20,000 workers in Youngstown walked
off their jobs.
But the steel companies refused to relent and when the workers'
wives joined their husbands on the picket line,
the situation rapidly deteriorated...
O'NEILL: “CIO officials said police fired tear gas
into their ranks.
Screaming, they gave way,
and scores of strikers rushed the police,
forcing them into a railroad underpass,
bullets spattered down from surrounding hills.”
GATES: You ever hear anything about this?
O'NEILL: No.
Well, I did hear that there were a lot of strikes and
a lot of violence.
GATES: Yeah. And wives. O'NEILL: Yes.
GATES: After steelworkers' wives joined the strikers in
the picket line, it had to be a hell of a mess.
O'NEILL: Oh my God.
GATES: The police ordered them to leave.
They refused.
The police fired tear gas at the women and a fight between
the strikers and the police of course erupted.
Two strikers died, man...
And dozens were injured. Can you imagine?
O'NEILL: Yeah.
It was, um, it was America as they knew it in those days.
GATES: The strike lasted for roughly one month before the
governor of Ohio ordered the mills re-opened,
and called in the National Guard.
In the end, both workers and management suffered greatly,
and Ed's grandfather seems to have paid a price ...
Within a year he was no longer a foreman, but instead,
was working as what was known as a "stocker",
which was not a promotion...
He was demoted.
We don't know why...
O'NEILL: He was demoted. GATES: He was demoted.
O'NEILL: Yeah.
It could have been something to do with his inability to lead.
GATES: It could have.
O'NEILL: I mean, he could have had some kind of a,
I always suspected that he had some kind of
a nervous breakdown.
GATES: Really? O'NEILL: Yeah.
But nobody ever said anything to me about it.
GATES: Mmm. O'NEILL: That's shocking to me.
GATES: Joseph O'Neill passed away in 1955,
on Ed's ninth birthday.
Learning more about his life compelled Ed to think
about his own father,
whose spirit was so dramatically different
from his grandfather's,
giving Ed a new appreciation for what his
father had endured.
O'NEILL: He was a Depression kid.
GATES: Right. O'NEILL: They didn't want him.
And I know that, at his graduation from high school,
they didn't go.
GATES: Oh, man.
O'NEILL: It was right down the street.
GATES: That's cold. O'NEILL: Yeah, it was.
So he was very insecure about that.
And so when he had the kids, it was like...
GATES: That's his family. O'NEILL: That was it.
GATES: Yeah.
O'NEILL: But you could never fill that hole.
No matter how much you tried.
GATES: Just like Ed, Sammy Hagar was the son
of a steelworker,
but his father brought no stability to the family.
Almost all of the parenting was left to Sammy's mother and
she suffered terribly at the hands of her husband...
How did she end up with that life do you think?
HAGAR: You know, uh,
I really don't have an answer to that.
I, I wish I did.
It would be easier to understand and say,
“Okay, I forgive my father.
Or, I forgive my mother.”
I think my mother was so desperate.
The only thing I could think of was that she was so
desperate to get out of the,
you know, the family she had been in.
They were so poor.
They, she lived in her tent her whole life, you know, in a tent.
GATES: Mmm.
HAGAR: Uh, and I think she found a man that,
my dad was super confident.
And I think she thought,
“Oh, this man will take care of me and
I could have a decent life.
I can get out of this, you know, this rut.”
GATES: Yeah. HAGAR: Yeah.
GATES: Poor kid.
HAGAR: And I think she was afraid to go on her own.
She's like, “What am I going to do?
I don't have a education. I don't have a vocation.
I don't have a job.”
GATES: She knew how to get those potatoes and
those strawberries though.
HAGAR: Yeah, she knew how to survive.
GATES: The tumult of his mother's life left Sammy
knowing little about her roots.
he'd spent time with her parents growing up,
but recalls that they were both quiet and somewhat secretive
about the past...
