The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

Though I'm sure it wasn't amusing to his creditors, who ended up seriously out of pocket, I copyright National Portrait Gallery, London found the story of  Alfred Bond's bankruptcy  weirdly endearing. I was pleased that he found another wealthy wife and lived out his days in luxury.   Alfred's first wife, Georgianna Eliza Tharp, had the good sense to die shortly before his financial woes caught up with him. He'd been fortunate in that marriage too, because her family were very wealthy indeed. They lived on an estate called  Chippenham Park , near Newmarket. Unlike my other ancestors, who are sometimes only recorded in church records of their baptisms, marriages and burials, the Tharps are exceedingly well documented, and there are two reasons for this. One is that they were stinking rich -- they married into other wealthy families and made frequent appearances in the news and society pages of the papers. The second is that they were exceedingly litigious, and recor

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

When I saw that there were DNA matches with Alfred and Georgianna's ancestors on both sides, that seemed to be confirmation that they were direct ancestors to the mysterious grandmother, Christine Cambridge . The degrees of match would help determine how many generations there were between them, but she definitely had DNA from both of their birth families. How else could that be explained? It was a shock to my certainties when I realised that because Alfred's sister (Juliet Bond) had married Georgianna's uncle (Augustus James Tharp), that couple's children also had Bond and Tharp ancestors and therefore had DNA from both sides.  Three of their children could theoretically have been one of Christine's parents: Theodore Augustus Tharp (b. 1844), Arthur Keane Tharp (b. 1849) and Juliet Louisa Tharp (b. 1847). Another brother had died in infancy and the remaining sister, Agnes Laura Tharp (b. 1851), married in September 1881, making her an unlikely mother for Christine

Christine's birth date of about 1881 discounts a few of Alfred and Georgianna's children as possible parents, including the oldest son, Alfred, who died two years before she was born, the middle son, Frederic, who didn't survive infancy, and probably also the youngest son, John, who would only have been about twelve at the time. Although it's theoretically possible that he could have fathered a child at that age, it is highly unlikely. Several sisters were already married by the time Christine was born. The eldest, Anna had married Richard D'Olier George in 1873 and had four daughters by the time of Christine's birth. Georgiana married William Hanning Lee in 1877 and had had a daughter and two sons by the time Christine was born. Ethel married William Webster Watts in June 1881, five months before the date Christine claimed as her birthday. It seems pretty unlikely that any of them could have had a child adopted without her husband finding out. The youngest da

Here's a family tree for Alfred Bond and Georgianna Eliza Tharp. Based on their professions and where they lived, these people looked nothing like my other maternal ancestors, who were all agricultural labourers and factory workers in Warwickshire and Scotland. That alone suggested that they must belong to the unknown bit of my family tree: the ancestors of  Christine Cambridge . Since we have DNA matches to confirm all of the other ancestral lines, there is nowhere else where this family could sit. The letters in blue represent people whose DNA matches my mum's and her brother's. The alphabetical order would be much neater if new ones didn't keep coming in -- M and O are another two matches through John Dixon and Ann Blackett. The letters are next to the common ancestors in each case. DEFG and H are closer DNA matches, with Alfred and Georgianna as shared ancestors, making them 2nd and 3rd cousins. ABCIJKL and M have shared ancestors further back, making them 4th and 5