John was born in around 1708, son of Robert in my last post. He started life as a Ginn and ended it as a Ginns. It is entirely possible that when his parents moved to Fen Ditton he did not move with them. What is certain, is that after his widowed mother remarried (1728) and subsequently died (1730) he took himself off to London. He was there by early 1732.
The name Ginns (see later) is so rare and the coincidence of there being another of that name in Wapping so small, that he has to be the John (of St George's in the East - effectively Wapping) who turns up at the Fleet in early 1732 and marries a Martha Simpson (RG 7. 84) John was described as a Mariner, ie a seaman. St George's (above) was carved out of St Dunstans Stepney in 1729 because the area was booming and, following the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1666, there was huge development in areas not previously built on. The area was adjacent to the Docks of course and it is likely that John (who was clearly never formally apprenticed as a Peruke Maker) first arrived there and obtained the only work he could - on one of the ships in the docks which were crowded with the masts of both the navy proper and the East India Company, the latter being his most likely source of work.
We have no idea of what happened to Martha, there is no burial entry I can trace. There were no children either and it is of course possible that John actually undertook a voyage and she was gone when he returned. There is at least a chance that she was alive when John remarried and that he lied when describing himself as a Bachelor.
For by 1735, John was a Peruke Maker, an occupation he followed for the rest of his life, and was back at the Fleet again where (RG 7. 127) he married Rose Foreman, described as of St Dunstan's in Stepney, the parish out of which St George's had been formed as I say.
A Peruke Maker was essentially a Barber with additional skills. He cut hair, made and repaired the wigs for men that were the fashion of the day and on display in the shop and also undertook minor surgical duties as a tooth-drawer and, bizarrely to us, a bleeder, as people were routinely bled to improve their health by removing the evil humours in the body. Men wore their hair short and covered it with their powdered wig, which by this time was getting a lot simpler than formerly. The explorer James Cook with peruke is shown below, he marrying Elizabeth Batts from the Bell Inn at Execution Dock in Wapping (the inn obviously known to John here) in 1762.
John called himself Ginns from the time of his first marriage - I have no idea why - all of his siblings retained the name Ginn (save Benjamin who became Ginns from 1760 or so). It may be (he was the eldest son) that his father Robert died in debt which would have been passed on to the eldest son as we have seen with the Fyfield Ginn family. He may have moved and changed his name for that reason. Bizarrely, he may have changed his name because the name (as with so many Hertfordshire Ginns) was pronounced like the drink, and at this time in London there was an anti-Gin craze as it was the drink of the poor and the cause of major social unrest. Certainly other Ginn men changed their names for curious reasons, as correspondents have told me. Likely only John knew.
I am sure that John was employed and did not work on his own account. We have him in the Land Tax from 1746 and he was in Well Close Ward, in St George's and one of the Tower Liberties, ie under the administration of the Tower of London which was close by. Well Close Ward was effectively Wellclose Square and John is known to have lived in Ship Alley, which was part of an area built in the 1680s and ran off Wellclose Square to the south, on the way down to the Ratcliffe Highway and on to the docks as its name suggests. The area was respectable in John's time, but became very popular with immigrants in the late Victorian period and became something of a slum, but I upload photos below which show Ship Alley from Wellclose Square on the left side as you look in about 1900 and the same view today. Ship Alley has now gone and is a park, but the tree on the right may well be the same as in 1900.
John and Rose also had no issue and, oddly, she also disappears from the records. There were no apparent cemeteries yet built in London and therefore I fail to see why she would not be recorded as a parish burial, unless John were following the example of the contemporary fictional barber, Sweeney Todd !
By the 1750s John had yet another wife, Elizabeth. I cannot find any marriage entry. She seems to be the mother of John's only ever child, as Elizabeth Ginns died at Ship Alley in 1758 and their obvious child Margaret in 1759.
John soldiered on, and in 1762 married his fourth wife, the widow Elizabeth Forbes, by licence at St George's. She was to be his last.
John Ginns "Barber" died at St George's in 1778 - he was about 70. He left mourning rings to many family members in Melbourn, Little Easton and elsewhere and everything else to Elizabeth who died at St George's in 1786 with a quoted age of 72. The second page of John's original will with his signature is below. He was obviously in a bad way and the will was written 13th June and he was buried 15th July - the signature on his marriage of 1762 is much stronger.
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