Ginn family of Great Dunmow in Essex - Notes

 There was a Ginn family in Great Dunmow in Essex from the earliest recorded times, ie from the early 1500s.  Indeed, there are one or two recorded instances of them as witches or the victims of witchcraft in the 1500s.

But although there are lots of references of them right through to 1700 or thereabouts, the overwhelming evidence is that this family died out in the male line in Dunmow by 1712 or so.  Though the Great Waltham Ginn family sprang from them.

So the question has always been - who was the Edward Ginn who turned up in 1737 at Great Dunmow apparently a widower marrying an Elizabeth Smith there in that year.  To be honest, the only thing I am certain about on this, is that I am uncertain on this.  I have a theory, but that theory could be wrong and there is no evidence to point researchers in any particular direction.

He may, I repeat may, be the Edward Ginn from Braughing who was certainly alive in 1727 (see my post of  4th September 2012 on William Ginn of Braughing  in my blog on ginn-hertfordshire.blogspot.com ) but that would require certain information (principally burials of his first wife and first son John) to be missing in the records, and would equally rely on his first son Edward (there is no baptism for this Edward in Essex) being six years older that we would think.  So I may be trying to force a "fit", there may be another explanation.

What we know is that Edward Ginn of Great Dunmow had two sons, Edward and John (the latter died in infancy) and two daughters Elizabeth and Mary (Mary married Revnell Challis at Great Dunmow in 1770).  Edward senior died in 1746 - and that is it.

Edward junior (with whom this post is principally concerned) married Susannah Staines at Great Dunmow in 1764.  Ned was a Labourer.  He and Susan had seven children, Ned dying in 1819 with a quoted age of 88 (making him born in circa 1731).  Susan had died in 1815 with a quoted age of 73 which would have made her ten years younger than Ned.

The principal reason for this post is the children and, in particular, what I know of two of their sons

Ned and Susan had seven children as I say

Edward - the first died in infancy, the second married Elizabeth Abbot at Great Dunmow in 1803.  He is the ancestor of all the later Dunmow Ginns, including Ron Ginn with whom I have corresponded.

Mary - married Joseph Smith at Great Dunmow in 1789

Susannah - married John Green at Great Dunmow in 1792

Ann - married James Downham at Great Dunmow in 1797

Joseph - born in 1780.  He joined the West Essex Militia during the earlier years of the Napoleonic Wars.  Whilst in the Militia he married Elizabeth Gipson (likely a Great Dunmow girl) at Chelmsford in 1803.  No children are known.  I have known the following for years (so many I have discarded the notebooks) but he subsequently volunteered for the Regular Army from the Militia and when I did a sweep of the British Napoleonic era army death records (it took months) in the mid 1990s.I found that this man died in 1807 in the West Indies, likely of disease.  He was 27.

James- has been harder to trace than his brother Joe.  He was born in 1774.  In the 1790s he joined his brother Joseph in the West Essex Militia.  I knew that he got a lady called Ann pregnant in 1810 or so, as in 1811 she turned up at Great Dunmow having a daughter Jane , purporting to be the wife of James Ginn "soldier".  

There was no record (unlike Joe's) of Jim volunteering out of the West Essex Militia, and I could not find him for many years, and then in 2015 a record turned up which suggested that he had joined the 3rd Foot ("the Buffs") a fine infantry regiment.  I then accessed the muster records.

James Ginn joined the 3rd Foot on 1st May 1811 - he was taken into the 2nd Battalion and then transferred to the 1st Battalion (who had fought brilliantly and lost many men at Albuera on 16th May 1811 - below)  and went to Deal Fort in Kent. 

My suspicion is that he already had the early signs of consumption, ie tuberculosis.  He sailed for Portugal and Wellington's army, landed and the last record of him in the sun light is "on the march in Portalegre" which was and is a stronghold on the border near Badajoz in Spain where the 3rd had retired to rest and regroup after Albuera (below).  It was pretty much the last thing James saw.  He was taken into hospital some months afterwards and sadly died there on 13th August 1812 - he was 38. (WO12/2114 National Archives).  What happened to his daughter Jane is a mystery - I hope she lived.

