Amelia Gertrude Wombwell and Jacob Valentine

The Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London.
It has been holding services for over 300 years.

Amelia Gertrude Wombwell, the daughter of George Wombwell junior and Elizabeth Adella Cresey married Jacob Valentine, a tailor, in July 1894. Jacob was born in Bishopsgate in 1861, the son of Benjamin Valentine and Esther Hartell. 

These names cannot help but arouse some curiosity, and some further investigation reveals that Benjamin and Esther were married in 1847 at the Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London. 

Benjamin was the son of Emanuel (de Moses) Henriques Valentine (1769–1824) and Leah Rodrigues (1770-1844).  This  line of Valentines, were all born in London and married, generation by generation, at the Bevis Marks synagogue. The origins of the Valentine family in London are explored in considerable detail on the website of Ian Handricks.

So, George Wombwell junior's first daughter, to summarise all this, married Herbert Sowerby, a Protestant missionary to China. His second daughter, Amelia Gertrude Wombwell then married a Sephardic Jew from a family who would have escaped from the Spanish inquisition and made their way, hook or crook, to London, there to make their way within the growing Jewish community of the City.

The marriage of Amelia Gertrude Wombwell and Jacob Valentine took place in 1894, the very same year when Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell terminated their involvement with the Protestant Episcopal Mission in China. 

Should Ann Fanny then have returned to England, as seems likely, along with Herbert Sowerby, it would have been to discover that her half-sister had now wedded into the Sephardic Jewish community of London. Along with the treatment they had suffered at the hands of certain members of their own Mission whilst striving to convert the Chinese to the true path of Christianity, it must have been yet another blow to discover that her perennially unreliable father had now succeeded in allowing her half-sister to marry into another faith entirely. Appalled? Disgusted? Scandalized? We have no idea.