The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

This is the story of my mysterious grandmother,   Christine Cambridge ,  who was born in about 1881 and  adopted by Daniel and Sandys Rann in Birmingham. Christine never knew her birth parents, but  DNA evidence  proves that she was the grandchild of Alfred and Georgianna Eliza Bond of Freston in Suffolk . Alfred received a comfortable income as Rector of Freston, but he was also a substantial landowner in his own right, and seems to have enjoyed the pleasures of a country squire without suffering too much inconvenience at the hands of his parishioners. Georgianna's parents, Joseph Sidney Tharp and Anna Maria Gent, will have provided her with a generous marriage portion, invested to generate an annual income, and she also inherited big wodge of cash from her uncle,  George William Gent of Moyns Park . Georgianna's grave in Freston Despite all of this, in March 1878, local newspapers reported that Alfred's creditors had arranged a meeting to determine whether or not he shoul

The DNA matches confirmed that we were directly descended from the Reverend Alfred Bond and his wife, Georgianna Eliza Tharp . There's more sciency detail available if you want it, and you can click on their names to look at photos in the National Portrait Gallery collection. The photos show an affluent, confident couple who'd been married for eleven years and, by that date, had six children. They'd go on to have another three, so there were plenty of candidates for the transmission of their genetic material to Christine Cambridge . I haven't been able to confirm which one was her parent for certain, but my money is currently on their fourth son,  Gerald Gordon Bond . Future DNA matches could disprove my hunch. Alfred was the youngest of eight children of John Bond (1789-1831) and Emily Dixon (1789-1867). His older brother, John Theodore Bond (1812-1841) died young, leaving the only remaining son to inherit the lion's share of their father's estate. And what a

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: The