Prince William recently took a DNA test with some surprising findings. Turns out the future king of England has Indian family-he is directly related to an Indian woman who was a housekeeper.
According to The Times of India, saliva samples from the Prince's relatives show he is a descendent of a woman named Eliza Kewark.
William-currently the duke of Cambridge and next in line for British kingship after his father Charles-preformed the tests through Britain's DNA, a genetic testing facility based in London. According to test officials there, William held a small amount of Eliza's mitochondrial DNA. This piece of DNA, known as mtDNA, is a small piece that is usually passed on from mother to child.
Eliza worked as a domestic servant for William's great-great-great-great-great grandfather Theodore Forbes. Forbes was a Scottish merchant who was employed by the East India Company in Surat. Together, they had a daughter named Katherine-it is by this maternal line that Prince William's mother Princess Diana and his brother Prince Harry have maintained the Indian DNA.
Eliza was reportedly born in 1790, and dwelled in India during the time that it was ruled by the East India Company. Some say that Eliza was of Armenian descent, because her last name is similar to the Armenian name Kevork.
According to Dr. Jim Wilson, genetics expert at the University of Edinburgh and head scientist at Britain's DNA, an Armenian living in Bombay caught his eye.
"I was wondering if it was possible that she was Indian," he told the Times of India. "What as an Armenian doing in Bombay? That's what got me interested."
Wilson used birth, marriage and death certificates to trace a few of Eliza's living family-third cousins to Diana's mother-and tested their saliva.
"This was independent evidence that there was Indian ancestry," Dr. Wilson said. "For me, it corroborated the findings from the mtDNA. We got two different kinds of genetic evidence that are independent of one another and they both corroborate the story. So it really seems that our future king has a little bit of Indian blood."