Richard Ginn, Coachmaker of St Giles in the Fields London died 1743

Richard Ginn likely does not have any descendants, though I cannot rule it out.  But although I am not sure I would have liked the man, the fact is that he gives us an interesting story about what life was like for the journeyman craftsman in the London of the early 1700s. 

If we think of the early 1700s at all, we think of Pirates of the Caribbean and  Dick Turpin.  A somewhat romantic view.  The reality is told in Hogarth's engravings.  London in the period is realistically portrayed by him and by Ned Ward in his "The London Spy" of 1703.   

                                                 Night- by Hogarth

The real London of the period was one of narrow streets, alleys and courts with quaint names such as Cow-Piss Alley.  Filled with filth and disease and a population living on top of one another,  the inhabitants, of all classes, were very coarse - drinking, fighting, swearing, whoring and mostly dying well before their time if they survived infancy in the first place.  The poor, and there were plenty of those, were often stealing, breaking and entering, murdering and ending up having their necks stretched on Tyburn Hill.  Some as Ned Ward tells us, were attempting some escape, by lining up to be taken as indentured servants to the American Plantations - "white slaves" as Ned called them with contempt, signing up to a life of misery.  If you believe any of this to be exaggerated, then the story of Richard Ginn dispels any doubts.

Richard Ginn was born in about 1685, the actual baptism does not seem to have survived although it may simply not be online.  His parents were Richard and Elizabeth (nee Clark) his father being a Miller of Newmarket in Cambridgeshire.  There is a very slim chance that he connects to Hertfordshire (Richard and Ben Ginn/Genn of Ely having a haberdashery shop in Newmarket at the time he was born) but more likely he almost certainly connects to the Ginn family of nearby Burrough Green.

The records of the Coachmakers Company (Guild) of the City of London were totally destroyed in a German air raid in WW2, but by some miracle the apprenticeship records had been indexed, if not the records of those finishing their training and being admitted to the Company.

Richard Ginn was apprenticed for seven years to a Charles Moore of the Coachmakers Company  in 1700.  As the Company records do not survive I cannot find anything on Chas, but he obviously carried out his trade in central London.

Richard would have completed his apprenticeship and become a Freeman of the Company in 1707.  In that same year Richard married an Ann Kesdart (of foreign extraction I suspect) in a clandestine marriage at the Fleet.

Richard and Ann initially lived in Knaves Acre, St James Piccadilly, which Strype described in 1720 as "Knaves Acre or Poultney Street" which he thought long and narrow and "chiefly inhabited by those selling old goods, and glass bottles".

Richard and Ann had their three children there, either Ann was older or they somehow planned their family, because there were only ever three kids.

In the 1720s the couple moved to Parker's Lane in St Giles in the Fields.  We know this, because Richard tells us.  It was probably something to do with his employer (see below) being appointed the Royal Coachmaker in 1727.

Now, Strype called Parker's Lane long and narrow also, he did not consider it of much account - it ran off of Drury Lane and parallel to Great Queen Street.  I was astonished to discover it still does, it is now called Parker Street, how many, if any of the old buildings survive I have no idea.

Strype's view in 1720

Richard Ginn was working for a "Mr Birtworth" in the Old Bailey records as transcribed, the King's Coachmaker, but an Australian correspondent who read this post has kindly pointed out that Richard's employer was a Timothy Budworth, who was appointed the Royal Coachmaker in 1727, had his business in St Giles in the Fields and his premises in Parker's Lane no less.  Dick was obviously living by the works.  Budworth died in 1742 and a Richard Budworth, I assume his son, took over the business and continued the Royal connection.

In the January of 1730, Ann died.  She must have been about 50.  Scarcely a month elapsed  (to the obvious disgust of his son Tom)  when Richard remarried an Elizabeth Canis at St Giles, the church was being rebuilt at this time.

Tom Ginn was 13 and he went off the rails.  He was up before the Old Bailey - below

Tom got off, but he was obviously not a happy lad, the robbery was in February 1730,  his dad remarrying in March.  It is likely that the accused dropped the charges.

Whatever the reason, whatever the excuse, Richard Ginn packed his son off to the American colonies as we shall see below.

