Finding Your Roots: Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns Uncovers Lincoln Connection

Entertainment
29 October 2014
by Ancestry Team

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is well known for his lengthy and well-researched films, notably his five-part series The Civil War. But until his turn on Finding Your Roots’ “Our American Storytellers” episode, Burns didn’t have a true understanding of how deeply his own family tree was intertwined with that war.

Ken Burns and Documentaries

Ken was born in Brooklyn and attributes his love of the cinema to his father, who got him hooked on going to the movies. With a supportive family who encouraged his dreams, he originally thought he’d direct feature films, but after his mother’s death when he was 11, his focus shifted to documentary storytelling. One friend declared that Burns’ mother’s long battle with cancer left him wanting to “wake the dead” and use stories to help bring people back to life.

Ken Burns

Ken Burns Interest and Connection to The Civil War

His fascination with the Civil War is longstanding, and he told Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. that when he was a child and he and his brother would play a Civil War game, he’d make his brother play the Confederates; Ken was a loyal Union supporter from a young age. But Gates and his team of genealogists found that Ken’s great-great-grandfather Abraham Burns not only fought for the Confederate army but enlisted to do so. He was eventually imprisoned by the Union, and in order to win back his freedom, he had to swear an oath of allegiance; records show him saying he was forced to join the rebels. Ken didn’t really buy that statement, and while he’s never supported his relative’s viewpoint, he admits these sort of truths come with our families and their past.

He had a slightly harder time stomaching the next revelation that Gates unfurled about another Abraham on the Burns family tree. This Abraham is on the maternal side, Ken’s great-great-grandfather Abraham Smith. Ken could barely read the records that clearly showed that this ancestor owned six slaves before the Civil War broke out, a fact no one in his family had talked about.

Things briefly looked up as they explored further branches of his tree. Ken’s paternal 5th great-grandfather Gerardus Clarkson was a surgeon during the Revolutionary War and a major advocate for modern medicine. Better yet, Gerardus was related to Ken’s personal hero Abraham Lincoln, making Burns a distant cousin of the president. That news left Ken beaming from ear to ear.

But that bright spot turned dark quickly as Gates revealed some information about Ken’s maternal 5th great-grandfather Eldad Tupper. When Ken heard the name, his initial reaction was that he ought to call his pregnant daughter and tell her to use this unique family name for her unborn child, but that quickly changed. Eldad was a soldier in Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War, but he was a Loyalist fighting for the British. “Oh no, a Tory!” Ken exclaimed.

Trying to end on a positive note, Gates did have some good news from Ken’s DNA results. Burns family legend said that they were somehow related to Scottish poet Robert Burns, and DNA proved that Ken is indeed a cousin.

Despite some unsettling news about a slave owner, a Confederate soldier, and a British Loyalist, Ken learned that he’s distantly related to poet Robert Burns and his hero Abraham Lincoln, creating a very diverse and fascinating family tree.

To watch full episodes of Finding Your Roots, visit PBS.org.

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