What links one of the largest industrial fortunes of the eighteenth century – a fortune made in a glass factory in the wilds of northern Portugal – with the Lynford Estate in Norfolk and the building of a church in Cambridge at a cost (in to-day's values) of almost five million pounds?
The Society's speaker on May 18th, 2006 will be Jenifer Roberts who is not the first person to have heard the legend of a vast family fortune which melted away down the centuries but, perhaps, is the first to have written a fascinating book about her researches.
Her talk will follow the fortune through several generations of two families, Lyne and Stephens, who combined their names and coats of arms in 1828. It is a true story of rags to riches: how the illegitimate son of a servant girl became the richest industrialist in Europe; how, in the next generation, the son of a Cornish clergyman became the richest commoner in England and how, sixty years later, a French ballerina provided the funds of almost five million pounds (in to-day's values) to build the Catholic Church in Cambridge.
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Cambridge University Heraldic and Genealogical Society