Richard and Elizabeth did not have any children and from the information we have Liz did not bring any with her from a previous marriage.  So by the end of 1730 there was just the two of them.

But Dick had a three storey house, I assume he owned it although the Land Tax records have maddeningly not survived for St Giles.  But it seems to have been a narrow but tall house.

They started to take in lodgers.  St Giles was apparently famous for it's lodging houses, gin shops and houses of ill repute ie brothels (of which more later) and Dick had two spare bedrooms.  By 1733 one was occupied by a Mr Oliver, a young chap, and later a Robert Jasper came to lodge (who shared both a room and a bed - this was common at the time) with Oliver.  Later, after 1740,  a Richard Baker came to stay.  He was a clerk at a Writing Office, apparently like a legal or solicitor's clerk, drawing up documents.  He clearly earned more than Oliver and Jasper, and had his own room two steps down the stairs from them.  So by 1741 we have three young chaps lodging with Dick and Liz.  Elizabeth did not cook for them, this was not a lodging house, like in the time of Dickens a century later, the lads would eat at the local  inns and pie shops.

Richard Baker was allegedly (he denied it but the jury did not believe him) a regular visitor to the house of a Mr South in Horsfords Alley nearby, the "White Horse"  alehouse in Drum Alley off of Drury Lane (his "local") and the "Coach and Horses" in Drury Lane.

He reputedly used to hang out with a bunch of Irish petty criminals and ruffians at the "White Horse" and pass some time at South's which was "a common receptacle for lewd women" and in the words of one Mary Swinney who was out of work and "lodged" there - "everybody is welcome to come for 3d a piece.."   A high class establishment then.  The Irish lads turned up at South's  every Thursday.

Now, the Irish gang associated with and were known criminals, and in February 1741, one Robert Rhodes, the Constable for St Giles attempted to arrest a chap called Robinson for an offence.  He had been looking for him for some time.  The Irish (ringleaders Molloy and Timms with perhaps a dozen others), and Dick Baker were at South's (it was a Thursday) and upon hearing of the attempted arrest of their mate the Irish picked up everything they could find, brooms, sticks, mops ("mop handed" rather than "mob handed" then) and rushed to Robinson's assistance.  Dick Baker was swept up in the rush.

They beat up Rhodes quite severely, freed Robinson and made a run for it.  Some of the Irish chose to rob Rhodes,  that was, literally, their fatal mistake.

Some of them were taken quite quickly and the ringleaders hanged after a quick trial.  It appears that they had been adventurers, travelling over the continent, in the army, petty crime - you name it.  They roamed  too far for any genealogist's liking !

Some of the Irish fled back to Ireland.  But they caught Dick Baker.  There were witnesses against him

Dick denied all and called various people in his defence.  Some for good character but nobody who could really convince anybody he was not there..  But he called Richard and Elizabeth Ginn for an alibi, together with Robert Jasper.  It was all a lie.  they may have felt sorry for him,  they scarcely knew him, he may have paid them.  I have no idea.

The Ginns claimed that Jasper had been ill for two weeks at the relevant time and that on the night in question Baker had looked after him and asked Liz about cooking Jasper some flounders - Bob cannot have been that ill then it seemed to me, or the jury.  Richard Ginn, who left home at 5.30 am and returned at 8.30 pm, six days a week apparently, said that nobody could have got out that night after 9, or indeed any night, because he locked up tight "for I could be killed as well as another man" at 9pm   and he had a "vermin" (dog) who let rip at anybody coming in or out (and we all know dogs like that).

The problem was that whilst Richard Ginn said that "his people" were always a abed at 9, Dick Baker's employer and his fellow clerk said that he often worked until midnight, sometimes through the night for an urgent job and his alibi was shot down in flames.

They sentenced him to death.  For nearly a month Richard Baker prepared to meet his maker and then the night before his execution at Tyburn -this happened.  Lucky lad.

Richard Ginn died in 1743, he was about 58 I would say.  He left a will (PCC - National Archives) leaving all to Elizabeth who married John Rolleston, a Confectioner, at the Fleet that same year.

