In 1979, Burns moved from
Manhattan, New York City, to
Walpole, New Hampshire, where he rented a house that he eventually bought. The original reason for the move was that his rent in Manhattan rose from US$275 to $325 (from US$ to $ in dollars). He has credited the move to the small town with ultimately jump-starting his later success, and he still resides there to this day. In 1982, Burns married Amy Stechler. The couple had two daughters,
Sarah and
Lilly. On October 18, 2003, Burns married Julie Deborah Brown, daughter of Leslie Mundjer and the
Smith Barney senior vice president Richard Brown. Julie Deborah Brown founded Room to Grow, a non-profit organization providing aid to children separated from their families. They have two daughters. Burns is a descendant of
Johannes de Peyster Sr. through Gerardus Clarkson, an
American Revolutionary War physician from
Philadelphia, and he is a distant relative of Scottish poet
Robert Burns. In 2014, Burns appeared in
Henry Louis Gates's
Finding Your Roots where he discovered that he is a descendant of a
slave owner from the
Deep South, in addition to having a lineage which traces back to Colonial Americans of
Loyalist allegiance during the
American Revolution. Burns is an avid
quilt collector. About one-third of the quilts from his personal collection were displayed at the
International Quilt Museum at the
University of Nebraska–Lincoln from January 19 to May 13, 2018. When asked if he would ever make a film regarding his mother Lyla, Burns responded: "All of my films are about her. I don't think I could do it directly, because of how intensely painful it is."
Politics Burns is a longtime supporter of the
Democratic Party, describing himself as a “
yellow-dog Democrat” and contributing almost $40,000 in political donations. In 2008, the
Democratic National Committee chose Burns to produce the introductory video for Senator
Ted Kennedy's August 2008 speech to the
Democratic National Convention, a video described by
Politico as a "Burns-crafted tribute casting him [Kennedy] as the modern
Ulysses bringing his party home to port." In August 2009, Kennedy died, and Burns produced a short eulogy video at his funeral. In endorsing
Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency in December 2007, Burns compared Obama to
Abraham Lincoln. He said he had planned to be a regular contributor to
Countdown with Keith Olbermann on
Current TV. In 2016, he also delivered a commencement speech at
Stanford University criticizing
Donald Trump. He also criticized the media for devoting so much airtime to him and failing to give him scrutiny: "Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not.
Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago." In 2023, a 2013 photograph of Ken Burns and
Clarence Thomas at a
Koch Brothers fundraising event was made public in a
Pro Publica article about Justice Thomas' connections to right-wing activists. Burns stated that the encounter was a brief social encounter resulting from
Charles Koch's support of
PBS programming. ==Awards and honors==