Introduction

Hi

My name is Michael Taylor and since 1989 I have been undertaking a One Name Study into the Ginn family of Hertfordshire in England.

This blog has been created to share my research and hopefully that of others, to correct some of the errors that researchers (having seen my research) have made in posts on sites such as Ancestry and, perhaps most importantly of all - to act as some sort of memorial for the Ginn family of Hertfordshire.

Various descendants of certain families have added and are adding information along the way and, in particular, my fellow  Ginn researcher Michael Ginn of Billericay has added a lot of information on the family from 1837 to the present.

The first Ginn reference in Hertfordshire I have found dates from 1307 when a certain Richard Gynne or Ginn is referred to in the Poll Tax/Lay Subsidy record of that year - I have seen the original entry at the National Archives.

By the late medieval period (1400s) there were broadly three distinct (but likely related from earlier times) Ginn families in Hertfordshire which I have broken down loosely into:-

The Aston Family
The Stevenage Family
The Ware Family

1.  The Aston Family

This is the family that has the most (virtually all) of the Ginn  family descendants arising from Hertfordshire alive today.  The main ancestor of this family is William Ginn, a yeoman farmer c1450-c1520 who will be dealt with in more detail in my next post.  Chiefly, it is this man's descendants that I have been and still am researching.

2.  The Stevenage Family

Also largely yeoman farmers, and Stevenage being adjacent to Aston, this family can be said to have died out (but see below) by the 1700s, partly due to disease, partly due to a paucity of male children.  There were some interesting members of this family however and they will be dealt with in a later post.

3.  The Ware family

The first known of this family, a Richard Ginn who had a son, also Richard, in 1617 in Ware has long been a mystery.  There is no information to convincingly connect him directly or indirectly to either the Aston or Stevenage families.  The Ware family have descendants (in part taking the name Gynne or even Ghinn), some quite interesting  and even notable, so the point is of some importance.

Recently, some information has become available,  largely due to the research of American academics into English medieval documents, making it plain that there were members of the Ginn family in Ware by the 1450s, that the family stayed and developed into the reign of Henry the 8th (ascended the throne 1509) and there are some reasons to suppose (to be explored in a later post) that the Ware Ginn family might be a "far flung outpost" of the Stevenage family and thus possibly the only surviving descendants of that branch.