We set out to see what they'd hidden and focused
on the family of Sammy's grandmother,
Katherine Alessi.
Katherine's parents,
Giacomo and Gertrude Alessi appear on the 1900 census
for Rochester, New York...
The record shows that Giacomo was an immigrant from Italy,
with an occupation common to many immigrants of the day:
He was a fruit dealer.
Did you know that?
HAGAR: Yeah. No, no, I had no idea.
GATES: Well, when I saw the words “fruit dealer”,
I pictured a kindly man with a cart selling apples and oranges
in his neighborhood, right?
But it turns out that's not exactly what your
great-grandfather was doing.
Please turn the page.
Sammy, this was published in a newspaper on
July 18th, 1899
in a local Rochester newspaper.
HAGAR: Rochester new...
Wow!
GATES: So, this is one year before the census we just saw.
Would you please read what we've transcribed for you
in the white box?
HAGAR: “The residents of North Street were
startled yesterday afternoon,
by the sharp report of a pistol shot.
Joseph Lombardo had been shot by Joseph Alessi,
also known as Ollis.”
Whoa!
“Both he and Alessi are natives of Italy.
The latter came to America about nine years ago.
He has several brothers here, Samuel”.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!
“who has a fruit store at, Monroe Avenue and Antonino,
who has a fruit stand on Clinton Avenue.”
These guys were mobsters! I should have known!
GATES: Sammy's relatives were indeed "mobsters" of a sort...
Two of Giacomo's brothers, Samuel and Joseph Alessi,
were fellow fruit dealers,
a job that seems to have been far more violent
than either Sammy or I had imagined...
HAGAR: “Lombardo was driving in his wagon when
he was hailed by Alessi,
but other witnesses say that it was Lombardo
who hailed Alessi.
He asked the latter if he intended to
pay him what he owed.”
Oh! Oh-ho-ho!
“Alessi told a reporter that he pulled out 75 cents.
Lombardo slapped the hand away and cried out,
‘You owe me $13.'
Then Lombardo is said to have made a lunge at Alessi.
The latter ran across the street and went up to
the rooms he occupied.
A few seconds later he rushed back into the street
flourishing a revolver.”
Wow!
“When Lombardo started to run away Alessi raised the weapon,
leveled it, and deliberately shot at Lombardo.
Within an hour, Alessi was in custody.”
Wow!
GATES: This is your relative shooting another man over $13.
HAGAR: This is unbelievable.
Uh, but my grandparents were quiet.
You know, like I said, it,
I think they had a lot of ghosts that they
didn't talk about.
GATES: Yeah. Well, now you know why.
HAGAR: Oh my goodness. GATES: Yeah.
HAGAR: This is unbelievable!
Ohhh!
GATES: When the victim of the shooting eventually died,
Joseph Alessi was charged with murder and was sentenced
to 12 years in prison.
Records show that his brother Giacomo left New York
soon after moving his family to California,
where Sammy's grandmother Katherine would be born.
But this story does not end here.
back in New York, the Alessis still faced
a shocking retribution...
In 1911, Joseph's 28-year-old son Antonio was found dead with
his throat cut so viciously that his head was nearly
severed from his body...
HAGAR: Wow. Wow. GATES: They got his son.
HAGAR: Man, $13! GATES: Yeah.
HAGAR: That's what just keeps going back in my head.
GATES: And they tried... HAGAR: This started with $13.
GATES: $13...
HAGAR: This guy's cutting people's heads off.
GATES: And they tried to decapitate him.
HAGAR: Oh, it's, wow.
GATES: And you never heard anything about
this coming down...
HAGAR: No. GATES: From your family tree?
Nothing.
HAGAR: No. GATES: Please turn the page.
HAGAR: Yes.
GATES: Sammy, this article was published on June 16, 1912.
About a year and a half after Antonio was killed.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
(laughter)
HAGAR: When is this going to stop, Doc?