     St Giles in the Fields

Richard and Ann had three children:

Richard - was born in 1708.  There is no record of an infant death, but that is not necessarily conclusive and there is no apprenticeship record which I would have expected..  There are two suspects for him in the records in later life, but though both married neither had issue.  Conclusive evidence linking one of them might turn up.

Ann - was born in 1711.There is no marriage I can trace that might be her and she is not mentioned in her father's will.  I suspect she died in infancy.

Thomas - was born in 1716 and has intrigued me for years.  Note the old Bailey record above.  His "punishment" for that episode and the trouble he was clearly giving his father was to be sent as an indentured servant to Maryland in the American colonies in 1730.  He was 14 and not the 16 his father claimed.  I have seen the original record, but see the summary below from "A list of Immigrants from England to America" - Kaminkow.  I am working on it.

William Ginn, Quaker & Clockmaker of London died 1750

William, son of William in my last post, has had a great deal of nonsense written about him on some of the family trees on Ancestry. Some researchers even link him to the Hertfordshire family!  Many researchers have blindly followed others, and only one or two good American genealogists have taken the time to really explore the earliest of the records they found back to the 1690s.

William Ginn was born in 1672.  He lost his mother when he was three and four years later, aged eight, his father decided he had  now become a Quaker. Unlike his half-sister Elizabeth, William at least was brought up in the Quaker ways.

In 1687 when he was 15, William Ginn "son of William Ginn  of Huntingdon, Baker", was apprenticed to a Thomas Woodman of London to train as a Turner (below)

William Ginn learned fast.  I have not researched him in the Guild records, but he clearly was admitted to the Guild in or about 1694.  Now a Turner.

But we know,  from records gleaned by the British Museum no less, that he had ambitions far beyond his admitted trade.

By 1697, still only 25, William was making watch/time piece cases, and he was good at it.  In that year he was running a business from Little Old Bailey in the City of London (near St Pauls - I worked close by thirty years ago) making watch cases, and he had enraged the Clockmakers Guild who were out to stop him.  The British Museum say that William Ginn, Turner,  placated them by paying his dues to the Guild and thus continued his business.

Clock or watch making it appears was a suitable occupation for a Quaker as you could practice it without necessarily swearing an Oath to a Guild, oaths being prohibited for quakers.  Theefore there are a great number of celebrated Quaker watchmakers such as Tompion and Daniel Quare who was the King's watchmaker.  Ginn worked with all of them in his day.

William Ginn's mark

William Ginn married in 1699.  He married Ann Watts, daughter of John and Mary Watts (nee Blaugdone).  John Watts was a Bristol shipbuilder and the marriage was in Bristol. Mary Watts was the daughter of the celebrated Quaker writer and "sufferer" Barbara Braugdone . see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Blaugdone and https://bolesbooksblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/3-the-jolliffe-family-descent-from-barbara-blaugdone-quaker-sufferer/ and her marriage to John Watts in Bristol in 1670 below.

William was given as a Turner, the son of William Ginn, Baker of Cambridge and everybody was there including Barbara, the marriage is below and many Friends were witnesses.

William Ginn returned to London and was living in the Poultry in 1700, but by 1703 set up his business in St John Zachary in London near Gresham Street, Goldsmith's Hall and the longstanding Quaker meeting place in rooms at the "Bull and Mouth" Inn (below) which had been rebuilt after the Great Fire of London.  I know that Will attended meetings there.

Will kept his business in St John Zachary for virtually the rest of his life, both the Land Tax and the Quaker records concur on this.  Many of his watches seem to survive, the British Museum have three - see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1958-1201-2347.

Some come up for private sale and my correspondent Esther Odell (nee Ginn) sent me this below - Esther is no relation to Will.

So, we can imagine William busy in his workshop there for decades.  The British Museum says that he was active until at least 1730 when he was nearly 60.  Old age may well have slowed him down a bit, it was a precision craft.

I am told that during his life William acquired stock in a New England company, and he obviously made a very good living at his trade.  Quakers were sober and industrious and formed their own city within the City.  I have no doubt at all that with more research into Quaker activities of the time in London, a good deal more could be found out about this man..

