Last Tuesday's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured Alex Scott - ex-footballer and TV presenter.
Alex is a biracial Black woman, with interesting and strong characters on all sides of her family.
Her episode focussed on both her maternal and paternal lines of ancestry - i.e. her mother's and her father's sides of her family.
Alex was surprised to learn that on her mother's side of the family, she had Russian (Lithuanian) Jewish ancestors, who lived in London's East End.
The exploration of the threat of fascism and police brutality against Jewish immigrants in the 1930s was, as she herself points out, something that should be more prominent in the nation's memory.
This is something that happened in living memory, and forgetting the amount of support Hitler and the Nazis had in this country is something that we cannot afford to do.
Alex also explored her Jamaican family from her father's side of the family, being especially interested in the family of her beloved grandmother.
Much of this part of the family was a story of hardships and survival.
But there was also some uncomfortable history to contend with.
One of Alex's ancestors was a person of colour - in these circumstances, a light-skinned Black person, possibly with white ancestry - who owned slaves.
This can be hard to fathom, but the embedding of slavery within societies was deep and complex, and free people of colour - especially those with some white ancestry, or of a certain social status - often owned slaves.
It can be difficult to reconcile the events of the past with our morality in the present.
Alex was clearly struggling with the revelations, and it's something many British and Commonwealth Black people have to contend with - the complex feelings attached to being descended from both slaves and slave owners.
Still, Alex faced her family's history as it was - knowing the past can be a powerful thing, no matter the ups and downs.
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