Daru Rooke takes Tracy Whitaker on the trail of her notorious antecedent Mary Bateman, who was hanged in 1809 for the murder of Leeds woman Rebecca Perigo and was one of the first criminals to be publicly dissected in the quest for medical knowledge.
A small note beside the entry in the family tree of James Chalmers , who died in 1901, reads "eaten by cannibals". One hundred years after the event, Rooke takes ancestor Charlotte Sainsbury to Papua New Guinea to retrace the footsteps of this remarkable Victorian missionary.
Rooke takes Sarah Apps on the trail of her great-uncle, artist Claughton Pellew, who refused to be conscripted into the British forces in 1916 and spent the remainder of the First World War incarcerated. Sarah gets a taste of what life in prison was like for her ancestor when she spends 24 hours in a Victorian jail.
British middleweight boxing hopeful Spencer Fearon travels from south London to Jamaica with Rooke, expecting to find his ancestry intertwined with the familiar stories of slavery and powerlessness. But, on arrival, he finds that his surname derives from a powerful group of English colonisers, and that a branch of his family was the Maroons - a group of fearless freedom fighters who, in 1738, won independence from the British.
Rooke uncovers a Victorian miscarriage of justice as he and actor David Maybrick examine the case of Florence, convicted in 1889 of poisoning her husband with arsenic.