Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard on Finding Your Roots – TONIGHT! Tuesday February 18th, 2025!

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard on Finding Your Roots: A new episode of Finding Your Roots  TONIGHT Tuesday, February 18, 2025 8pm EST/ 7pm CST!

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sits down with actors and married couple Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard. Together they find that their ancestors had some unbelievable similarities. Spanning continents and centuries, Gates introduces Kristen and Dax to stories about the soldiers, settlers, and criminals who make up their ancestry, which helps his guests understand themselves and their families like never before.

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard on Finding Your Roots: Video Preview

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard on Finding Your Roots: Season 11 Celebrities

Over the course of ten new episodes, Gates and his team use genealogical detective work and cutting-edge DNA analysis to trace the family trees of twenty compelling guests, telling stories that illuminate America’s fundamental diversity.

• José Andrés
• Joy Behar
• Kristen Bell
• Rubén Blades
• Lonnie Bunch
• Rita Dove
• Laurence Fishburne
• Michael Imperioli
• Melanie Lynskey
• Debra Messing
• Natalie Morales
• Sheryl Lee Ralph
• Lea Salonga
• Amanda Seyfried
• Dax Shepard
• Sean Sherman
• Sharon Stone
• Amy Tan
• Chrissy Teigen

and for the FIRST TIME… Henry Louis Gates, Jr. !

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard on Finding Your Roots: Season 11 Schedule

• January 7 – “Larger Than Life” – actors Lea Salonga and Amanda Seyfried

• January 14 – “La Famiglia” – talk show host Joy Behar and actor Michael Imperioli

• January 21 – “Stranger Than Fiction”- novelist Amy Tan and poet Rita Dove

• January 28 – “Dreamers One and All” – actor Sharon Stone and model Chrissy Teigen

• February 4 – “Family Recipes” – celebrity chefs José Andrés and Sean Sherman

• February 11 – “Latin Roots” – musician Rubén Blades and journalist Natalie Morales

• February 18 – “The Ties That Bind” – actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard

• February 25 – “The Butterfly Effect”- actors Debra Messing and Melanie Lynskey

• April 1 – “Moving on Up” – historian Lonnie Bunch and actor Sheryl Lee Ralph

• April 8 – “Finding My Roots” – actor Laurence Fishburne and host and executive producer Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

About Finding Your Roots

As the pages turn in each guest’s book of life, emotional revelations give way to complex questions about identity. Through Gates’ discerning touch, his guests learn what every family history shares—love, courage, and sacrifice—and how our histories transcend borders, merging to form an American root system fortified by its diversity. Along the way, viewers are transported from coastal Africa to the Mississippi Delta; from shtetls in the former Russian Empire to the ancestral lands of the Lakota Nation; from villages in the Philippines to a pirate enclave in Puerto Rico—all in search of the stories that will bring our guests’ ancestors to life. What’s more, this new season also includes a special reveal: the solution to a mystery that has haunted Gates’ own family for generations.

At the center of it all, guiding every discovery, is host, writer and executive producer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

“Our ancestors’ genetic legacies cascade down the branches of our family trees informing who we are,” said Gates. “As FINDING YOUR ROOTS enters its eleventh season, the team and I cherish deeply the bond we have with our guests and viewers to explore the history we have in common through personal stories of those who have shaped our world, one generation to the next. It’s a special honor to have our home on PBS, and we can’t wait to share this season’s amazing slate of guests with our audience.”

Assembling the extensive family trees and ancestral narratives alongside Dr. Gates are DNA expert CeCe Moore (chief genetic genealogist for Parabon Nanolabs and host of ABC’s THE GENETIC DETECTIVE) and genealogists Nick Sheedy, Kimberly N. Morgan, and Akosua Moore,who together have solved hundreds of mysteries and reconnected innumerable lost relatives over the past two decades.

Throughout the first ten seasons of the acclaimed series, Gates and his team have made life-changing discoveries for many celebrity guests. Highlights include finding the long-lost biological family of Andy Samberg’s mother (who had been adopted); Pamela Adlon learning the identity of her maternal grandfather; LL Cool J learning that his mother had been adopted (something she had not known); and Rebecca Hall learning of her maternal grandfather’s African American background, which he had kept hidden (a discovery that inspired Hall’s directorial debut, “Passing”).

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