“Bullet wounds received on the night of June 7th brought
about the death of Paul Ollis, 33 years old.
The dead man was a brother of Antonio Ollis who
was found 18 months ago with his head all but cut off.”
HAGAR: Oh, my goodness.
GATES: Your great grand uncle Joseph lost not just one,
but two of his sons in brutal homicides.
HAGAR: Wow!
GATES: What's it like to find this out?
HAGAR: I thought more on my dad's side to be more people
beating people up and stuff, 'cause, you know, but not...
GATES: To put it in perspective,
you knew Katherine, your grandmother.
They were her first cousins.
HAGAR: Yeah! GATES: Think about that.
HAGAR: Yeah. Man, I know my first cousins.
If this was going on with my first cousins,
I don't know what I would think.
GATES: Do you think she knew about this?
It's hard to imagine that she didn't, right?
HAGAR: I think they did.
You know, my grandparents, now that I think about it,
when, when we were little when I was little,
my grandparents would come over and visit with my mom.
There was a lot of whispering going on at, at, at night.
GATES: Mm-hmm.
HAGAR: But I thought it was always my grandpa
had stole something, you know?
Because he got,
he even got caught stealing out of stores before.
He'd steal, uh, fishing gear.
He'd go in and,
with a vest on, and he'd take a,
put some lures on his vest, and walk out.
He got caught in a Thrifty Drugstore when he
was like 65 years old.
He was a character, but man...
GATES: He was a character.
HAGAR: But I didn't, I mean,
this is bringing up a whole new thoughts about
how they acted about things.
GATES: Sure.
HAGAR: Always moving, always moving.
In the middle of the night.
GATES: Well, think about this move.
We don't know if Katherine knew, but Katherine's parents,
your great grandparents, Giacomo and Gertrude, split.
Do you think their decision to move 3,000 miles away?
HAGAR: Yeah, “How far can we get without crossing a border?”
GATES: The Alessis had escaped the violence that plagued their
relatives back in New York,
but another kind of danger awaited them in California...
In 1907, Sammy's great-grandmother Gertrude
passed away in Los Angeles.
Her death certificate cites a tragic complicating cause...
HAGAR: “Drunkenness.”
GATES: Drunkenness. Yeah.
HAGAR: Oh, wow. That's Katherine's mom.
GATES: Mm-hmm. Man, she was only 33.
HAGAR: 33 years old. Drank herself to death.
GATES: She drank herself to death.
HAGAR: That's, I mean, wow.
GATES: Mmm.
HAGAR: How old was my, my grandma then?
GATES: Four, at the time. HAGAR: Boy, that's hard to take.
GATES: Sammy told me that he'd heard stories growing up about
his grandmother spending time in a convent when she was young.
he was about to discover that those stories were
partly based on fact...
The 1910 census indicates that Katherine was placed in a
Catholic orphanage following her mother's death...
HAGAR: “Name of Institution: Regina Coeli Orphan Asylum on
North Hill Street, Los Angeles.
Alessi, Catarina,
inmate, age: 7.”
GATES: Catarina is Katherine. HAGAR: Yeah.
GATES: There's your convent.
HAGAR: That really happened. GATES: Yeah.
HAGAR: Oh, God, it's horrible. GATES: Yeah.
(Sammy groans)
GATES: Did she ever talk about this time in her life?
HAGAR: No. No, only my mom did.
GATES: Oh. That had to be tough.
HAGAR: Sure.
GATES: Yeah. HAGAR: Yeah.
GATES: I want to show you what it was like.
Could you please turn the page?
Sammy, you're looking at photos of the
Regina Coeli Orphan Asylum,
an all-girls orphanage, where we just saw your
grandmother Katherine in 1910.
The asylum was known specifically to
help Italian immigrants.
The girls were kept at the orphanage either until
they could be placed with a qualified family or
until they were able to look after themselves and
make a living on their own.
To this end, they were educated through eighth grade.
