My great-great-grandmother from Tamil Nadu, says Virgin Founder Richard Branson

In an Instagram post, Virgin Group Founder & Billionaire Richard Branson revealed that his great-great-great grandmother hail from Tamil Nadu, India.

In an event to celebrate his airline Virgin Atlantic’s new route to the city, Branson posted a picture of himself sharing a stage with Anand Mahindra, unveiling that Virgin Atlantic’s newest flying icon was named Aria after his great-great-great grandmother.

“Great to be in India to celebrate @virginatlantic’s new route to Mumbai and join #AnandMahindra for our Business Is An Adventure event. We also unveiled our newest flying icon, named Aria, after my great great great grandfather’s wife,” Branson wrote.

According to Yahoo News, Branson said that he took a DNA test some years ago, which revealed that his great-great-great grandmother hailed from Tamil Nadu’s Cuddalore.

The Cuddalore district is in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Scholars believe the name Cuddalore is derived from the beach the town is famous for, which means ‘sea town’ in Tamil.

“I knew that I had past generations living in India, but haven’t realised how strong our connections were.

“So, it turned out that from 1793, we had four generations living here in Cuddalore and one of my great-great-great grandmothers were from Tamil Nadu named Aria, who was married to one of my great-great-great grandfathers,” Branson was quoted as saying.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.