Authors: Deirdre Savage & Stefan Mroczek, New Zealand, February 2015
Editors Note: This story affects many descendants in different families, primarily the Millard, Bishop, and Savage families with ancestors/origins in India.
Sailing for India;
William Vaudrey Glascott set sail for India from England at about the age of 21 on the Indiaman sailing ship Sir Stephen Lushington in 1810. He had enlisted as a soldier with the East India Company and was a younger son of a Welsh Methodist clergyman Rev Craddock Glascott (link to Craddock Glascott) who at the time was making his living in Devon where he worked for 50 years. William did not choose to be a clergyman himself, like both his other brothers, but decided to seek his fortune by joining the army and heading for the exotic East.
It was here, stationed in the coastal regions of Bombay for four years, that he met a local woman and settled down to begin the family that has continued for 7 generations and spread throughout the world.
At this time there were vastly more British men in India than there were British women (the Suez Canal did not yet exist) and it was the East India Company’s policy to encourage its soldiers to marry local women to promote social stability and to facilitate the assimilation of the cultures it controlled. Forming relationships with Indian girls was therefore common practice and socially quite typical during this period at the beginning of the 19th century. It was also common that there was no written record of these liaisons and so there was possibly no formal “marriage” with the local girl William took as his partner.
However, the young couple appear to have set up home together and soon gave birth to their first child, a daughter, in the environs of Bombay in about 1815. This girl was named Mary Anne Glascott and her birth marks 200 years of family history and the beginning of the Indian/British chapter of the family from which so many of us have sprung.
Unfortunately this couple was not destined to live together for long as it seems the young wife was left widowed at probably a very young age when William died “after a short illness” on Qeshm (Kishme) Island in the Persian Gulf, where he was stationed for some months - possibly from the fever which was rampant in such a hot and desolate spot.
When he died, his daughter, Mary Anne Glascott, was around 4 years old and his wife was left with at least one other daughter, Eliza, and a son, William Frederick, to raise on her own. It would seem that their English relatives never had any idea of their existence and how they all survived and the lives they lived in India is a mystery to us today, but many of us are living proof that they did survive and spread across the globe!
An Orphaned Daughter;
Mary Anne Glascott grew up in these military cantonments in the Bombay region and married, in her turn, a soldier by the name of Thomas Edwards, to whom she had two daughters (one of whom was to become Anna Leonowens). However, it was not long before she too was left a widow while probably still in her teens. She married again very quickly in 1832 to an Irish solider, Patrick Donohoe, and they went on to have a large family together. They moved around a great deal with his work managing the building of roads with the Corps of Engineers, but by the time he died in 1864 they were well established in Poona (modern Pune, in-land from Mumbai) and relatively prosperous.
The children resulting from this marriage would have been classed as Anglo-Indian (or sometimes also called Eurasian) as their mother was a “half-caste” and “India-born” and so very clearly not English. Over time, the numerous off-spring of these wide-spread marriages went on to form a huge class of technical and middle management citizens who (though they could never become the CEOs of the nation) were the industrious founders and workers in the institutions of the railways, medicine and teaching throughout India. Anglo-Indians were fiercely proud of their “Englishness” and aspired to be more “English than the English” themselves – with their English language skills and education, Christian religion and English habits they served as the ideal instrument of the ruling class British and could, in many ways, be said to have built modern India.
However, by the time of the British Raj (the British government took over the administration of India in the 1850s) Victorian racism was on the rise and it was common for families to distance themselves from any predecessors who were anything other than “white”. Anna Leonowens (whose life and work inspired
the novel Anna and the King of Siam and the musical The King and I as well as more recent movies) strongly disassociated herself from any Indian legacy and went to great lengths to establish her utmost Englishness in her career and in her writing - although it seems she was born and raised in Pune along with the rest of the family and never set foot in England! She maintained this stance throughout her long life and is said to have attributed her darker complexion to her Welsh ancestry. Two recent biographies of Anna both develop extensive documentation of her birth and life in India and establish the probability that her grandmother, the unknown woman who set up home with William Vaudrey Glascott, was indeed most likely to have been an Indian or part Indian woman (see references).
So how is it that we can be sure, at this great distance of time and culture, that William really did marry a woman of Indian origin when no one in the family has ever gone on record as acknowledging this heritage? Would it be possible to use her numerous descendants to prove her existence? It was with this question in mind that we began a quest to see if it was possible to find some living relative who still carried her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) down those two hundred years and 7 generations…..
Mitochondrial DNA;
Mitochondrial DNA is a particular from of DNA we each acquire from our mothers and can only be passed on by women, remaining very stable and unchanged over quite vast periods of time. With this knowledge it became apparent that if we could follow an unbroken female line of daughters from this unrecorded woman right down to the present day then we could examine that current mtDNA and it would be identical to hers.
