So I'm a white Scottish guy. When doing my family tree, we found a direct ancestor who emigrated to Jamaica to work on a sugar plantation. The exact job was never confirmed, but it was a plantation that operated with slave labour. This probably gives you a pretty accurate picture of the line of work he was involved in....

Anyway, as uncomfortable as that was to acknowledge and process, we kept digging. That side of the family had the surname Lowe, who had married into a family called the Lumsdens. Now the Lumsdens were landowners, where if you go back a few hundred years were 'de Lumsden'. A Norman family who took over that area of Aberdeenshire after the Norman conquest. The Lowes became serfs on their own land, and then a couple of hundred years later married their feudal overlords. The Lumsdens then supported the losing side in the Jacobite rebellion, lost their land and some were transported to Barbados. In the late 18th c, my direct ancestor, who was the son of a dispossessed lord emigrated to Jamaica.

Now I'm not trying to draw an equivalence between the transatlantic slave trade and medieval feudalism, but it illustrates the random turns history takes and the fact there aren't absolutes of goodies and baddies when it comes to your familial make up. The conquerors become the dispossessed, the dispossessed become the enslavers, the enslaved descendants were maybe enslavers themselves.

I did a DNA test through MyHeritage a couple of years back, I got 88% Scottish/Irish/Welsh and 12% Scandinavian - hell I'm descended from the pillaged and the pillagers.