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
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