A question without an answer
In 1967, on my first day at school in England, a teacher asked me what my ethnicity was. I was thirteen, newly arrived from Mauritius. I said I was from the General Population. She replied: That's not an ethnicity.
She was right, in a way. "General Population" is the Mauritian census category for those who do not identify as Hindu, Muslim, or Sino-Mauritian. It is a bureaucratic residual, an identity defined by what it is not. But what it contains is one of the most complex and remarkable stories of human mixing in the world: African, Malagasy, Indian, European, and Southeast Asian ancestry, layered across four centuries of colonisation, slavery, indenture, and survival.
I did not know any of that at thirteen. It has taken sixty years of curiosity and the convergence of four different disciplines to begin to piece the answer together.
Four strands, one story
No single discipline could answer the question. Genealogy could trace the family tree, but not explain where the ancestors came from. DNA analysis could reveal the continental origins, but not the historical circumstances that brought those populations together. The history of Mauritius could explain the circumstances, but not the deeper question of how Malagasy people, carrying Austronesian heritage from Borneo, came to be in the Indian Ocean at all. And language anthropology, tracing the Austronesian expansion through cognate words across twenty languages, could answer that deepest question but needed the other three to connect it to a single family on a single island.
This site weaves the four strands together. Each can be read independently, but the connections between them (a DNA segment that corresponds to a wave of historical migration, a surname that reveals a system of slave naming, a word in Mauritian Creole that traces back to Borneo) are where the real story emerges.
The research
The genealogical research draws on civil and church records in Mauritius, colonial archives at the National Archives at Kew and the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, the UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, and online genealogy platforms, principally Ancestry, with additional leads from MyHeritage. The family tree has been traced back to Pierre Jerome, born into slavery around 1798 and freed in 1812, aged fourteen and a half, by Jean-Pierre Galichet, most likely his biological father.
The DNA analysis is based on tests of three siblings, two through AncestryDNA and one through 23andMe, together with ancestry breakdowns from two paternal first cousins tested by Ancestry. AncestryDNA provided phasing to separate maternal and paternal inheritance. Further phasing work is underway using a full genome sequence from Full Genomes Corporation. The Y-chromosome haplogroup R-S219 traces the paternal line to Leinster, Ireland, around 300 AD; the mitochondrial haplogroup M2b traces the maternal line to the Dravidian peoples of South India.
The historical strand draws on published scholarship on Mauritius, from the Dutch settlement in 1598 through French colonisation, slavery, British rule, abolition, Indian indenture, and independence, as well as primary sources including manumission records, slave compensation records, and colonial correspondence.
The language anthropology strand builds on the work of Otto Christian Dahl, who demonstrated the connection between Malagasy and the Ma'anyan language of southern Borneo, and subsequent research into the Austronesian expansion and its relationship to the peopling of Madagascar.
The BMI lecture
This research was presented as a lecture at the Birmingham & Midland Institute, where it was well received by an audience of academic colleagues and members. The lecture traced the same four-strand narrative that structures this site, beginning with the question of ethnicity and moving through genealogy, DNA evidence, colonial history, and the Austronesian language connection.
Following the lecture, a professor encouraged me to write a book on the subject. This site is, in part, a response to that encouragement: an attempt to present the research in an interactive form that allows visitors to explore the connections between the four strands for themselves, rather than following a single linear narrative.
About the author
I was born in Mauritius in 1953 and came to England in 1967, arriving in London at thirteen, the same year as the "General Population" exchange this page opens with.
My working life has been in science and technology rather than academia: a degree in Pharmacology was the only qualification I held when I started work. A second degree, in Applied Computing, and later a master's in Computer Science and a postgraduate certificate in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, all followed part-time alongside my career. I am a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the British Computer Society. I started out at the Department of Health and Social Security, first in supplementary benefits and later in information technology, as the department adopted computerisation. From there I moved into data engineering and IT at NatWest Bank, then worked as an independent IT consultant, before forming my own company supplying IT and database services to banking and financial firms in the City of London.
Alongside that career, I spent thirteen of the twenty years between 1994 and 2014 as an elected councillor on the London Borough of Sutton, including a year as Mayor in 2011–2012, and stood as the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Croydon North in 2010 and for Birmingham Perry Barr in 2019.
The question of identity and origins, first raised by that teacher in 1967, ran underneath all of it: a working life spent in engineering, banking, and public service, and a private, decades-long pursuit of the family history recorded on this site.
I am married, with three grown-up children and five grandchildren, the latest generation of the family whose deeper origins this site sets out to trace.
The personal stake in this research is not incidental: it is the driving force. The rigour is in service of a deeply personal question: who were we, and how did we come to be?
A note on methodology
This is not a peer-reviewed academic publication. It is original research by a non-specialist, drawing on publicly available records, commercial DNA testing, and published scholarship. I have tried to be rigorous in distinguishing between what the evidence shows and what I infer from it. Where the historical or genetic record is ambiguous, as it frequently is for enslaved people whose names were changed, whose families were separated, and whose stories were not thought worth recording, I have said so.
Corrections, additional information, and scholarly perspectives are welcome, at contact@rootsacrossoceans.mu. This site is a living document and will be updated as new evidence emerges or errors are identified.
For the full detail behind that rigour, the archives visited in person and consulted online across three countries, and the statistical method connecting the DNA evidence to the family tree, see the Methodology page.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Birmingham & Midland Institute for the opportunity to present this research; to the academic colleagues who attended and whose encouragement shaped the decision to develop this site; to the archivists in Mauritius, at the National Archives at Kew, and at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence; to the UCL Department of History for maintaining the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database; to my son Pascal who set me going with a prototype of this website; to my daughter Issy for her useful editorial suggestions; to my sister Joyce for sharing recollections of her coversations with my late mother and to my siblings Gervais and Shirley, and my late mother Angela, whose DNA made the ancestral analysis possible.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Brown, my teacher and mentor, who became a lifelong friend to my family and who told me at the age of 13 that General Population was not an ethnicity.