[5] Her predecessor, Robert Somerville, upon his retirement on 1 July 2020 was given the honorary title of Tremaine Professor Emeritus of Religion.

[1] Ada's father Richard Lane Bampton, a spermaceti chandler[4][8] originally from Little Sutton, Warwickshire,[9] had left for the California Gold Rush on 25 January 1849 on one of the first schooners to depart New York City for San Francisco, the Roe,[2] which made the journey in 154 days.

[1][12] Instead, Ada grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn, living with her mother and her cousin Frederick Bampton,[1][4][13][14][15][16] with whom she was particularly close, calling him her uncle even to her husband.

[12][17] On 3 October 1888 in Manhattan she married Dr. William Allen Tremaine,[20] the son of a Connecticut hotelier,[21] a physician practicing in Providence, Rhode Island.

[22] Their only child, Frederick Bampton Tremaine, was born in Providence on 6 February 1890;[23] he died eleven months later, on 12 January 1891, of unspecified causes.

[31] Frederick, who had begun suffering from bouts of dementia,[1][12][31][32] had been living with Ada and William Tremaine for over a year.

[47] That final bequest seems to have been handled posthaste by the Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company, the executors of Ada's estate, as in the 1942 annual report to the Columbia trustees, President Nicholas Murray Butler announced that the university had finally received their funds from the estate of Ada B.