Robert Ginn of Eynesbury died 1807

Robert here was son of Robert in my post of  April 16th 2020. He was an agricultural labourer.  Bob married Mary Lawson at Eynesbury in 1769.

I know extremely little about him and Mary.  Mary died in 1800.  Robert's death does not appear in the Eynesbury register and I think that he has to be the Robert Ginn in Buckden who died there in 1807.  Robert his son went there when he came back from the wars and Bob here may have taken a cottage there.

 He and Mary had six children

Elizabeth - twice - both died in infancy

Robert - twice - the first died infancy, for the second see later post.

Ann - born in 1783 - she married John Emory at  Eaton Socon in 1803

Joseph - see later post

John Ginn of Suffolk and the 20th Foot died 1855

Readers of my other blog will know by now that I am interested in the "lost souls", the people without descendants, with nobody interested in researching them and who died, often for their country, without memorial.  So it is with John here.

About 25 years ago when researching my other blog at the National Archives, I started putting together a series of notes on the Ginn men who joined the army during the Victorian period and died, thus never getting to pension and thus having no discharge papers and not (even now) listed in any index, online or elsewhere.  I had to trawl through a lot of original records.  The list, after Kipling, is entitled "The Soldiers of the Queen".

John here was born in Suffolk in approximately 1836.  He enlisted with the 20th Regiment of Foot (East Devons) at Westminster, London on 5th September 1853 and gave his occupation as Labourer and his age as 17 years 8 months.  he was 5 foot 5 inches tall with fair hair and grey eyes with a brown complexion.

The regiment were first in London, then sent out to the Mediterranean in 1854 as part of the 26,000 strong British Expeditionary Force at the outbreak of the Crimean War.

The regiment was initially at Varna where the troops suffered much from disease, principally cholera, arriving in the Crimea in mid-September.  They had barely landed, when marching inland the army encountered the Russians on 20th September and attacked them, the 20th among them, at the Battle of the Alma (below) which thankfully the British and French won.

John was not wounded at that battle, but like many men of that army on the march he soon contracted cholera, in fact it had not left the army since they had encamped at Varna, being placed on the sick list on 25th September.

He was shipped out to the "dying rooms" (they can scarcely be called anything else) at the famous or infamous hospital at Scutari (which is still there and below)

The British soldiers at the hospital were in desperate straits, with no medical staff to talk of some 88% of them were dying at this time.

Step in Florence Nightingale and her 38 nurses who embarked for Turkey and arrived at Scutari in November of that year.

Very sadly, although she and her ladies obviously did the best that they could, there were 14,000 men in hospital by February 1855 (not all at Scutari) and John died at Scutari on 4th March 1855 - he had just turned 19.

John was posthumously awarded the Crimean War Medal with clasps for both Alma and the Battle of Inkerman.  The latter was an error as, being on the sick list,  he could not have been present at that battle.  His parents were given as being in Needham Market where the medal was sent, and also given as Lionel and Elizabeth, although I have never found mention of them in the records

Robert Ginn of Eynesbury died 1781

Robert here was son of Thomas in my last post.  I have always assumed that he was a tailor as every generation in this family seem to have been, but cannot state that as a known fact.

Robert married Mary Mills at Barham in 1737.  Either this was his first marriage (and he later married another Mary) or this was his only marriage and the couple either initially had children at other than Eynesbury or had some trouble in starting a family, as the first child was not baptised at Eynesbury until 1744.

The couple always lived there, I sadly have no idea exactly where.  Mary was buried at Eynesbury in 1780, Robert in 1781 aged 58.

Robert and Mary had six children

Robert - see later post

James - see later post

Ann - married John Brown at Eynesbury in 1772

Elizabeth - is untraced

Mary - married James Castleman at Eynesbury in 1781

Sarah - married Joseph Smith at Eynesbury in 1780

Thomas Ginn of Southoe and Eynesbury died 1759

Thomas Ginn here was son of James in my last post.  I know only a little about him.  He was a Tailor.

