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The Prowse/Prouse family has a long and interesting history with connection with such people as Rollo the Viking, William the Conqueror, Eudo de Preaux. EUDO was Steward or Seneschal of William the Conqueror, William II & Henry I of England. Governor of Colchester. Built St. John's Abbey in that city. Great landowner in England & also owned the Castle of Preaux in Normandy. Large holdings in Cambridgeshire. Also in Beds., Essex, Herts. and Norfolk. John Prowse and his wife Joan Orchard had 10 children, seven boys and three girls. John was born about 1456 at Chagford, Devonshire, England. He married Joan Orchard from Somersetshire. This family and their ancestors can account for most of the Prowse families now living in Devon and Somerset in the U.K.
The advent of DNA testing brings new opportunities to connect families where the paper trail is missing. I have taken all the Y-DNA tests offered by Family TreeDNA. The results were surprising. My line of Prowses can trace back to the Middle Ages with connections with the houses of Wessex, Tudors, Lancasters, and Plantagenets. Members of Parliament, soldiers and sailors, captains of the fireships that defeated the Spanish Armada, World War I and II soldiers and airmen. A Prowse flew a Spitfire during the Battle of Britain. Several of the Surety Barons of the Magna Carta have connections to the Prowse family.
Many Prowse lines are at brick walls because the paper trail is either nonexistent or has not yet been discovered. The Y-DNA test has provide us with a marker that can prove Prowse connections and break through the brick wall that has stopped many in their genealogy research.
The results of my Big Y-DNA test tells us that at least 1,000 years ago a man had a massive deletion or mutation that has been passed on to his sons and their sons down to the present. My sons match my DNA perfectly. I started the Multiple Deletion Project at FTDNA as a place for others with the same mutation. At present we have 32 members. Interestingly, most of our members do not carry the surname Prowse. This means common ancestors offspring took other surnames for many different reasons, but we are all descendants of the man who had the mutation. Surnames associated with this DNA are Hicks, Gaskill, Richards, Lippincott, Johnson, Malicoat, Winters, and others. We must keep in mind that some of these surnames are the result of a child born out of wedlock and taking the name of his mother, or an orphan raised by a family with a different surname than his. This can be misleading. For example, many of the Hick surname with the mutation do not show a connection to the Hicks family DNA.
If you are a Prowse/Prouse researcher and have reached a dead end, consider taking a Y DNA test. At the minimum choose the Y-37 test. There are three others: Y-67, Y111, and the Big Y-700. The mutation first show up in the Y-37 test. The mutation shows itself as Zeros. The Y-37 test has six zeros, eight more for a total of 14 in the Y-67 test. If you take the Y-111 test and have this mutation five more are found for a total of 19. The least expensive test, the Y-37, has shown if you have the six zeros, your are 99% sure to have zeros in the other tests.
Now is the time for Prowse researches to make a huge contribution to Prowse genealogy. Future generations will look back on us and our dedication to finding out about our ancestors with appreciation.
If you have questions or information I would be happy to hear from you. My email address is RLProuse@mac.com