Origins of the Ginn or Gynn family of Bluntisham & Houghton and Wyton

I have been researching in Huntingdonshire since the beginning of the 1990s.  Sometimes by visits to the Hunts Record Office or the Society of Genealogists, sometimes (in recent times) online, on the rare occasion employing a professional researcher to dig something out for me.  It is not an easy county to research, not least because many records are not indexed or widely available, if available at all. And the county is an "island" surrounded by other counties (Northants, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire) all of which had families with the Ginn surname themselves, and all felt free to nip over the border (and back again) whenever they felt like it.

However, if you ignore the family at Stilton on the Northants border (of which more later) there were three, apparently separate (but were they ?) families in Hunts with the surname Ginn (or a version of it) between the reigns of Elizabeth 1st and Queen Victoria.  These were:

• The Ginn family at Houghton and Wyton which originated in Hertfordshire in the 1500s

• The Ginn family of Southoe, Eynesbury  the Staughtons  and St Neots which can be traced from the mid 1600s

• The Ginn or Gynn family of Bluntisham, Houghton and Wyton and St Ives which can be traced from c 1725

All three of these families had a fondness for the surname Robert in the male line - is this coincidence ?  Until 2020, I was certain that the early Houghton & Wyton family died out (in Huntingdonshire at least) with the death of Thomas Ginn (Gentleman and Alderman of Huntingdon) in 1636. But this year has shown that Thomas had at least one male sibling who lived to adulthood that I was unaware of - so could the family have continued in Hunts ?  Could two or all three of these families be related - the truth is I have no idea.  There is no evidence that they are as yet.

So what do we know of the last of these families, of the three men who were are in the Bluntisham records in the 1790s - Robert, Charles and Henry ?  We know two things:

•   That all three  of these men were brothers
•   We know who Charles Ginn or Gynn was

So we can put the family together - see next post