What's it like to think of your grandma going through that?
HAGAR: Horrible.
But, I mean, it seems like she didn't have much to
compare it to.
I mean, that's the only,
almost like when I think of myself,
when I went through my hard times as a child,
I didn't have anything to compare it to,
so it wasn't so bad.
GATES: Yeah.
HAGAR: But I, I'm so sad that I,
I lived without this knowledge.
It seems like if I would've known this growing up and they
would've shared all this with me...
GATES: Mmm-hmm.
HAGAR: I would've been going around telling stories
and, you know,
and asking my grandma so many questions.
I mean, this.
Ooof.
GATES: We don't know how long Katherine spent
at the orphanage.
Its records have been lost,
we only know that she was separated from
her younger brothers and her father,
during a crucial period of childhood,
leaving Sammy to wonder how all this suffering
had affected his mother...
HAGAR: My mom had a harder life than I thought.
I mean, you know, growing up with, with my grandma,
my grandma must have been, kinda loony.
I mean, she always was.
She was, you know,
she was definitely an odd, an oddball, you know?
GATES: Suffered so much trauma.
HAGAR: Yeah. But my mom, my poor mom, you know.
I don't think my mom got loved properly.
GATES: Yeah. That's sad.
HAGAR: I don't think that my grandma knew how to do that.
GATES: Yeah. HAGAR: She was too wounded.
GATES: That's a good way to put it.
HAGAR: That's pretty much it, yep.
Thank you for this, Doctor.
This is tough. I'm a softie.
You're tearing my, you're tearing me up.
Get them cameras out of here,
and I'm going to roll around on the ground
for a couple minutes.
GATES: Aww. HAGAR: Whew.
GATES: We'd already explored Ed O'Neill's paternal roots,
showing how his grandfather was shaped by the brutal world of
the steel industry.
Now, turning to Ed's mother's family tree,
we found ancestors who were forced to confront a world that
was even more brutal...
The story begins with Ed's third great-grandparents:
Bridget and James Tyrrell,
Bridget and James were born in Ireland in the
early 1800s and left their native land
sometime after 1849 with seven children in tow,
fleeing starvation and the horrors of what became
known as the Great Potato Famine...
By 1860, the family had settled in Ed's hometown,
Youngstown, Ohio,
where a new set of challenges awaited them...
GATES: What are their occupations?
O'NEILL: Coal miner. GATES: Coal miner.
And 17-year-old coal miner.
O'NEILL: Yes. GATES: Yeah.
James is a coal miner,
Bridget's taking care of the children, and son, Thomas,
who's only 17 years old,
has already started working in the mines.
O'NEILL: In the mines. GATES: Alongside his father.
Did you know that?
O'NEILL: No.
GATES: That you had coal in your blood?
O'NEILL: No.
GATES: What do you imagine that was like, Ed?
O'NEILL: I've never been in those mines.
GATES: I would never want to go.
O'NEILL: I didn't know what they look like.
I don't want to go down underneath the ground.
GATES: When Ed's ancestors arrived in America,
Ohio's coal industry was booming.
But the workers who actually had to go into the mines faced
a terrifying task,
laboring more than 1,000 feet beneath the earth,
breathing in clouds of coal dust,
constantly fearing that the walls around
them would collapse...
O'NEILL: Look how young they are.
Those faces, most of them are young.
GATES: Yep. O'NEILL: Yep.
They didn't do it for their health.
GATES: Unh-uh.
James and 17-year-old Thomas likely took an elevator
down the mining shaft and mined the coal by hand
using picks and shovels.
O'NEILL: Yeah.
GATES: And Thomas is just one year older than
your daughter, Claire.
Think about that for a minute.
Can you imagine sending Claire off to the mines to
support the family?
O'NEILL: No. No, no. No.
GATES: How do you think they felt about their new country?
O'NEILL: Well, they were probably eating.
