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Note: N56A
Note: Corporal 16421 Grenadier Guards
It has always been thought that Charles Brown�s mother was Spanish. This was confirmed to me by Graham (Alex) Ash the grandson of Verbena Brown, the sister of Charles Brown. He, like, me has Rhesus negative blood group O. It is known that blood groups are inherited.
However, the Spanish line has been difficult to ascertain. We know his mother was Alma Odessa Kempthorne born in Cornwall. I have traced her parentage back to her grandfather Mark Kempthorne, b 1805 in Cornwall.
the following is taken from The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes
pp 57-61..................After the Second World War Arthur Mourant took over as compiler of blood group data from around the world. He then met R.A. Fisher, the most influential geneticist of his day, who had been working out the genetics of the new blood groups which were being discovered, and he had become fascinated by the particularly convoluted inheritance of one of them - the Rhesus blood group. This new group had been discovered by Karl Landsteiner and his colleague Alexander Wiener in 1940 after they mixed human blood with the blood of rabbits that had themselves been injected with cells of the Rhesus monkey. Fisher had come up with a complicated theory to account for the way in which the different sub- types within the group were passed down from parents to their children.
........ Arthur Mourant had discovered a large family of 12 siblings which provided the practical proof of his theory.
........ While the rest of the world is predominantly Rhesus positive, Europe stands out as having a very nearly equal frequency of both types. Mourant found that French and Spanish Basques had a very high frequency of Rhesus negative blood, in fact, the highest in the world.
Bauduer, Frederic "The Basques: Review of Population Genetics and Mendelian Disorders"
Human Biology - Volume 77, Number 5, October 2005, pp. 619-637
Wayne State University Press
Abstract
The Basques live at the western end of the Pyrenees along the Atlantic Ocean and are thought to represent the descendants of a pre-Neolithic people. They demonstrate marked specificities regarding language and genetics among the European populations. We review the published data on the population genetics and Mendelian disorders of the Basques. An atypical distribution in some blood group polymorphisms (ABO, Rhesus, and Duffy) was first found in this population. Subsequently, additional characteristics have been described with regard to proteins (enzymes and immunoglobulins) and the HLA system. The advent of molecular biology methods in the 1990s allowed further insights into Basque population genetics based mainly on Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. In addition, the Basques demonstrate peculiarities regarding the distribution of various inherited diseases (i.e., unusual frequencies or founding effects). Taken together, these data support the idea of an ancient and still relatively unmixed population subjected to genetic drift.
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