The sixth season of Finding Your Roots is slated to premiere on PBS on October 8, and viewers can expect to see some familiar faces exploring unfamiliar territory by uncovering their ancestry.

Among the bevy of familiar faces uncovering their ancestry will include Jordan Peele, Sterling K. Brown, Jeffrey Wright, Jon Batiste, Queen Latifah and Issa Rae.

Using everything from cutting edge DNA research to old school genealogical sleuthing, Finding Your Roots will take viewers on a journey where they will meet the ancestors of guests, some of whom were bootleggers, war heroes, criminals and immigrants.

The program is hosted and executive produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

“Hosting Finding Your Roots is not only profoundly rewarding as a scholar,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said, “it’s part of a larger mission to inspire us all to seek out the stories of our ancestors—to see history as something that we are all a part of, that we all have a stake in—and, in realizing this, to help us arrive at a deeper understanding of what it means to be part of the human family. Our series strives to show how all Americans are related, despite our present divisive politics, at the most fundamental levels of all: through our families, through our immigrant experiences, whether forced or voluntary, and at the level of the genome. I couldn’t be more excited to share Season Six with our viewers.”

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