GATES: Mm-hmm. O'NEILL: You know.
So they probably liked that part of it.
Yeah, I mean, I guess you do what you have to do.
GATES: Whatever comforts the Tyrrells found in America
did not last for long...
In 1861, a year after we saw them in the Ohio census,
their new nation was engulfed by civil war.
James and Bridget were in their 50s,
but they had three sons, all teenagers,
and in August of 1862,
their oldest boy, Thomas Tyrrell,
appeared on a muster roll for an Ohio infantry regiment...
O'NEILL: Unbelievable.
GATES: Thomas volunteered.
He volunteered to serve in the Union Army.
He was just nineteen years old, a teenager.
And what do you think your third great-grandmother,
Bridget, thought?
She was watching her child head off to fight in a war in a
country she had just moved to.
O'NEILL: That would be rough.
I mean, 19.
He was just a boy a few years before that.
GATES: Yeah. O'NEILL: 19 is a boy.
GATES: 19 is a boy. O'NEILL: Yeah.
GATES: Thomas was given little time to grow up,
just two months after volunteering,
his regiment was thrust into a battle at
Chaplin Hills, Kentucky,
where more than 70,000 soldiers fought over a
small network of roads outside the town of Perryville...
O'NEILL: Look at that.
GATES: More than 7,500 casualties were suffered,
making it one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war...
O'NEILL: Wow.
GATES: Relative to the size of the armies involved,
sort of per capita.
O'NEILL: Yeah.
GATES: So how did Thomas fare, do you think?
I want you to guess.
O'NEILL: Well, I would say it's a crap shoot.
He was probably not trained that much, right?
GATES: No. O'NEILL: I mean, just thrown in.
GATES: Remember he went in August.
This is October.
O'NEILL: Well then, you're either lucky or you're unlucky.
GATES: Yeah.
Well, let's see which it was for Thomas.
This is another military record, dated February 21, 1863.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
O'NEILL: “I certify that I have carefully examined the said
Thomas Tyrrell and find him incapable of performing the
duties of a soldier because of gunshot wounds
in right shoulder,
leaving him with stiff joint and almost useless arm.
Degree of disability, two-thirds.”
Oh my God.
GATES: Thomas was discharged in February of 1863
with a permanent disability.
And this wasn't the end of his family's ordeal...
A year later,
his brother James followed him into the army and
soon found himself hospitalized with a heart condition...
Ed wondered how the boys' parents must have felt,
waiting at home,
wondering if their sons were hurt or captured,
dead or alive...
But as it turns out, their mother wasn't at home...
Records show that by the fall of 1864,
Bridget Tyrrell was serving in the Union Army as a nurse,
one of roughly 20,000 women who volunteered to aid
the northern cause...
And in many cases, these women just showed up and
did whatever they could to help.
They get tired of sitting around having all that anxiety.
O'NEILL: I mean I would love to have been a fly on the wall
when she decided to go and say,
"Where are you going?"
GATES: Right. "You were doing what?
You're not doing that."
O'NEILL: "How are you getting there?
You're going through war places."
GATES: That's right. O'NEILL: Unbelievable.
GATES: Bridget tended to the wounded in what was known as
“Brown Hospital” in Louisville, Kentucky,
there's no evidence that she had any
medical training at all, but that likely didn't matter,
as reports suggest the hospital was desperate for
whatever help it could get...
O'NEILL: "The sick are sent to the general hospitals in
and about Louisville.
Brown Hospital has received most of the patients
from the army.
This hospital is entirely too much crowded for its capacity
and number of surgeons and nurses.
The patients have not been able to receive the
attention they should."
GATES: That's where she worked.
O'NEILL: Oh my God.
GATES: At the hospital where Bridget worked...
O'NEILL: What is that? GATES: That's it.
O'NEILL: Oh my God. It's like a shack.
GATES: That is Brown...
O'NEILL: It's an elongated shack.
GATES: That is Brown Hospital, man.
