The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

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

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