David Ginn/Gynn of Tottenham and West Ham d. 1871

David, son  of John of Thorley in my post of today, began life as a Ginn and ended it as Gynn.  He was five when his father died or disappeared and does not seem to have known his Dad's christian name.  He was barely eleven when his eldest brother Sam marched off to war and Dave seems to have believed that his Dad was called Samuel.  David has been the very devil to research because he never stayed in once place for more than a year or two - a habit that seems to have been passed on to his grandsons in the Merchant Navy.

He arrived in Walthamstow with his brother George during the last year or two of the Napoleonic Wars and married Elizabeth Asquith there in 1814 , soon moving to Bethnal Green where the first three children were born. 

 He and Elizabeth then moved to Tottenham (brother George being there again) and was there for some considerable period but I could not find him in the 1841 Census (it is a big area) and lost him, my research at that time being in the original records, none such being available online in the early 1990s.   In 2007 he was found in the online 1841 census in Hackney. At this time he was a Coachman.  He was there as Gynn (indexed as Gunn in the census on Ancestry) and was confusingly in the same building as a David Ginn and his wife and two children from Ireland.

I could not find him in 1851 for ages, then he turned up as Gynn (indexed as Guynn) and by then was a shopkeeper in West Ham  with wife Ann and a couple of servants (possibly employees at the shop) and lodgers.  It is considered certain that the 1848 marriage at St Pancras (David Ginn to Ann Bailey) is him although the wrong father (Samuel) is given and the name is spelt Ginn - because he gives his occupation as gardener, which is what his daughter Eliza (below) said of him the same year, and it is likely as said he may not have known his father’s true Christian name. 

In 1861 he has turned up as Gynn born Thorley in West Ham with a grandchild, what is likely a housekeeper  and a host of  (6 – one from Thorley) boarders and was running something like a lodging house.  He remarried Sarah Gifford or Jifford at West Ham in 1862, he a widower and she widowed .

Whether he invested what money he made and lived off of the savings I known not, but in 1871 he was in Bromley (Poplar) as David Gynn born Thorley (indexed as Grave) and was clearly in lodgings as a “Gentleman”  He died later that year in Poplar aged 76.

David and Elizabeth had seven children

David - see later post

Emma  - in Hackney in 1841.  Married  Thomas Huddell at Edmonton 1842

Samuel - I tracked this lad down by going to the Greater London Record office in 2006 and looking up the marriage.  He married at St Leonard’s Shoreditch (as Gynn)  in 1846, a gardener.  Sarah Boulton was born in Esher.  In 1851 they were in Finsbury, Islington  and had one child, Eliza aged 4. In 1861 I found them as Gywn at Camden Passage, Islington – Samuel was still  a gardener and there were no children there. In 1861, Eliza/ Elizabeth was in West Ham staying with her grandfather though described as his niece.  She married Charles William Douglas in Islington in 1866.

 My friend Michael Ginn discovered that Samuel died at the age of 41 in Shoreditch from a stroke (1845)

Eliza - married Thomas Mills at Spitalfields in 1848

George and Elizabeth - not in the 1841 census and assumed to have died young

Maria - died infancy