O'NEILL: Oh my God. It doesn't look like...
GATES: Can you imagine how it...
O'NEILL: Any hospital I ever saw.
GATES: Imagine how it smelled. Just start with that.
O'NEILL: God.
She probably watched a lot of men die.
GATES: Oh, yeah. O'NEILL: Every day.
GATES: Yeah. Big time. O'NEILL: Geez.
That's, that's something. Different world.
GATES: Yeah. What a character.
O'NEILL: I would've loved to have known her.
GATES: Yeah. She had grit, man.
O'NEILL: Oh, yeah.
GATES: I want to show you something else.
Please turn the page.
O'NEILL: This is amazing. This is amazing.
GATES: Fast forward to the year 1897.
This is Bridget's obituary.
O'NEILL: Okay.
GATES: Would you please read the part we've transcribed
in the white box?
O'NEILL: "During the late war, Mrs. Terrell had two sons and
15 nephews in the Northern Army and made
several trips to the southern battlefields to
administer to their wants.
Many a dying soldier blessed her for her kindness and
care with their last breath."
So, that was sort of what I thought...
GATES: Absolutely.
O'NEILL: Was a big part of her job.
GATES: Yeah. O'NEILL: It would be.
GATES: It was holding people's hands who were staring
into the terror of death.
O'NEILL: Oh my God. That's incredible.
GATES: That's incredible. O'NEILL: That's moving.
GATES: I don't know what she was like to live with,
but she was great.
She performed nobly.
And according to her obituary,
Bridget made several trips to care for her family
during the war.
O'NEILL: Yes, yes.
GATES: What's it like to see that, man?
O'NEILL: When would you say to your husband,
"I'm going back down for another tour."
GATES: Yeah, a tour. Yeah.
O'NEILL: "And I'm going again."
GATES: Yeah. "Whether you like it or not."
O'NEILL: Several means at least three, right?
GATES: Yeah. There you go.
O'NEILL: Oh, that's just incredible.
GATES: We had a final detail to share with Ed,
a church archive in Ireland contains
Bridget's marriage record,
it lists her maiden name, Lally,
and indicates that she was likely born in county Offaly,
in the Irish midlands,
a region that was hard-hit during the famine,
offering further insight into the character of
Ed's remarkable ancestor...
She protected her family during two of the greatest
tragedies in history.
O'NEILL: Unbelievable.
GATES: The famine and the war.
What do you make of her?
O'NEILL: Well, it's like "Gunga Din".
"Better man than I am."
GATES: Absolutely.
And think about how quickly they came to this country and
grasped the ideals and offered themselves for sacrifice.
O'NEILL: Yes.
GATES: Yes. They were immigrants.
They could say, "I don't have a nickel in this fight.
I'm from Ireland.”
O'NEILL: Right. GATES: But they didn't.
O'NEILL: I guess they must have had a great desire to
belong to America.
GATES: Yeah, hook, line, and sinker they went into it.
O'NEILL: Yeah, it was the promised land.
GATES: Right.
O'NEILL: Boy, I'm glad I came here today.
GATES: We'd already traced Sammy Hagar's
mother's ancestry back to Italy,
revealing a family that struggled to stay together
Across multiple generations.
Now, turning to Sammy's father's roots,
we encountered ancestors facing a very different
kind of turmoil...
Sammy's great-grandfather, William R. Hagar,
was born in Virginia sometime around 1845,
his mother was a woman named Elizabeth Bailey.
And his father, we assumed, was a man named Alem Hagar.
That assumption was based on the paper trail...
Alem and Elizabeth married in 1823 and records suggest
they had at least four children together,
but when we searched for the family in the 1850 census,
we noticed something unusual...
HAGAR: “Elizabeth Hagar, age 40,
Granville Hagar, age 14.
William R. Hagar, age five, Polly Means Hagar, age 20.”
