Family history has a habit of bowling you a googly from time to time. There I was, having one last rustle through the newspapers, and apart from a couple more funnies – Viscountess Mina’s apartment in Paris was apparently decorated like an exotic Turkish boudoir, with huge floor cushions in place of chairs, while the Stratford Advertiser claims Viscount Edgar enticed young women to his home by inviting them to come and play his pianos – I thought we were just about done.
And then I searched plain ‘Riboldi’. Hundreds of hits, of course, though mostly variations of the original story about my 2x great-aunt Catherine Mary’s adoption and the judicial hearings.
But in December 1882, the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent printed an intriguing piece headed ‘Startling windfall to a Lancashire mill operative’:
‘A young man named Joseph Riboldi, a self-actor minder at the Albion Mills, Farnworth, near Bolton, has just been the recipient of the gratifying intelligence that, together with a younger brother, he is entitled to the handsome fortune of two million francs. It appears that the father of the lads served in the Crimean war and, after his discharge, became a Custom House officer in London, dying in the city some time ago and leaving a widow with three sons and a daughter. The mother deserted her three eldest children while a French gentleman adopted the young girl and bequeathed to her the whole of his property. The young heiress entered a convent where she also died, leaving two million francs for her relations.