From the PBS television series, "Finding Your Roots", hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Questlove learned in December 2017 that he was descended in part from Charles and Maggie Lewis, his three times great-grandparents, who had been taken captive in warfare and sold as slaves in the port of Ouidah, Dahomey (now Benin) to American ship captain William Foster. They were among 110 slaves smuggled illegally to Mobile, Alabama, in July 1860 on the "Clotilda". It was the last known slave ship to carry slaves to the United States. Questlove is the only guest to have appeared on Gates's program to be descended from slaves known by name, ship, and where they came from in Africa.