Authors: Deirdre Savage & Stefan Mroczek - New Zealand
2015 is a year that marks 200 years since our English forefather, soldier William Vaudrey Glascott, and a mystery female ancestor gave birth to their daughter Mary Anne Glascott near Bombay – and so began the Indian/British chapter of the family from which we all descend.
Over the past year my son, Stefan Mroczek, and I have been enjoying expanding and documenting (on the Geni website) the family tree of my grandfather Philip Savage during the 7 generations that the family lived in India. He was the great grandson of Mary Anne Glascott (through her daughter Ellen from her second marriage to Patrick Donohoe) but the identity of Maryanne’s mother was unknown.
Both authors of two recent books relating to the subject (see references) had put forward a variety of evidence and speculated that she was of Indian heritage. And so I began a quest to see if it was possible to find some living relative who carried her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and so shed some light on the origins of this unrecorded woman.
It was near the end of 2014 that I finally managed to track down an unknown third cousin of ours who carries this particular unbroken female line of DNA* – and so I met Roslin, who lives in Dunedin (South Island of NZ) and who had also been trying to find out about this line of the family and who also had no idea our branch existed in New Zealand. Roslin’s great-grandmother was the half-sister of our great-grandfather, Thomas Arthur, the Bombay Headmaster.
She and her sisters are the x6 granddaughters of this “unidentified non-European woman” who records show paired-up with (there is no record of a marriage) our x6 grandfather, William Vaudrey Glascott, in the Bombay area around 1814. 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 is no longer remembered in our family.
So, with this mitochondrial DNA, preserved through the female ancestral line direct from this woman, we have been able to prove that this unnamed grandmother of us all was most likely of Asian origin. The strongest possibility that these mtDNA results suggest is that our 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.
It was as a soldier for the East India Company that William Vaudery Glascott came out to India from England on the Indiaman sailing ship Sir Stephen Lushington in 1810. The exact ethnicity of the local woman he “married” is not clear but she was certainly not from the UK.
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.
The resulting children were classed as Anglo-Indian (or sometimes also called Eurasian) and their off-spring went on to form a huge technical and middle management class of people who (though they could never become the CEOs of the nation) were the proud founders and workers in the institutions of the railways, medicine and teaching etc. 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.
This unknown local woman was also the grandmother of one of our better known relatives, 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). Although Anna disassociated herself from any Indian legacy and went to great lengths to establish her utmost Englishness throughout her life and in her writing it seems she was born and raised in Pune (Poona) along with the rest of our ancestors and never set foot in England! The two recent biographies of Anna both develop extensive documentation of her birth and life in India and establish the probability that her grandmother, our shared ancestor, was indeed most likely an Indian or part Indian woman (see references).
They also both agree that this unknown woman was left widowed at probably a very young age when her husband was killed in action on Qeshm (Kishme) Island in the Persian Gulf and her daughter, our x6 grandmother Mary Anne Glascott, was less than 4 years old. It appears that the English family (the Patriarch being a Methodist minister in Devon) of her deceased husband, William Vaudrey Glascott, knew nothing about this Indian liaison and she was left with at least one other daughter and a son to raise. How they all survived and the lives they lived in India are a mystery to us at this distance but we are living proof that they did survive and spread across the globe!
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 then contact me and we can join you up by email. The site uses a free, open, sharing model that relies on everyone contributing and helping each other.
*The mitochondrial DNA is passed on only through the female line of daughters so the reason that none of the rest of us in NZ are carriers of this woman’s mtDNA is because we are the descendants of x2 generations of men in this genetic line (Philip and Thomas Arthur Savage). The mtDNA of Philip’s female children is from their mother, who has no link back to India. To carry this mystery woman’s mtDNA the person must be a daughter’s daughter’s daughter in an unbroken line back to this non-European woman.
Our 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 HVR-2 regions, the top 4 predicted mtDNA haplogroups for Roslin are as follows:
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.
Ancient distribution;
By looking at markers in the DNA of indigenous populations the route of haplogroup R and its ancestor haplogroups can be traced back into Africa through the Middle East.
Modern Groups
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 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.