And so the hunt began to try and expand the family tree to see if such a line did in fact exist. My own mtDNA, as well as that of all my known first cousins, was of no use as we are the descendants of x2 generations of men in this genetic line (Philip and Thomas Arthur Savage being the descendants of Mary Anne’s third daughter Ellen Jane). Mary Anne had a number of daughters but only the two from her first marriage to Thomas Edwards seemed to have had daughters themselves – Anna Harriet, who became Anna Leonowens, and Eliza Julia who married Sgt Major James Millard. We currently have no contact with the Leonowens line who are in North America and Germany and unfortunately the extensive and well-documented connections with the Millard line are all through a male ancestor also. In order to carry this mystery woman’s mtDNA, the person had to be a daughter’s daughter’s daughter in an unbroken line back to this non-European woman through Mary Anne. So, we were unaware of the existence of any such female descendant and were confronted only with dead-ends on the family tree as we knew it.
Footnote: The Pratt branch of the Millard descendants may well carry an uninterrupted daughter to daughter link but this line, which includes the famous actor Boris Karloff, is in America and we do not have contact with them either at this time
A New Cousin;
With much internet sleuthing and some very good luck it was near the end of 2014 that we finally managed to track down an unknown third cousin who appeared to carry this particular unbroken female line of DNA – and she turned out to have been living in NZ all along! And so we were introduced to Roslin, who lives in Dunedin (South Island of NZ), and discovered how our two different branches of the family had been living in the same country for 3 generations without any knowledge of each other.
Roslin and her sisters are the x6 granddaughters of the unidentified non-European woman whose daughter was Mary Anne Glascott. Mary Anne’s daughter was Ellen Jane Donohoe (from Mary Anne’s second marriage to Patrick Donohoe) and Ellen was, in turn, the mother of Thomas Arthur Savage (the Bombay headmaster from whom I and all my numerous NZ cousins are descended). Ellen Jane went on to have a number of other children from her second marriage to George Augustus Savage and one of them was Roslin’s great grandmother Ellen Sarah. Ellen Sarah’s daughter was Doris Ellen and her daughter was Jean who met a NZ airman in England and came to New Zealand with him after World War 2, where Roslin and her siblings were born.
A simple cheek swab of Roslin’s DNA was all that it finally took to put us in touch with this mystery ancestor whose identity and existence had for so long been forgotten within our family.
Asian Origins;
With this mitochondrial DNA, preserved through the female ancestral line, we have been able to prove that this unnamed grandmother of so many of us was most likely of Asian origin. The strongest possibility that these mtDNA results suggest is that this ancestor was from the region which is now Central India or the border area between India and Pakistan – all of this region, including the vast majority of modern Pakistan, was ruled over by the East India Company at this time and corresponds to the administrative area that later, in British Raj times, became known as the Bombay Presidency.
Below is a summary of the results from the DNA test. If you are interested in looking at the family tree and the profiles it contains you can search these names on www.Geni.com and if you would like to add yourself and your family to the tree or add details or edit what we already have there you can be joined up by email. The site uses a free, open, sharing model that relies on everyone contributing and helping each other.
This Female Relative has tested the HVR-1 and HVR-2 regions of her mtDNA and has not tested the Coding Region. Based on the sequencing results of the mtDNA HVR-1 and HVR2 regions, the top 4 predicted mtDNA haplogroups for Roslin are as follows:
Click on image to expand it:
Editors Note: This story affects many descendants in different families, primarily the Millard, Bishop, and Savage families with ancestors/origins in India.
Sailing for India;
William Vaudrey Glascott set sail for India from England at about the age of 21 on the Indiaman sailing ship Sir Stephen Lushington in 1810. He had enlisted as a soldier with the East India Company and was a younger son of a Welsh Methodist clergyman Rev Craddock Glascott (link to Craddock Glascott) who at the time was making his living in Devon where he worked for 50 years. William did not choose to be a clergyman himself, like both his other brothers, but decided to seek his fortune by joining the army and heading for the exotic East.
It was here, stationed in the coastal regions of Bombay for four years, that he met a local woman and settled down to begin the family that has continued for 7 generations and spread throughout the world.
At this time there were vastly more British men in India than there were British women (the Suez Canal did not yet exist) and it was the East India Company’s policy to encourage its soldiers to marry local women to promote social stability and to facilitate the assimilation of the cultures it controlled. Forming relationships with Indian girls was therefore common practice and socially quite typical during this period at the beginning of the 19th century. It was also common that there was no written record of these liaisons and so there was possibly no formal “marriage” with the local girl William took as his partner.
