The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

Theodore Augustus Tharp (1844-1915) was the son of the Reverend Augustus James Tharp (Georgianna's uncle) and of Juliet Bond (Alfred's sister). By 1861, he was in the Addiscombe Military Seminary and he was a lieutenant with the 104th Regiment of Foot (Bengal Fusiliers) in Ireland by 1867. Although he certainly also served in India before he retired in 1872, Theodore found the time to entertain his father's parishioners with comic songs and readings on more than one occasion. Theodore returned from India in 1870 (see clipping from the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal on the 16th of April) and he married Margaret Annabel Black Spence in 1872. The couple had five sons: Eden Arthur Augustus George Tharp (b. 1873), John Montagu Emile Sidney Tharp (b. 1875), Julian Augustus Tharp (born and died 1875), Charles Julian Theodore Tharp (b. 1878) and Stuart Norman Frederick James Tharp (b. 1880). I'll come back to his family life later. After leaving the army, Theodore turned his

Content Warning: Suicide We're on the trail of the mysterious grandmother, Christine Cambridge . She was adopted by Daniel and Sandys Rann in Birmingham but never knew her birth parents . Within our family, we'd always thought Christine must have been related to the Ranns, and there were two main candidates: their daughter Caroline and Daniel's sister Annie. Caroline and Annie seem to have been quite a team. In 1881, around the time Christine was been conceived, the 14-year-old niece and 40-year-old aunt were living on Church Street in Birmingham. They had a maid but no visible means of support. You can draw your own conclusions. Annie claimed to be unmarried on this census and she repeated the lie when she married a brewer called Charles Davis in 1883. Annie's first husband, a chandelier-maker called Thomas Jones  (d. 1878) must have slipped her mind.  At the time of the next census in 1891, Caroline and Annie (widowed again) were running the Waverley Hotel on New Meet

My mum's grandmother, Christine Winifred Cambridge , didn't have a birth certificate. It was the law that births should be registered and there was a large fine to pay if you didn't, but I can't find any record for Christine. She didn't acquire her surname until later, but no Christine Winifreds were registered as having been born on the date she claimed as her birthday, the 20th of November 1881. None were registered that year, in fact, or five years on either side of it, not anywhere in the United Kingdom. Christine might have been mistaken about her date of birth, but could she have been more than five years out? When her age was estimated as 9, could she actually have been younger than 4 or older than 14? Unlikely. If Christine had been abandoned as a baby, whoever gave her the name Christine would have registered her as a foundling with that name.  So, either Christine's birth wasn't registered at all, or it was registered in another name. If I found Ch

She was actually my mum's grandmother, and her name was Christine Cambridge. The mystery is that she never knew who her parents were. Naturally, she told stories, but her grandchildren took them with a pinch of salt.  The problem was that Christine wasn't particularly nice. When her husband died, she made her children promise they wouldn't get married and leave her. When they inevitably did, they had to make it up to her by giving her money every week. None of them realised the others were too -- Christine was living in (relative) luxury while they were struggling to make ends meet.  To the end of her life, my Nanna used to keep tins and packets of food in her bedroom (which, ok, is weird). She started doing it when she came out of hospital after a serious operation and was recuperating upstairs. Her mother-in-law, Christine, would come round 'to help', and instead help herself to anything she fancied from the kitchen. The pattern in these stories is that Christine