How do you find clues when you don't know what you're looking for?


I'm on the trail of my mysterious grandmother, Christine Cambridge, who was adopted by Daniel and Sandys Rann in Birmingham but never knew her birth parents. We'd always thought Christine must have been related to the Ranns, but there was no DNA evidence to prove it.

This didn't necessarily mean we weren't related to them -- it could be that the Ranns had no descendants or their descendants weren't interested in family history or they'd uploaded their DNA to other databases. But it did mean that I couldn't prove the connection.

Ok, but Christine must have had two parents, right? So maybe I could find the other one. Wouldn't that be a thing? 

On the strength of this thought, I embarked on a phase of pointless clicking and frowning while I looked at the family trees of people with shared DNA and tried to figure out how we were connected with them. Were they connected to the Ranns? Did their ancestors live in Birmingham? 

There were two main problems:

  1. The 1880s is about four or five generations ago, which is a LOT of ancestors to sift through for each DNA match
  2. How was I supposed to spot our shared ancestor if I didn't know who they were? 

I'd pretty well given up when I realised what was actually blindingly obvious. I didn't need to compare the family trees of our DNA matches with our family tree -- I needed to compare them with each other. I already had DNA matches to confirm all our other ancestral lines in that period, so if two of the people I was getting DNA matches with had ancestors in common, and if those shared ancestors weren't already on my family tree, the connection was likely to be through Christine. 

In a state of genealogical excitement, I started looking for names that turned up in more than one family tree, and there was one that caught my eye.  John Fleetwood Bond was all over the place in the family trees of people our DNA matched with. He was born in 1911, so he couldn't be Christine's ancestor (she was born in about 1881), but  I started seeing Bonds everywhere at this point, so I went back another generation to John F. Bond's father. John Lincoln Fleetwood Bond was born in 1869. He could, just about, have been Christine's father, but it seemed worth going back another generation.

And that's when I first met the Rev. Alfred Bond and his wife, Georgianna Eliza, of the parish of Freston in Suffolk. We're talking full-on Victorian vicar, and for someone whose ancestors were all agricultural labourers and factory workers, that seemed incredible enough.


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Comments

  1. Julie Coleman27 April 2024 at 06:16

    The next instalment is here:

    https://mysteriousgrandmother.blogspot.com/2023/06/and-that-was-when-i-met-my-great-great.html

    ReplyDelete

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