LeVar Burton got hit with a one-two punch while tracing his family’s ancestry on the Jan. 16 episode of PBS’ hit series “Finding Your Roots.”

Burton rose to fame as a child actor in the TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” the show that host Henry Louis Gates cited as an inspiration for the PBS show, and went on to star in “Star Trek” and host “Reading Rainbow.”

On the PBS show, he discovered a hidden family secret. Burton learned that a great-great-grandmother on his mother’s side, Mary Sills, was raised by a man she thought was her biological father, but wasn’t. (Burton knew Sills when he was a young boy).

Sills was the biological daughter of a white farmer named James Henry Dixon who had a wife and family at the time of her birth.

“And she was the other family on the other side,” Burton said in shock.
Then, Gates revealed that Dixon served in the Confederate Army as a teenager.

“Are you kidding me? Oh my God, oh my God. I did not see this coming,” Burton said.
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