Watch: Exclusive Clips From Tonight’s ‘Finding Your Roots’

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was 9 years old when he started drawing his family tree. It was the day after his paternal grandfather died and his father showed him his grandfather’s scrapbooks of old family photographs and obituaries. Gates, 73, has made it his life’s calling to – among other things – help people gain personal insight by exploring their genealogical past. What was initially African American Lives, a show aiming to fill in the gaps of African American genealogy, transformed into Finding Your Roots to help notable American celebrities explore their ancestry. 

“The mistake I had made was to assume that everybody but Black people knew their family tree,” Gates told AARP earlier this year. “But nobody knows their family tree. People know their grandparents. But some people don’t know that.”

Finding Your Roots returned in January for its 10th season on PBS. (AARP is a corporate sponsor of this season.) This season features more stars (including Alanis Morissette, LeVar Burton and Tracy Morgan – to name a few) and, for the first time in the show’s history, three everyday Americans who want to dig deeper into their family ancestry.

Tune in every Tuesday at 8 p.m. for the latest episode on your local PBS station. Watch exclusive clips of tonight’s fourth episode below.

Ed O’Neill

Actor Ed O’Neill explores his and his father’s past in this clip from tonight’s episode.

When his grandfather Joseph O’Neill died on his ninth birthday in 1955, O’Neill was curious to learn more about his own father. The 77-year-old actor of Modern Family and Married … With Children fame talks about the insights gained from exploring his dad’s past and how that informed his own upbringing. O’Neill said his father’s family didn’t attend his father’s high school graduation, creating a lot of insecurities. “When he had the kids, that was it, but you could never fill that hole no matter how much you tried,” O’Neill said in the clip. 

Sammy Hagar

Sammy Hagar’s parents were farmworkers in Salinas, California, where the rocker who rose to fame with the band Montrose and as the lead vocalist for Van Halen, was born. The family moved to a nearby town when he was 2 years old so his father could work at a steel mill and better provide for the family. Hagar, 76, recalls his father’s struggles with alcoholism in the latest episode of Finding Your Roots. “He was a violent drunk,” Hagar told Gates. “It was hard. … Some relatives would take us in, and if they didn’t we’d sleep in the car a lot.” See the clip below.