However, the young couple appear to have set up home together and soon gave birth to their first child, a daughter, in the environs of Bombay in about 1815. This girl was named Mary Anne Glascott and her birth marks 200 years of family history and the beginning of the Indian/British chapter of the family from which so many of us have sprung.
Unfortunately this couple was not destined to live together for long as it seems the young wife was left widowed at probably a very young age when William died “after a short illness” on Qeshm (Kishme) Island in the Persian Gulf, where he was stationed for some months - possibly from the fever which was rampant in such a hot and desolate spot.
When he died, his daughter, Mary Anne Glascott, was around 4 years old and his wife was left with at least one other daughter, Eliza, and a son, William Frederick, to raise on her own. It would seem that their English relatives never had any idea of their existence and how they all survived and the lives they lived in India is a mystery to us today, but many of us are living proof that they did survive and spread across the globe!
An Orphaned Daughter;
Mary Anne Glascott grew up in these military cantonments in the Bombay region and married, in her turn, a soldier by the name of Thomas Edwards, to whom she had two daughters (one of whom was to become Anna Leonowens). However, it was not long before she too was left a widow while probably still in her teens. She married again very quickly in 1832 to an Irish solider, Patrick Donohoe, and they went on to have a large family together. They moved around a great deal with his work managing the building of roads with the Corps of Engineers, but by the time he died in 1864 they were well established in Poona (modern Pune, in-land from Mumbai) and relatively prosperous.
The children resulting from this marriage would have been classed as Anglo-Indian (or sometimes also called Eurasian) as their mother was a “half-caste” and “India-born” and so very clearly not English. Over time, the numerous off-spring of these wide-spread marriages went on to form a huge class of technical and middle management citizens who (though they could never become the CEOs of the nation) were the industrious founders and workers in the institutions of the railways, medicine and teaching throughout India. Anglo-Indians were fiercely proud of their “Englishness” and aspired to be more “English than the English” themselves – with their English language skills and education, Christian religion and English habits they served as the ideal instrument of the ruling class British and could, in many ways, be said to have built modern India.
However, by the time of the British Raj (the British government took over the administration of India in the 1850s) Victorian racism was on the rise and it was common for families to distance themselves from any predecessors who were anything other than “white”. Anna Leonowens (whose life and work inspired
the novel Anna and the King of Siam and the musical The King and I as well as more recent movies) strongly disassociated herself from any Indian legacy and went to great lengths to establish her utmost Englishness in her career and in her writing - although it seems she was born and raised in Pune along with the rest of the family and never set foot in England! She maintained this stance throughout her long life and is said to have attributed her darker complexion to her Welsh ancestry. Two recent biographies of Anna both develop extensive documentation of her birth and life in India and establish the probability that her grandmother, the unknown woman who set up home with William Vaudrey Glascott, was indeed most likely to have been an Indian or part Indian woman (see references).
So how is it that we can be sure, at this great distance of time and culture, that William really did marry a woman of Indian origin when no one in the family has ever gone on record as acknowledging this heritage? Would it be possible to use her numerous descendants to prove her existence? It was with this question in mind that we began a quest to see if it was possible to find some living relative who still carried her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) down those two hundred years and 7 generations…..
Mitochondrial DNA;
Mitochondrial DNA is a particular from of DNA we each acquire from our mothers and can only be passed on by women, remaining very stable and unchanged over quite vast periods of time. With this knowledge it became apparent that if we could follow an unbroken female line of daughters from this unrecorded woman right down to the present day then we could examine that current mtDNA and it would be identical to hers.
And so the hunt began to try and expand the family tree to see if such a line did in fact exist. My own mtDNA, as well as that of all my known first cousins, was of no use as we are the descendants of x2 generations of men in this genetic line (Philip and Thomas Arthur Savage being the descendants of Mary Anne’s third daughter Ellen Jane). Mary Anne had a number of daughters but only the two from her first marriage to Thomas Edwards seemed to have had daughters themselves – Anna Harriet, who became Anna Leonowens, and Eliza Julia who married Sgt Major James Millard. We currently have no contact with the Leonowens line who are in North America and Germany and unfortunately the extensive and well-documented connections with the Millard line are all through a male ancestor also. In order to carry this mystery woman’s mtDNA, the person had to be a daughter’s daughter’s daughter in an unbroken line back to this non-European woman through Mary Anne. So, we were unaware of the existence of any such female descendant and were confronted only with dead-ends on the family tree as we knew it.
Footnote: The Pratt branch of the Millard descendants may well carry an uninterrupted daughter to daughter link but this line, which includes the famous actor Boris Karloff, is in America and we do not have contact with them either at this time
A New Cousin;
With much internet sleuthing and some very good luck it was near the end of 2014 that we finally managed to track down an unknown third cousin who appeared to carry this particular unbroken female line of DNA – and she turned out to have been living in NZ all along! And so we were introduced to Roslin, who lives in Dunedin (South Island of NZ), and discovered how our two different branches of the family had been living in the same country for 3 generations without any knowledge of each other.
