Moira Stewart Traces Clara Christian to Edinburgh | Who Do You Think You Are? UK | S1 E6

Moira Stewart follows her maternal roots from Clara Christian's 1915 Edinburgh studies to a Highland TB sanatorium and London's first Pan-African Conference. In this Who Do You Think You Are? UK journey, Moira tackles the question where are you from by tracing pioneers in her family long before Windrush. With her mother Marjorie, who came to Britain from Dominica at 14 aboard the Berengaria and later trained as a nurse during the war, she recalls wartime London, the spirit of pulling together, and the stresses that ended her parents' marriage in 1943. In Edinburgh, university records and a 1915 student photograph reveal her grandmother, Clara Christian of Dominica, among early Caribbean medical students, and her grandfather, Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon of Trinidad. Guided by Professor Geoff Palmer and a plaque to James Africanus Horton, Moira learns Clara passed her early courses before giving up studies to start a family. Birth certificates for Barbara and twins Joyce and Evelyn place the young family in the Highlands, and a lead takes Moira to a TB sanatorium where patients once slept outside in the snow for the famed fresh air cure. The trail reaches further back to great-grandfather George James Christian, a Dominica-born teacher who saved by wrapping limes to study law in London. At Gray's Inn he accelerated through his course, mixed with fellow colonial barristers, and helped shape the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 near Parliament, where his speech on Africa's plunder was reported in The Times. He later left for the Gold Coast to build a career in law and politics. In Dominica and Antigua, Moira meets cousins Pearl and Purcell, hears of a strong musical thread in the family, and traces the Christian line to Green Bay, where Moravian missionaries schooled formerly enslaved communities. In slave registers without surnames and pedigrees of the white Christian planters, she confronts the possibility of mixed ancestry and the ironies of Christian Bay and the great house. The episode closes with Moira's reflection on identity, refusing to be defined by slavery while embracing a complex, proud past. #WhoDoYouThinkYouAre #MoiraStewart #FamilyHistory #Edinburgh #PanAfrican #Dominica #Antigua #BlackBritishHistory