GATES: There's your great-grandfather,
William R. Hagar as a child living with his mother and
two of his likely siblings in Mercer County, Virginia.
HAGAR: Okay. GATES: But his father's missing.
HAGAR: No Alem.
GATES: So we wanted to see what happened to him.
Could you please turn the page?
HAGAR: Man, these people are disappearing like,
like the Italians!
GATES: This is another part of the 1850 Federal Census.
Only this one is from Tazewell County, Virginia.
Would you please read the transcribed section?
HAGAR: “Alem Hagar, age 50, place of birth, Virginia.
Sally Hagar, age 89, place of birth, Virginia.”
GATES: That's Elizabeth's husband, Alem,
alive and well but living in a different county...
HAGAR: With his mother?
GATES: With his mother, with this 89-year-old mother.
HAGAR: Wow.
GATES: What do you make of that?
HAGAR: I don't know what to make of that.
GATES: Our researchers were equally baffled.
The divorce rate in Virginia at this time was less than 1%,
we assumed the census taker had made an error,
but when we jumped forward ten years, to the 1860 census,
we discovered that Alem and Elizabeth were still living
in separate counties...
And as far as we could tell, they never reunited.
They separated and never reunited.
HAGAR: Wow.
And she raised kids by herself way back then?
GATES: She raised kids by herself. Yup.
HAGAR: Wow.
GATES: So this is where the story gets wild.
All right? You ready? I want you to...
HAGAR: I'm buckled up, brother.
GATES: I want you to fasten your seatbelt, all right?
Because I'm going to walk you through some complicated stuff.
Don't turn that page yet.
HAGAR: Okay. GATES: All right?
Now, the available records for Elizabeth and Alem do not
shed any more light on their relationship.
But when we looked at your DNA,
remember we gave you a couple DNA tests,
we noticed something very interesting.
HAGAR: Okay.
GATES: Our interest was focused on the results of
Sammy's Y-DNA test.
This type of test traces a man's direct male lineage by
identifying the genetic signature that is passed from
father to son across generations.
In theory, Sammy's Y-DNA should have matched
Alem Hagar's DNA
and all the Hagar men who came before him on his father's
father's line...
But that's not what his results showed.
Sammy, this chart shows the total number of men found
with the surname Hagar,
who match your Y-DNA signature.
Could you please read that number?
HAGAR: Zero!
I don't need glasses for that, brother.
(laughs)
How can that be?
GATES: Sammy?
Genetically, you are not a Hagar.
HAGAR: Get out of here.
GATES: You want to find out what your real
biological surname is?
HAGAR: Oh, God, yes.
Yes, this is, this is nutty as anything I've ever imagined.
GATES: What I'm about to introduce you to is
100% certain, okay?
HAGAR: Okay.
GATES: Because you are not a Hagar.
This is who you are.
Please turn the page.
HAGAR: Oh, man.
I'm going to get, I don't know if I'm ready for this.
GATES: Sammy, this is the same graphic we just saw
on the previous page.
HAGAR: I'm a Belcher?!
GATES: You are a Belcher.
HAGAR: Oh, my God!
GATES: Your Y-DNA matches 27 men with the surname Belcher.
There is no doubt, this is a slam-dunk identification.
HAGAR: Wow.
GATES: You are Sammy Belcher. HAGAR: What a trip!
GATES: There was only one possible explanation
for this anomaly.
Somewhere on Sammy's direct paternal line,
one of his female ancestors had borne a child
with someone who was a Belcher,
and not a Hagar,
and the most likely candidate was his
great-great-grandmother Elizabeth...
HAGAR: Wooo-wee....
GATES: And perhaps that was the very reason why Alem and
Elizabeth weren't living together in 1850 and 1860 when
he goes back and lives with his mother.
She, it's possible, had an affair and he figured it out.
HAGAR: And left.
GATES: Split. “I'm out of here.”
(Sammy whistles).
HAGAR: Boy, that changed everything.
