I knew that Prince William had some Indian ancestry through Princess Diana but I had no idea that it was his direct maternal ancestor who was Indian (mother’s mother etc). Eliza Kewark was alleged to have been Armenian but it seems at the very least she was half Indian so it’s interesting to note that the 2nd in line to the throne is not only a descendant of George the 1st (not since Queen Anne in the early 18th century, Act of Union time), the descendant of George the 2nd (which is a first ever) and now is a direct descendant of an Indian on his mother’s side while his direct paternal lineage goes back to the House of Oldenberg (even though he is de jure a member of the House of Windsor). It’s interesting to see how Monarchy in Europe seems to be particularly Germanic (most of the Dynasties seemed to have stemmed from Germanic ancestors maybe because of Charlemagne) but it’s nice to know the future King is in some way Gujarati, albeit a very long way off (but in a very substantial way as his Mitochondrial DNA is basically Indian).
‘As the third son of a Scottish landowner, Forbes needed to make his fortune elsewhere and like many ambitious young men, he went to India to do just that.
‘When Forbes arrived in the Bombay Presidency he employed a housekeeper, Eliza Kewark. They had three children, one of whom, Catherine or Kitty, was the ancestress of Princess Diana.’
With the full article it shows just how serendipitous it that Eliza’s daughters go on that in this rising Asian age the British King will have a substantial Asian link.
Revealed: William’s Indian ancestry. DNA tests show future monarch has clear genetic line to the former ‘Jewel in the Crown’ from Diana’s side
Ironically the current Jacobite heir at the moment (who genealogically have a better claim to the British throne than the current British Royal family) is the
Second in Line to the Throne of Lichtenstein. It seems Europe’s Royal Families and Aristocracies are mind-numbingly inter-linked.
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Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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