Do our ancestors matter – what they did or what was done to them? Andrea Stuart, prize-winning author of The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon’s Josephine, has traced her family tree back to the birth of a child in eighteenth-century Barbados who is the result of a union between a powerful white slave owner and an unnamed black female slave. From here she follows the white side of the family further back to the moment in the 1630s when a Leicestershire blacksmith called George Ashby audaciously emigrated to Barbados. 

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