William and Ann had a good number of children, but as was typical of London at the time, all but one died.  This was particularly a time of smallpox epidemics as we can see only too clearly in my other blog, and the majority of the children died of that cause as the Quaker records relate.

Ann Ginn died in 1742 of an apoplectic fit, in other words a stroke.  Her age was given as 69 - she was 68.

The Land Tax records suggest that William stayed in his workshop at Aldergate Ward until 1747, my suspicion is that then, on his own and aged 75 he gave it all up. sold his property and disposed of all but a little of the proceeds as we have no will.

William died in Southwark in 1750 with a quoted age of 78, which is exactly correct. He died of old age.  Like all of his deceased children, he was buried in the Quaker Burial ground near Bunhill Fields.  It is still there, there are no memorials of course, I understand some 12,000 Friends lie there.  

William and Ann had six children - all save one buried at Bunhill Fields

Benjamin and Benjamin Mercurius (Mercuius = orator) -   both died in infancy, the latter of smallpox aged 3

William - twice, both died in infancy

Nathaniel - died infancy

Anna Maria - died of tuberculosis in 1734 aged 25

Tralucia - Her birth is recorded in the Meeting at the Bull and Mouth in 1706.   She married Hans Steger, a clockmaker and son of clockmaker John at St Benet and St Paul's Wharf in London in 1733.  The Licence bond is below.  They emigrated to Virginia in the American colonies and have a huge number of descendants

William Ginn, Baker of Cambridge died 1707

William here, son of Thomas in the last post, has perplexed me for about 25 years.  I was in the Huntingdon Archives many years ago when I remember turning up the marriage of a William Ginn who was a Quaker.  Years after that, I obtained the will of a William who lived in Cambridge and realised it was the same man.  More years passed, and I found an apprenticeship record of the man's only son.  That was where it then sat.  I knew of non-conformist records of a William in London, but had no idea that guy was a Quaker - in fact the names of his children were so odd I thought he was a foreigner !

The "Eureka" moment came in 2014, when I came across a marriage entry on a pedigree loaded up my an American researcher, Mary Ann Blackburn on Ancestry, which gave details of the marriage of a William Ginn in Bristol to an Ann Watts.  Nobody knew who the father mentioned in the record was - but I did!  A day off from work researching  at the Cambridge Archives uncovered the whole story.

William here was born in 1629.  It is unlikely that he ever went to fight in the English Civil War, but I cannot rule it out.  What I know is that following his mother's  death he and his brother Joshua made their way to Cambridge.

William was a Baker, though we do not know exactly when he took up that occupation.  What I do know is that in about 1652 he married a lady called Margaret, the marriage entry seems to have been lost to us.

William and Margaret lived in the parish of St Giles in Cambridge, the old church of which was pulled down and completely rebuilt in the 1870s, but the old church is shown below.

William and Margaret had no less than eight children whilst in St Giles, but living conditions in any city at the time were extremely challenging with the levels of disease and lack of sanitation, and no less than seven of the children died in infancy.

Joshua, William's brother died in 1665, which brought money to William and he bought the "Sign of the Chequer" or "Chequers Inn" in that parish and like many of his time had the dual occupation of running the pub and making money as a baker.  The Inn no longer stands and I cannot find anything about it.

Margaret died at St Giles in 1666.  William was left with his daughter Elizabeth, aged nine.  She had been mentioned in Uncle Joshua's will the year before.

William did not remarry until about 1670, he married a Sarah but again the marriage entry is lost to us. At the time of the marriage William moved to St Peters in Cambridge, a tiny parish with a tiny church, but he kept the Chequers Inn.

William and Sarah had two children, including the third attempt at a son called William for William snr, this younger William being the later father of Tralucia Ginn but, again, of the two children only one survived.  William Ginn junior was baptised in 1672 in the  ancient font there decorated with four mermen and still in use (below).

Sarah died  in 1676, possibly with a late child.  William now had two children at home, Elizabeth who was 19 and her half brother William who was 3. It cannot have been easy and it likely that Elizabeth acted as Mum to Billy for the next five years .