Roslin and her sisters are the x6 granddaughters of the unidentified non-European woman whose daughter was Mary Anne Glascott. Mary Anne’s daughter was Ellen Jane Donohoe (from Mary Anne’s second marriage to Patrick Donohoe) and Ellen was, in turn, the mother of Thomas Arthur Savage (the Bombay headmaster from whom I and all my numerous NZ cousins are descended). Ellen Jane went on to have a number of other children from her second marriage to George Augustus Savage and one of them was Roslin’s great grandmother Ellen Sarah. Ellen Sarah’s daughter was Doris Ellen and her daughter was Jean who met a NZ airman in England and came to New Zealand with him after World War 2, where Roslin and her siblings were born.
A simple cheek swab of Roslin’s DNA was all that it finally took to put us in touch with this mystery ancestor whose identity and existence had for so long been forgotten within our family.
Asian Origins;
With this mitochondrial DNA, preserved through the female ancestral line, we have been able to prove that this unnamed grandmother of so many of us was most likely of Asian origin. The strongest possibility that these mtDNA results suggest is that this ancestor was from the region which is now Central India or the border area between India and Pakistan – all of this region, including the vast majority of modern Pakistan, was ruled over by the East India Company at this time and corresponds to the administrative area that later, in British Raj times, became known as the Bombay Presidency.
Below is a summary of the results from the DNA test. If you are interested in looking at the family tree and the profiles it contains you can search these names on www.Geni.com and if you would like to add yourself and your family to the tree or add details or edit what we already have there you can be joined up by email. The site uses a free, open, sharing model that relies on everyone contributing and helping each other.
This Female Relative has tested the HVR-1 and HVR-2 regions of her mtDNA and has not tested the Coding Region. Based on the sequencing results of the mtDNA HVR-1 and HVR2 regions, the top 4 predicted mtDNA haplogroups for Roslin are as follows:
Click on image to expand it:
From these results Genebase is able to predict which haplogroup you belong to. This haplogroup can tell you where your female ancestors originated, migrated and settled. Each modern population has a mixture of haplogroups in their population. The strongest prediction is R haplogroup.
Click on image to expand it:
Click on image to expand it:
Modern Populations;
Various studies on indigenous groups around the world allow you to compare your mtDNA to hundreds of others. The highest matches give the best prediction for what modern indigenous group you are most closely related to and could be the source of your mtDNA.
Various studies on indigenous groups around the world allow you to compare your mtDNA to hundreds of others. The highest matches give the best prediction for what modern indigenous group you are most closely related to and could be the source of your mtDNA.
As you can see the RMI of Pakistani is much higher than Yemeni. This means the mtDNA is 8.5 times more likely to have originated from Pakistani population than Yemeni. And 10 times more likely than Rhone.
As you can also see from the summary of the mtDNA Haplogroup box, the connection to R haplogroup is classified as “weak” – however it remains the most likely of the 4 possible connections and H, U and P are all subgroups derived, historically, from R and scattered in genetic populations around Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
More to Learn;
It is our hope that in the further more tests may be done to reveal other ethnic or regional details and now that we have made contact with this direct line of daughters from our mystery ancestor we may be able to update this information and so add more details to the story of our family in India.
Post Script: We would like to thank our third cousin Roslin for making this research possible and for her generous support throughout this long process. It has been delightful to talk with her and learn about her branch of the family and we are very happy that this project has seen the re-connection of far-flung members of this lineage who were separated when the majority of the family left India.
We would also like to acknowledge the inspiration that all the amazing work Sally, Frances and John Buckler have done over the years has been to us. We would like to sincerely thank them for all their decades of tireless collating, researching and preserving our precious family history.
Thanks also for the cheerful assistance and guidance of our honorary family member and genealogy “guru” Keith Millard (in Canada).
References: Bombay Anna by Susan Morgan 2008, Masked by Alfred Habegger 2014
Mary Anne Glascott Descendants Fan Chart:
The following is a 7 generation descendants fan chart for Mary Anne Glascott, based on the information currently available in the family tree at Geni.com (as at October 2015). Each generation is shown in a different colour. Note that family members in Geni that are shown as Private do not have any information in the chart.
Click on image to enlarge:
The following is a 7 generation descendants fan chart for Mary Anne Glascott, based on the information currently available in the family tree at Geni.com (as at October 2015). Each generation is shown in a different colour. Note that family members in Geni that are shown as Private do not have any information in the chart.
Click on image to enlarge:
Quick Link: mtDNA of a Mystery Ancestor