American woman could soon prove she's descended from Queen Victoria's 'love child' with DNA test

The DNA test which could prove whether American Angela Webb is the great, great granddaughter of Queen Victoria could take just “a few months” to provide an answer, according to an expert from Ancestry.

The theory that Angela could be directly descended from Victoria’s secret love child was put forward by historian Dr Fern Riddell in her recent Channel 4 documentary. Her argument chimes with Angela’s long-held belief - based on family folklore - that she and her sister are related to Victoria.

While it was previously thought that the process of finding suitable source material would be a long, slow process, genetic genealogist Laura House said she would take a different approach to the one used for the identification of Richard III, whose remains were found under a car park in Leicester in 2012.

“For Richard III they used his actual remains, which meant they were dealing with degraded, mitochondrial DNA,” she explained. “For that you need descendants from the maternal line - so someone who is the daughter’s daughter’s daughter.

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“But in a case like Angela’s, the best approach would be to use autosomal DNA. This divides with each generation, so 50% from your parents, 25% from your grandparents, 12.5% from great-grandparents and so on. This would work for Angela because, according to Dr Riddell’s hypothesis, Victoria is her great, great grandmother so Angela would be guaranteed to have inherited autosomal DNA, she’s five generations away so we’d expect her to have 6.25% DNA.”

In the Channel 4 programme, screened last month, Dr Riddell presented new evidence to suggest the rumoured long love affair between the monarch and her manservant, John Brown, was real. She also put forward a theory that their union could have produced Victoria’s tenth child, a girl named Mary-Ann. Angela, a care worker from Minnesota who knows that she has Scottish heritage, says she is keen to have the test to prove her lineage.

“I’d approach this the same way as I’d approach any of my other cases,” Ancestry’s Laura said. “The methodology is the same, whether the ancestor you are looking for is a labourer or a queen. We’re not specifically looking for Queen Victoria, we’re not looking for anyone, just for who Angela’s ancestors are.”

The Ancestry database contains 27million test-takers mostly from the US and Europe, making it the biggest in the world. Because of this, Laura believes there’s a good chance of Angela, 47, finding answers. “We’d expect Angela to have matches from every line of her family tree. The odds of her not having any are slim. Then you can target test people to prove it one way or the other. It would be very hard to approach the royal family, but I’d recommend instead going for whoever Mary-Ann Brown’s documented parents were and approaching their descendants.”

Laura said that if Angela’s matches were exclusively Aberdeen Scots, that would indicate that she was not descended from Victoria, but from John’s brother Hugh and his wife Jessie, who brought up Mary-Ann. “But if there are matches in the database who are very obviously descended from Queen Victoria’s ancestors, that would be compelling evidence that she is descended from Victoria.”

Laura said this type of research would take “a few months” in all likelihood. “It’s not a huge project, you’ve just got to go through every batch in the database. The average person from the British Isles has thousands of matches.”

She is quietly confident that answers can be found. “If Angela has matches from that part of her family tree then it should be possible to definitively confirm it, one way or the other. My job is to use DNA to resolve these sorts of family tree mysteries so I work on cases like this all the time. I think it would be fantastic and a great opportunity to raise awareness about what is possible in terms of genetic genealogy as an approach to really exciting historical studies - many people don’t realise this is an option”

Describing her role as “the best job in the world” she said that the basic Ancestry testing kit costs £79, making it affordable. “It makes me sad when people have these questions and think that there is no answer.”

Angela, 47, told the Mirror she plans to have the DNA test. “I'll let the scientists do the science,” she declared. “I'm a supporting character in this journey, and so I will follow wherever the story leads me. I'm totally open to it.”

And she is optimistic that the royal family will eventually have to accept the validity of her ancestry. “My gut says it's going to have to get acknowledged at some point,” she said. “Scandals are always very exciting so I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions for them to answer. I’d like them to acknowledge the truth of this love, to recognise that it wasn’t cool to cover up and destroy evidence of the relationship they shared.”

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