Johni Cerny, the chief genealogist for PBS' Finding Your Roots, dies at 76

The New York Times

Cerny helped everybody from Oprah Winfrey to Bernie Sanders learn about their roots on the PBS series. “Johni Cerny was the proverbial dean of American genealogical research,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., host and executive producer of Finding Your Roots, said in a statement. In an email to The New York Times, he described her work as “transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity.”