SINCE she was a child, Gloria Reuben has been intrigued by her surname. The Canadian actress knew her parents were Jamaican but the question surrounding her Jewish last name lingered.

That mystery was solved recently by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates who confirmed her Jamaican-Jewish heritage in his acclaimed genealogy series, Finding Your Roots, which aired Tuesday in the United States on PBS.

Through visits to the Institute of Jamaica and English and German Synagogue in Kingston, Gates discovered Reuben’s father, Cyril George Reuben, was indeed Jewish.

It did not surprise the Torontoborn Reuben who said her black mother always spoke about her husband’s Jewish background. “That’s what I’ve been told,” she said. An engineer, Cyril Reuben was born in Jamaica in 1890 and moved to Canada during the 1920s. He died in 1976. Gates’ research showed that his parents were Henry Emanuel Reuben and Florence Gabay.

Henry was one of four sons for Isaac Reuben. Documents found the Reuben family having a presence in Jamaica as far back as 1817. Ms Gabay died in a Kingston asylum in 1917. Reuben, who has appeared in the hit television series ER and Oscar-winning film Lincoln, told Gates being a biracial child in Toronto was challenging.

She remembers being taunted by children, black and white. Jamaican film-maker Lennie Little-White recognised Reuben’s work with a Doctor Bird Award several years ago.

Actor Courtney B Vance, novelist/screenwriter Stephen King and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper are also subjects of this season’s Finding Your Roots