The following is excerpted from an interesting article posted on the May 7, 2012 edition of Hollywood.com:
The Social Network star, the daughter of legendary African-American producer Quincy Jones and Jewish actress Peggy Lipton, embarked on a journey to uncover her maternal roots on genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? and her research, which aired in the U.S. on Friday (04 May 2012), took her on a heart-wrenching trip to Eastern Europe.
Jones learned that her grandmother had been born Rita Rosenberg and emigrated with her sister Pearl from Dublin, Ireland to New York in 1926, when they were just teens.
The actress dug deeper into her family’s history and managed to trace her lineage back six generations to Riga, Latvia, where her great, great grandfather Benjamin Benson was born.
But her findings took a dark turn as she discovered that while Benson’s dad had managed to leave the country as a young man to avoid the mandatory 25-year military service, his relatives and subsequent generations of their family had remained in Latvia and they were all slaughtered in 1941.