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
Link = Mystery Ancestor
2015 is a year that marks 200 years since our English forefather, soldier William Vaudrey Glascott, and a mystery female ancestor gave birth to their daughter Mary Anne Glascott near Bombay – and so began the Indian/British chapter of the family from which we all descend.
Over the past year my son, Stefan Mroczek, and I have been enjoying expanding and documenting (on the Geni website) the family tree of my grandfather Philip Savage during the 7 generations that the family lived in India. He was the great grandson of Mary Anne Glascott (through her daughter Ellen from her second marriage to Patrick Donohoe) but the identity of Maryanne’s mother was unknown.
Both authors of two recent books relating to the subject (see references) had put forward a variety of evidence and speculated that she was of Indian heritage. And so I began a quest to see if it was possible to find some living relative who carried her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and so shed some light on the origins of this unrecorded woman.
It was near the end of 2014 that I finally managed to track down an unknown third cousin of ours who carries this particular unbroken female line of DNA* – and so I met Roslin, who lives in Dunedin (South Island of NZ) and who had also been trying to find out about this line of the family and who also had no idea our branch existed in New Zealand. Roslin’s great-grandmother was the half-sister of our great-grandfather, Thomas Arthur, the Bombay Headmaster.
She and her sisters are the x6 granddaughters of this “unidentified non-European woman” who records show paired-up with (there is no record of a marriage) our x6 grandfather, William Vaudrey Glascott, in the Bombay area around 1814. 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 is no longer remembered in our family.
So, with this mitochondrial DNA, preserved through the female ancestral line direct from this woman, we have been able to prove that this unnamed grandmother of us all was most likely of Asian origin. The strongest possibility that these mtDNA results suggest is that our 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.
It was as a soldier for the East India Company that William Vaudery Glascott came out to India from England on the Indiaman sailing ship Sir Stephen Lushington in 1810. The exact ethnicity of the local woman he “married” is not clear but she was certainly not from the UK.
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.
The resulting children were classed as Anglo-Indian (or sometimes also called Eurasian) and their off-spring went on to form a huge technical and middle management class of people who (though they could never become the CEOs of the nation) were the proud founders and workers in the institutions of the railways, medicine and teaching etc. 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.
This unknown local woman was also the grandmother of one of our better known relatives, 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). Although Anna disassociated herself from any Indian legacy and went to great lengths to establish her utmost Englishness throughout her life and in her writing it seems she was born and raised in Pune (Poona) along with the rest of our ancestors and never set foot in England! The two recent biographies of Anna both develop extensive documentation of her birth and life in India and establish the probability that her grandmother, our shared ancestor, was indeed most likely an Indian or part Indian woman (see references).
They also both agree that this unknown woman was left widowed at probably a very young age when her husband was killed in action on Qeshm (Kishme) Island in the Persian Gulf and her daughter, our x6 grandmother Mary Anne Glascott, was less than 4 years old. It appears that the English family (the Patriarch being a Methodist minister in Devon) of her deceased husband, William Vaudrey Glascott, knew nothing about this Indian liaison and she was left with at least one other daughter and a son to raise. How they all survived and the lives they lived in India are a mystery to us at this distance but we are living proof that they did survive and spread across the globe!
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 then contact me and we can join you up by email. The site uses a free, open, sharing model that relies on everyone contributing and helping each other.
*The mitochondrial DNA is passed on only through the female line of daughters so the reason that none of the rest of us in NZ are carriers of this woman’s mtDNA is because we are the descendants of x2 generations of men in this genetic line (Philip and Thomas Arthur Savage). The mtDNA of Philip’s female children is from their mother, who has no link back to India. To carry this mystery woman’s mtDNA the person must be a daughter’s daughter’s daughter in an unbroken line back to this non-European woman.
Our 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 HVR-2 regions, the top 4 predicted mtDNA haplogroups for Roslin are as follows:
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.
Ancient distribution;
By looking at markers in the DNA of indigenous populations the route of haplogroup R and its ancestor haplogroups can be traced back into Africa through the Middle East.
Modern Groups
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 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.
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
Link = Mystery Ancestor