‘Finding Your Roots’: America Ferrera Shocked by Grandmother’s Love Letter & Photo of Her Father

America Ferrera got the surprise of a lifetime on Tuesday’s (January 6) Season 12 premiere of Finding Your Roots.

The Ugly Betty, Superstore, and Barbie actor delved into a difficult part of her past with host Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: the disappearance of her father, Carlos, who abandoned her family when she was just eight years old and moved back to his home nation of Honduras, where he later died in 2010.

Carlos’ disappearance and death left a lot of question marks in Ferrera’s life, she told the PBS host. “He was there, and he was gone, and we just didn’t talk about it,” she remembered.

She got some answers when Gates revealed that Carlos himself was the product of a broken home and had a similar experience as her in his own childhood.

As it turned out, his mother, Georgina Paz Mendieta, moved from Honduras to Mexico in 1955, and the reason was a new romance.

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Ferrera was presented with a love letter from her late paternal grandmother, which was addressed to her eventual second husband, Nicolas Orturo Nuila Castillo, and read:

Orturo,

I suffered a disillusion that has caused me to close my heart to all affection, thinking that I could not love again. But you appeared on my lonely path to break the slough. Despite the disappointment I suffered, I listened to your words. Despite my dashed hopes, I forged new ones and new dreams.

“I had no idea. Zero. Nothing. I’ve known none of this,” she said, wistfully, after reading the note.

She then learned from Gates that Georgina and Nicholas moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an architect, while she was a school teacher, and they had another child together before returning to Honduras, where they reconnected with Ferrera’s father, Carlos.

“Obviously, I can relate to losing a parent. He was seven, and I was about eight when he left me. So I know that, and I’m curious about what that was then like for her to come back into his life in obviously a complicated way, and then to lose her again that way, I think probably really damaging and really devastating. Heartbreaking,” Ferrara said of this revelation.

Gates then showed Ferrera a photo of Carlos with his half-brother, which was taken some time after he’d left her family. Seeing that sight made Ferrera especially emotional, as she said, “It feels like salvaging a lost memory. I have no context for his life after he left. Nothing. Just, he left, and that was it. And I never knew where he was or what he was doing or how he was or any of it. So when he died, I really felt like that was it. With him went any hope of ever knowing, and it feels like magic to get to witness even just this still image of his life. And also, he has a smile on his face. And he looks… he’s alive, and he looks well. Yeah, amazing.”

Finding Your Roots, Tuesdays, 8/7c, PBS