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The Rev. Jesse Jackson will join the Rev. Al Sharpton on Saturday to make a special appeal to African-American parents to give their children a family tree as a holiday gift.
"Once they know what their ancestors had to endure [in slavery], they will hopefully decide not to waste their lives and make the most of it," Sharpton said.

Jackson, who will appear with Sharpton at his National Action Network headquarters in Harlem, told the Daily News he already knows that his father's grandparents were enslaved and that his bloodlines are Native American, Irish and African.

"We have been taught we are separate races, one superior and one inferior. But we really are blood relatives," Jackson said.

The News revealed Sunday that Ancestry.com genealogists had discovered that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton Sr., was enslaved by a relative of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond's.

Since then, Ancestry.com has seen an explosion of more than six times the normal number of visitors who create family trees.

"We normally have something like 7,000 people a day come and start creating family trees," said Tim Sullivan, president of the Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com. "On Tuesday, we had 46,000."

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