Kevin Clifton came to fame as a dancer on Strictly, eventually winning the series with his partner in dance – and now in life – Stacey Dooley. Known on set as ‘Kevin from Grimsby', he's proud of his northern roots but wants to investigate a long-standing family rumour from much further afield.
According to his dad, the Cliftons might be related to a mysterious woman called Matooski from the First Nations in Canada.
After discovering from censuses that his great-great-grandmother Emma was born in Canada, and that she was in an orphanage there, Kevin travels to Canada to investigate. He soon learns she spent a year in an orphanage even though her parents were still alive. Solving this mystery uncovers a powerful story of life in one of the colonial towns of Canada and a divorce, which was rare at the time. It made national news, enabling Kevin to read all the details of the case as it passed through the court. Despite allegations of abuse against her husband, Kevin's three-times great-grandmother Grace had her three children taken away, and they ended up in the orphanage.
Tracing Grace's family further back, Kevin heads to York Factory, a remote trading post on Hudson Bay, once the centre of the British Canadian fur trade. It's here that he discovers his five-times great-grandmother is Matooski – one of the very few First Nations women to be recorded in historical documents. Matooski was also known as Nancy and became the ‘country wife' of the head of the trading post, John George McTavish. Nancy, and other women like her, provided indispensable local knowledge and skills that enabled posts like York Factory to succeed.
Nancy was eventually abandoned by her British ‘husband,' and Kevin discovers how she and her daughter Grace, Kevin's four-times great-grandmother, narrowly survived a dangerous river journey inland. By the end of his journey, Kevin finds out that he comes from a long line of skilled and courageous female ancestors who survived – and thrived – against the odds.