GATES: That changed everything.
What do you think about this, man?
HAGAR: This stuff happens all the time.
I mean, this is so normal in life.
GATES: And guess what? It has happened.
People fell in love outside of marriage,
but only now are we able to find the evidence
because of DNA.
People took these secrets to the grave.
HAGAR: Yeah.
That's so sad because it's, thank God for DNA.
Because otherwise this stuff would just,
I mean, not that it,
I don't even know what it matters or what
it really means at my age.
GATES: Sure, right.
HAGAR: But if I was a young man if I was a seven,
eight-year-old, a teenager, just, you might think, yeah,
I want to meet some of these people and get down
at the bottom of it...
GATES: Sure.
HAGAR: And find out who loves me and who don't and
who I care about and who I need to help and who don't.
GATES: Right. HAGAR: I don't know.
GATES: We were not able to determine who fathered Sammy's
great-grandfather William, there are at least eleven
Belcher men who are possibilities and the DNA
evidence is not sufficient to distinguish among them,
but one thing is certain:
All eleven share the same father:
A man named Isham Belcher,
and DNA indicates that Isham has a very clear
connection to Sammy...
Isham Belcher is your third great-grandfather.
He is your great-great- great-grandfather.
You ready for this?
HAGAR: I sure am.
GATES: He was born in Virginia around the year 1770.
Six years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
HAGAR: Whoa.
GATES: So you have deep, deep roots in Revolutionary America.
Deep roots in Virginia.
How does it make you feel to know this?
HAGAR: Oh, it's crazy.
This is, this is lunacy, man.
This is so beyond my...
This is like trying to think about black holes and stuff.
GATES: I know. It's true.
HAGAR: It's like Carl Sagan stuff, right?
GATES: Like, “Hell, take me up”"
HAGAR: Stephen Hawking stuff. That's what this is.
GATES: It is! Are you glad to know this?
HAGAR: I'm so happy to know this and this gives me so much
mind-chewing ability.
I mean, man, my mind's going to work on this like a mouse
on a wheel of cheese, man.
GATES: The paper trail had run out for Sammy and Ed.
it was time to show them their full family trees...
O'NEILL: That's just amazing.
Look at that. This is just perfect.
GATES: Now filled with names they'd never heard before...
HAGAR: Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my goodness gracious.
GATES: For each, it was a moment of awe...
You got a World War I veteran there...
O'NEILL: That's great.
GATES: Offering the chance to see how their own lives
were part of a larger family story...
HAGAR: Oh, my man. This is beautiful.
That's big, deep, and touching.
Wow.
GATES: In the end, each man was left searching for words to
describe the experience...
O'NEILL: Wow. HAGAR: Doc, I'm overwhelmed.
It's like, I, I don't even know what it's like.
You have to interview me again,
like, in six months, just for five minutes,
and ask me what I think then because right now I
don't know what to think.
I mean, I, I love it.
I'm excited. It's really exhilarating, man.
GATES: It is.
HAGAR: I won't be able to sleep for a month, behind,
rolling this stuff around in my head and
reading through this book and, and showing it to my sister.
I mean, I just can't wait to show this to my sisters.
They're going to freak out.
GATES: What has our journey together meant to you?
O'NEILL: Well, just it's been a lifelong dream of,
desire that I've always had to find out this information
that I received today.
GATES: That's great.
O'NEILL: I always wanted to know,
ever since I was a little kid.
I always wanted to know this.
So I never did.
No one would ever, I'd ask everybody.
GATES: But they didn't know. O'NEILL: They did not know.
GATES: They did not know. But now...
O'NEILL: It went into the murky past and it was gone.
GATES: But now you know. What difference does it make?
O'NEILL: Everything.
GATES: That's the end of our journey with Ed O'Neill
and Sammy Hagar.
join me next time when we unlock the secrets of the past
for new guests on another episode of
“Finding Your Roots.”