Last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured two for the price of one, with TV doctors, and twin brothers, Chris and Xand Van Tulleken.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chris and Xand's family turned out to be very Dutch in origin, though with a link to an exiled Dutchman living in England at the beginning of the 19th Century.
Working-class people are rarely prominent enough to be exiled, so it's probably no surprise that the Van Tulleken family was historically a bit posh - especially given the oil paintings of ancestors that adorn the walls of the family's home.
Although achieving a low-rank of nobility - something the brothers banter about quite a bit in the episode - the Van Tulleken family were largely of the merchant classes.
Unfortunately, given the time period and the history of the Netherlands, that led to a discovery of an ancestor who was heavily involved in the slave trade - not in a distant, though still deplorable, indirect way, either.
Ambrosias Tulleken was a slave-holder and trader in Dutch Suriname and Demerara, which is now in Guyana.
The brothers were understandably extremely shocked by the revelation, and very uncomfortable.
History is not always pleasant to the modern eye - it is what it is, and we can only learn from it.
A much sweeter story came from Dutch Indonesia, where the brothers found one of their ancestors had married a mixed-race Indonesian woman.
Despite Chris' initial cynicism, Xand's romantic theories won out through the historic sources - their ancestor had given up his army career because his intended bride's ethnicity was not approved of.
From their ancestor's own words, preserved in a book - something very few of us will be lucky to find, but an invaluable resource - it was abundantly clear that he both loved and respected his wife, and that her death affected him deeply.
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