The Quakers had been persecuted in Cambridge in the 1660s, they had meetings there, St Ives, Huntingdon - you name it, although there were no formal meeting houses as such, they met at people's homes.  Ironically the earliest surviving actual Quaker Meeting House in England is well known to me, being in Hertford in Hertfordshire and built in 1670, below.

But in Cambridge they were a small, relatively secretive sect, and the government and church of the day, whipped up by the closet Catholic Stuart royal dynasty, persecuted them, as well as other protestant dissenting groups such as the Congregationalists.

I found absolutely no evidence that William Ginn was a Quaker during the time of the persecutions, quite to the contrary, he was a practising Anglican, but by the time that the persecutions started to die down in 1680, and certainly by the time that the Stuart dynasty fell and  of the Act of Toleration (Religious)  of 1689, William here was a Quaker.

We are back to the first record I ever found of him, when, at the Quaker Huntingdon Meeting of 1681, William Ginn of Cambridge married a Mary Bardolf - they actually married at a house in St Ives (Hunts Archives)  He was alternatively to be of Huntingdon or Cambridge hereafter. 

Not only did William become a Quaker, but there is evidence in the records that he became quite bigoted about it.  Where once it was the non conformists who were persecuted, now William saw himself as the conformist and the outsiders as "the others".  The circle turned.

In 1687, William apprenticed his only son into the Turner's Company in London and hoped for good things, but life had its usual ups and downs for him in later life, he saw his only daughter buried, his last remaining child married.  At the end you wonder how he saw the sum of his life.

William Ginn died in 1707 - he was 78. It I unclear where he is buried. His original will (Cambs Archives) , with his signature is below.  Neither his brother or his father could read and write, but William could.

William had acquired copyhold property in Chesterton ( Cambridgeshire) which was therefore held of the Manor.  Some manorial records for the period survive at the Cambridge University Library (says the Manorial Documents Register) which may say what this was, and that, together with the The Chequers Inn in St Giles was left to a Robert Nichols  and Mary his wife, declared to be William's son in law (from which I have deduced either Mary Bardolf had been a widow when she married William or William had an unrecorded daughter Mary - the likely Robert Nicholls  married Mary Church at Godmanchester in 1694) . William the son (who was already doing very nicely in London)  just received an acknowledgement and Mary his widow just the household goods and the princely sum of £5!

Mary Ginn died at Chatteris near St Ives in 1711 (Huntingdon Meeting).  It is likely she returned to where she came from after William died.

Two children survived viz

Elizabeth - this young lady intrigues me.  I doubt she led a happy life. She was born in 1657 and spent the first years of her life watching her siblings die, then her mother when she was 9.  Her father remarried and then his second wife died,  Elizabeth I am sure (together with any maid) being charged with helping to bring up her half brother whilst Dad was working.

Then, now an adult, Elizabeth witnessed her father becoming a Quaker.  The inference in the records is that she was not - at least not a willing one.

Elizabeth married, in my view likely after her half brother was apprenticed in 1687 - so about 1690 then.   I cannot find the marriage entry but she married someone with the surname Rose.  My suspicion is that it was not a Quaker marriage and her spouse was a local man.

She had one child that survived, a son, Ginn Rose.  He was alive when his grandfather died in 1707, probably in his teens.  He received a terse bequest "I give to my grandson Ginn Rose the sum of forty shillings if he lives and comes again but not else".  So he was clearly not a Quaker.  I cannot find any reference to a Ginn Rose in any record.

Elizabeth sadly died in 1693 aged 36.  Whether she was a Quaker or not she was buried as one, declared to be of Godmanchester and the daughter of William Ginn.

William - the third, two died in infancy - is the subject of the next post

Thomas - two died in infancy

Unity - died in infancy

John - two died in infancy

Susan - died in infancy

The story of Tralucia Ginn, Swavesey and the Quaker Baker

Just a handful of Ginns have turned up in my English research pre 1800 who had connections with, or allegedly sailed to, the American colonies or the West Indies. Most of them seem to have disappeared when they got there. Only two of them have a mention in American records on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean - and the only one of those who actually went (the other just held land in Maryland) is the strangely named Tralucia Ginn the Quaker, who seems to be quite well known .

