Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lynn, George
LYNN, GEORGE, the elder (1676–1742), astronomer and antiquary, born at Southwick House, near Oundle, Northamptonshire, in 1676, was son of George Lynn (d. 1681, aged 34), lord of the manor of Southwick, by his wife, Mary, eldest daughter of Walter Johnston of Spalding. His youngest brother Walter is separately noticed. He made observations of the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites at Southwick, 1724–6 and 1730–5, with a thirteen-foot telescope, and laid his results before the Royal Society (Phil. Trans. xxxiv. 66, xxxix. 196), as well as an account of the aurora borealis of 8 Oct. 1726 (ib. xxxiv. 253). In 1727 he proposed to the society ‘A Method of Determining Longitude from Falling Stars’ (ib. xxxv. 351), which was revived later by Benzenberg. Meteorological registers kept by him during fourteen years were communicated to the same body in 1740 (ib. xl. 686). His observation of twenty-one sunspots on 21 July 1736 obtained no public record (Stukeley, Memoirs, i. 432). He became in 1719 a member of the Spalding Society, to which he presented an extensive table of logarithms compiled by himself, and he joined William Stukeley [q. v.] in founding the Brazen-Nose Society at Stamford in 1736. About the same time he discovered at Cotterstock, within a mile of his residence, the tesselated pavement of a Roman villa, and his drawing of it was engraved by Vertue for the Society of Antiquaries. By his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. Humfrey Bellamy of London, he had two daughters and a son, George, who shared his antiquarian tastes, and has sometimes been confounded with him.
George Lynn the younger (1707–1758) was a barrister of the Inner Temple, and joined the Spalding Society in 1723 and the Society of Antiquaries in 1726. He married, in August 1734, a daughter of Sir Edward Bellamy, lord mayor of London in 1735 (Gent. Mag. 1735, 451), and through her became possessed of the manor of Frinton in Essex. He died on 16 May 1758, and was succeeded in the lordship of Southwick by a distant relative, who took the name of Lynn, and the estate, owned by the family since 1486, passed by marriage to Mr. George Capron in 1841. On his death, in 1758, a handsome monument by Roubiliac was erected to him in the parish church of Southwick.
[Memoirs of William Stukeley, M.D. (Surtees Soc.), 1882, i. 427, iii. 38, 49; Bridges's Hist. of Northamptonshire (Whalley), ii. 469, 472; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. vi. 72, 116; Reliquiæ Galleanæ, pp. 57, 64; Wolf's Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 699; Whellan's Hist. and Gazetteer of Northamptonshire, 1849, p. 743; Watt's Bibl. Brit.; The Genealogist, i. 353–4.]
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.187
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
| Page | Col. | Line | |
| 343 | i | 10 f.e. | Lynn, George, the elder: for Roubillac read Roubiliac |