Talk:Jen Reid

"Grandmother"

The article currently claims that "One of her grandmothers was an enslaved African". The cited source is this BBC article, which quotes Reid as saying "There's a story that needs to be told in my ancestry and this series takes it way, way back, to a grandmother who was an enslaved African". Now, think about it. Reid was born in 1970. Let's make a fairly extreme (and highly unlikely) case, and suppose that her father was 70 when she was born; and that he was born to a mother of 50. That would mean that Reid's grandmother could (just) have been born in about 1850. It's much more common to have children between the ages of about 20 and 30, suggesting that her grandmother was more probably born between about 1910 and 1930. Slavery was abolished across virtually the whole of the British Empire in 1833, the best part of a century earlier. Possible explanations: (1) The grandmother was a slave in some other jurisdiction – e.g. Brazil, where slavery wasn't abolished until 1888. (2) The grandmother was held as an illegal slave somewhere. (3) Reid is not actually talking about her grandmother, but about some undefined female ancestor – perhaps her great-great-great-great-grandmother, which would be a lot more plausible in terms of chronology. I think (3) sounds the most likely explanation. Another quote from Reid in the BBC article is, "As someone whose parents hail from Jamaica and Nigeria, the deep horror of enslavement was likely part of my family history" – which rather suggests this is all speculation anyway. So for those reasons, I'm going to change the statement in the article to "She claims that one of her grandmothers was an enslaved African". If anyone can come up with any more solid evidence, please do so. GrindtXX (talk) 20:03, 8 October 2021 (UTC)