A year or two back I gave my research to a correspondent and fellow researcher, Esther O'dell (nee Ginn) in the States, who has put the gist of this on Family Search, but it is probably best that I also tell this story here with all the documentation.

Years ago now, likely in the 1990s I extracted the wills and administration records  of the Ginn or Gynn family of Swavesey in Cambridgeshire, England.  These go back to the reign of Elizabeth the 1st, the late 1500s, when Shakespeare was still producing his plays.

I found  a Thomas and a William Ginn, worked out the story of Thomas and could not trace anybody forward from him save one daughter.  Also years ago, I extracted the will of a William Ginn in Cambridgeshire who I knew was a Quaker.  About six years ago I made two astonishing discoveries - one linked Tralucia Ginn to this later William - a man I affectionately call "The Quaker Baker", and one that linked him to Shakespearian Swavesey.

The Swavesey registers do not survive for much before 1600 - but there was clearly a William Ginn the elder who died in 1617 and had two sons, William jnr and Thomas.  Who these are, as yet I have no idea but have not ruled out a link to Hertfordshire given how far that family were roaming by the 1500s and the fact that they were in Huntingdon by the 1560s.

William jnr married a Dorothy and had two daughters (Elizabeth 1611 and Joan 1613) before dying prematurely in 1616 leaving Letters of Administration below (Cambridgeshire Archives) with Dorothy remarrying a Richard Blunt in 1621.

So it  is Thomas that we are concerned with here.

Thomas Ginn was a Husbandman, ie a smallholding farmer who married twice.  His first spouse was an Eleanor, their marriage predates the surviving registers and I know nothing about her - save that she and Tom had a son William in 1612 who died and a daughter Mary in 1615.  Eleanor sadly died in 1618.  Tom then remarried Unica Gyfford (a form of Eunice and meaning "unique") at Swavesey in 1620.

It is from these small beginnings of Thomas Ginn marrying Unica Gifford that all this springs.

You see Thomas and Unica had three children:  Unica 1621, Joshua 1626 and William 1629.  With Mary, their half sister - there were four children sitting around the dining table in the Hall.

original (signed) will of Thomas Ginn 1633 (Cambs. Archives)

Thomas Ginn would have had a hard life.  As a Husbandman rather than a Yeoman he would not have had the wherewithal to pay for labourers to assist him, but would have worked his own few acres and likely hired himself out as a day labourer to others.  With a life of unremitting grind he could feed his family and put enough aside to leave  his children a few pounds to give them a start in life.

Thomas Ginn died in 1633 - he was probably about 45.  He left a will , the original of which survives (above - Cambridgeshire Archives).  Thomas left his land and £60 to his eldest son Joshua, £20 each to daughters Unica and Mary and son William.  His widow was required to sell his house and lands when the children came of age.

Unica his widow died in 1641.  She also left a will, the probate copy of which is in part above (Cambs Archives).

Unica was a religious lady - her children were not yet of age and she wanted them to become responsible, godly adults.  So she left money to all of her children, and a chest and ten shillings "to buy a bible with" to each of the boys.  William received the chest that his father had had.

Thomas and Eleanor had one surviving child and Tom and Unica three, namely

Mary - she married John Charlton at Fen Drayton in 1640

Unica - married John Crosby (of Oakington) at Cambridge St Edward in 1642.  There is a surviving Marriage Licence at Cambridge Archives.  They had a fair number of children before Unica died in 1655 in her 30s

Joshua - never married.  On one remarkable day at the Cambridge Archives some years ago I linked three generations of this family together and Joshua appeared as if my magic !  He went to Cambridge with his brother, indeed my suspicion is he lived with William and family.  We do not know his occupation but I suspect he worked with his bro. You will recall that he was the eldest son - he had the lands in Swavesey which he had apparently kept and he died prematurely  in Cambridge in 1665, it could have been plague which was rife at the time, we are not told.  He was 39.   His original will with his signature is below (Cambs Archives).

Joshua Ginn left his lands in Swavesey to his brother and made small bequests to the family of his half sister Mary and to William's daughter Elizabeth.  Indeed, exceptionally, William and his then wife Margaret are noted in his burial entry.

William - the Quaker Baker - see next post