When I was growing up in Glasgow I didn’t have much to compare things with, there weren't many Jamaicans, there were more African students, but less Jamaicans so there wasn’t anyone to compare notes with.

I did know a few things about my family for example in my history my father is Jewish, but you don’t think of Jews in Jamaica, you only think of Jews and Israel or Eastern Europe, but Jamaica is not something that comes to mind, so people ask me and where my name comes from and I say oh it’s Jewish some people say but you can’t be Jewish.

Actually because you hear that and because the representation is what it is you begin to doubt the information that you’ve been given, and so I doubted it and I rejected it and I stop talking about it and it’s only now that I realise as it a historian investigating it and through the DNA.

And through these things I found out that my father was Jewish and he was not lying. I found out through the DNA that my Jewish heritage is not just Sephardic it’s Ashkenazi, it’s from Eastern Europe.

I have also learnt to have an appreciation for oral history, I am so Eurocentric in some ways, I criticise my aunt for being Eurocentric but I realise in my attitude I can be very Eurocentric - because I don’t believe things unless there’s a document there, and I had rejected oral history.

My mother had told me is that in our family we are indigenous, we have indigenous heritage, not Indian but indigenous- but I said that’s impossible because according to documented history indigenous Jamaicans were exterminated.

She said no we were told we were indigenous, and this was from my grandmother side and it’s and it’s coming from her father but I completely didn’t believe it because everyone that I spoke to insisted that it could not be the case.

DNA started coming out and some people started to say that there are black people who have indigenous heritage. I found out that we did, and the thing that came through as historian is that my cousin found out through slave records was my grandmother‘s grandfather, which is where my mother was saying this heritage came from- he was called Joseph Macintosh.

The British were like the Nazis, they were very meticulous in their record keeping . To record the names of slaves they used to record their ethnicity, so if you were a negro at five years old that’s how you were labelled, or you might be called a mulatto. Joseph Macintosh was described as a Sambo . Sambo is a half indigenous and half black, so they weren’t lying, the oral history was right. It’s there in black-and-white. But all this time I’ve been saying impossible impossible. Now I have a healthier recognition towards history and oral history you can’t ignore it and you can’t reject it.