Ada Emily Theresa Amelia Theresa Howard

March 2017: The only reference I could find in the records to an 'Ada Emily (or Amelia) Theresa Mathey (or Matthee)' born in Bloemfontein was an 'Amalia Thesra Ada Mathey' which is the lead I have pursued to build the family tree above her.

Update March 2017: I found out she was born in Philipolis, Free State. Her maiden name is confirmed as Mathey.

October 2017: I have done a bit of research into the MtDNA profile that I've inherited from her (as have all my siblings) via my grandmother and mother. MtDNA is only passed through the female line, so I have not passed it onto my children, although my wife has passed hers onto them.

June 2018: Ada Amelia Theresa Howard's MtDNA haplogroup is M E1A1a. The M part of the profile (the oldest) is carried by almost all East Asian peoples and dates back to around 60 000 years BP - so highly likely this mutation happened around the time of the 2nd exodus of humans from Africa that turned eastwards and hugged the Arabian and Indian sub-continent coasts. Some eventually ended up migrating north into China and the rest continued onto Indonesia and eventually the Philippines and beyond. The subsequent mutations (E1A1a) took place after the original M mutation, and therefore allow us to geographically place the probable origin of the last mutation (A1a) and the migratory routes used. The E subclade it is thought arose either in Fujian, a region on the coast of Southern China, or in Taiwan. From there ended up in the islands of far east Asia and the Philippines through migration. The final mutation - the A1a part - took place in the Philippines.

Wiki has an entry for the E haplogroup [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_E_(mtDNA)], under which all the subclades (i.e. sub-group of a haplogroup) for the E group are detailed. The highest incidence of the E1A1a group is in the Philippines, so the conclusion is that this is where the last mutation (A1a) took place and that was about 8000 years ago.

Whether my maternal ancestral line was directly from the Philippines when they arrived in South Africa or somewhere else (e.g. Indonesia or Malaysia where there are small pockets of this same MtDNA profile) will probably never be known. The DNA data base on FamilyDNA (the DNA sequencing company I used) lists people who have the same MtDNA profile and they are from east Asia, (some in the USA, but there through migration) but mostly from the Philippines - i.e. it confirms the probable original location.

I will need to do some more research into the most likely route into South Africa. At this point I am guessing that my maternal ancestral line arrived in South Africa during the late 1600's or 1700's. Many slaves were imported into South Africa during this time, and I have genetic links to the Cape Coloured community. I confirmed this very easily by just picking a fellow South African with that ethnicity and Geni found that the last common ancestor was in the 1790's. The other possible route was that they arrived as the wife of one of the many Dutch traders. In this case, she would have taken on the husband's name and probably a European first name as well, erasing her east Asian cultural links. It was quite normal in those days for families across Asia to marry off daughters to traders and collect some sort of dowry in the process. Who knows? If this is the case, I can only hope she had a good life!

Andrew C. Russell