Who Do You Think You Are? - Kevin Clifton

Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured celebrity dancer Kevin Clifton, known to everyone as 'Kevin from Grimsby.'

And while Kevin is, indeed, from Grimsby, his family history takes him much further away.

This episode featured one side of Kevin's family - his paternal line, whose history is mostly based in Canada.

And it's here that things get very interesting.

But also difficult - history is often uncomfortable, and this was something an emotional Kevin found out.

He lamented that it was 'always the men' in this ancestral line who inflicted the most pain and suffering on the women of his family, and had to grapple with being the descendant of both the men who caused the pain and the women who suffered from it.

A case of divorce in his family's past was covered in the newspapers - divorce being something highly unusual both at the time and in that particular area.

The press coverage was... revealing - with the husband taking a pre-emptive strategy, including denying - prior to any allegations being made - that he chased his wife with an axe and threatened to kill her. It's a very telling thing to try to get out in front of.

The abuse that was admitted to in court was bad enough, but considered acceptable at the time - it hopefully stands as a testament to social progress that admitting, in a court of law, that you had given your wife black eyes is no longer seen as a reasonable thing, and would now affect the divorce proceedings.

The main 'thread' of the episode, though, was the story - passed down through generations - of an Indigenous woman named Matooskie.

While it's not uncommon for families - especially in the US and Canada - to acquire a myth of Native heritage somewhere along the way, a specific name is much less so.

Matooskie, it turns out, was a First Nations (Canadian Indigenous) woman, who Kevin-from-Grimsby is directly descended from. 

A well-documented and somewhat iconic individual amongst First Nations historians, her story is even more interesting than my brief description of this episode (hopefully) makes it sound.

To me, though, what is truly important is not only that the story was passed down through the family, but that her Native name - Matooskie - is the one that was remembered by her descendants, rather than her Christian/European name of Nancy. 

It shows that regardless of her descriptions in church records as 'a half-breed woman' or her callous treatment by her Scottish husband, she retained her culture and her identity - enough to pass it down through the centuries.

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