Joe Manganiello On Learning His Black Ancestry On 'Finding Your Roots': 'I'm Descended From Survivors'

Last summer, Shadow & Act reported that Manganiello learns of his Black ancestry in the episode. The Rolling Stone piece reports the actor learned he is 7% Sub-Saharan African.

“Sub-Saharan African means that basically you’re descended from slavery, as it pertains to the United States, and I didn’t know that’s what it meant until I was on the show,” Manganiello said.

His fifth great-grandfather Plato Turner was an African-born man who was enslaved and brought to the United States as a child.

Plato became free and joined the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He even has a monument dedicated to him in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Manganiello also learned that his maternal great-grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian genocide.

While looking into his family history on his mother’s side, the actor discovered that his great-grandmother Terviz “Rose” Darakjian escaped death with her eighth child after her husband and seven children were killed right in front of her in 1915.

Rose swam across a river to escape death with her infant strapped to her back. Although she made it to the other side, Rose’s infant drowned during the journey.

When she made it to land, Rose lived in a cave before German officials found her. One of them, Karl Wilhelm Beutinger, later impregnated her, Entertainment Weekly reports.

“I’m descended from survivors,” Manganiello said during the episode. “All of a sudden I can see myself clearly for the first time.”

The actor’s aunt had a picture of Beutinger, which was later lost, as Shadow & Act reported.

“We had nothing to connect us being German other than this,” Manganiello said of the lost photo.

“You have to take the good with the bad,” he said. “And there’s some of that with history. I think there’s a tendency to say, ‘I’m so proud that my ancestors were on the right side of history,’ but that’s not you — that’s somebody else.”

Manganiello’s episode of Finding Your Roots airs on Thursday, Feb. 9, on PBS.