In 1706 Thomas married a Martha Mannering at Southoe, their first child was born there.  But Southoe as we have seen was a tiny place, and by 1707 Tom and Martha had moved to nearby Eynesbury, three times larger and next to St Neots, a prospering market town.  Tom would have undoubtedly found more work there.

Tom spent the next fifty or so years in Eynesbury - he died there in 1759 aged 74.  Martha had died in 1758.

Tom and Martha had ten children

James - born in 1707 is untraced

Martha - married William Baxter at St Neots in 1729 aged 20

Elizabeth and Mary - are untraced

Thomas - died in infancy

Ann - is untraced

Robert - there were two - the first died in infancy - the second see next post

Catherine - married John Baxter at Eynesbury in 1764 - she was 38 so there may not have been issue

Sarah - is untraced.

The Ginn family of Southoe - later Eynesbury

Many years ago I was researching one snowy day in the Huntingdon Record Office.  I was actually there to research a Hertfordshire family, but a lot of other information turned up, and I became fascinated by what I found in Southoe and Eynesbury, some of this information now being online, it was not then - in fact there was no "online" then !!

A James Ginn and what I took to be his brother William arrived in Southoe (some six miles from Huntingdon) in the 1670s.  They were likely born during the English Civil War.  There is absolutely no evidence to connect them to the only Ginn family known to have been in Huntingdonshire at this time (distant Stilton) nothing to connect them to the family at Swavesey (to be discussed in a later post) nor to a family from Hertfordshire (see post of 7th July 2012  in my other blog regarding Robert Ginn of Wyton and Houghton) that had settled in Huntingdon and Wyton and Houghton nearby, so the origins of the Southoe family are a total mystery.   All that having been said, the discovery in early 2020 of unknown Ginns from the Wyton/Houghton family and the propensity of this family to use the name Robert over centuries, has made me wonder if they do connect to the latter family and there is something hidden in the, as yet, available records.  All speculation at the moment.

My theory is that a couple arrived in the area after the  Civil War with family in tow.  Significantly, perhaps, a Mary Ginn (who I suspect was a widow) married a Richard Fowler at Eynesbury in 1657.  The move to Southoe is even more odd because Southoe has always been a tiny place, with a population of less than a hundred souls in medieval times and scarcely ever more than 200.  Why did James and William go there ?

William Ginn married and had issue but everybody died including a son Robert, so is not explored further here.  But James Ginn married an Ann Saunders at Southoe in 1673.  He had one hearth in the Hearth Tax of 1674.  They had four known children.  James Ginn died in 1706, likely about 65.  Ann died in 1716.

They had four children as I say

Elizabeth- married John Rappet at Southoe in 1693

James - married Elizabeth Jackson at Southoe in 1698 and Miriam or likely Marian Harding there in 1702.  Elizabeth had died in 1701. His  two known children, Dorcas and Matthew, both died in infancy. Marian died in 1705. James was given as "a workman" in the register which does not tell us a lot. James is untraced thereafter - so there could be more to this story.

Matthew - later of Great Staughton is clearly theirs. My notebooks have a gap in the register for 1681 and 1682 and the guy was born then.   This is why James jnr had a son Matt to honour his Uncle.  See post on the Ginn family of Great Staughton

Thomas - see next post

Introduction

This blog is a "sister" site as I say to my blog on the Ginn family of Hertfordshire (ginn-hertfordshire.blogspot.com).  Except that that site really only deals with the descendants of one man, William Ginn of Aston who died in 1520, and not other Hertfordshire Ginns and, crucially, makes no mention of other Ginn families whom I have come across along the way in my thirty plus years of research, some of whom may connect to Hertfordshire, some definitely not.

So this blog, with its rather "uncatchy" title is set up to discuss these, sometimes snippets, sometimes indigestible chunks of information I have encountered on my genealogical travels.

I hope they help the researcher, and act as a memorial to the deceased.