Prince William's Roots in India
The British and Indian media trumpeted the news recently: Prince William, the heir to the British throne, is carrying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that links him to an ancestor who lived in India. His great, great, great, great, great grandmother was a woman named Eliza Kewark who lived in Surat, Gurajat. She was the housekeeper of Theodore Forbes, a Scottish merchant, and had some children with him, including Katharine Scott Forbes, the great, great, great grandmother of Lady Diana, Prince William’s late mother. Kewark was Indian-Armenian—her genetic heritage through her mother was Indian, leading author Patrick French to conclude that Prince William, future King of England, is (drum roll, please) 1/256th Indian. And now, of course, it’s up to the Indian High Commissioner to the U.K., Dr. J. Bhagwati, to put in a request that Prince William spend 1/256th of his time in India, if only to give the Indian and British media more to write about. A winter vacation house in Surat, perhaps?
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