Your monument shall be my gentle verse
That eyes not yet created shall o'er read
And tongues to be, your being, shall rehearse
When all the breathers of your world are dead
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen
Where breath most breathes - in mouths of men

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Wednesday 20 May 2020

New blog- Ginn: Dunmow, Eynesbury, Over, Swavesey etc

Just to say that in the light of the Covid-19 outbreak I have started a new blog to this as a "sister" blog alongside this one, which will remain vastly the larger of the two.  It is called the rather catchy (lol) GINN GENEALOGICAL GLEANINGS  and is to be found here-

https://ginngenealogical.blogspot.com/


The position is that in the light of the outbreak (and the resulting time it gives me) together with the fact that I am a Type 1 (taking insulin) Diabetic aged 64 and life is uncertain (just read my blogs) I have decided to do the best I can to put the contents of my notebooks online.

I have been researching the GINN FAMILY of HERTFORDSHIRE since 1989.  Along the way I have come across many other GINN families, some of which have been linked to Hertfordshire ( often long after I first researched them) others may be in the future, some were never going to be.

My notebooks are full with work on these families, snippets, sometimes chunks of information I have found on them, interesting stories, you name it.  After more than 30 years a lot of this is still not on the web, on any website, so it will be useful.  I have not done work on the Ginn family of Soham, nor Cornwall or Suffolk, but there has  been passing work on the family in Northants, quite a lot of work in western (not eastern) Cambridgeshire and a very strong effort in Essex, Huntingdonshire and, of course, London.  So the plan is to translate that work into coherent posts on this new blog.

I managed to get the new blog on the web without difficulty, but (perhaps because of the epidemic with everybody working from home ) I had a lot of trouble getting the blog recognized by search engines, although Google are now displaying and linking to it.  So part of the reason for this post, is to advertise the new blog and, indirectly via this blog get it recognized by further search  engines and promoted for visitors.

Tags which are relevant and to be posted in due course are

GINN:  DUNMOW
GINN:  SOUTHOE & EYNESBURY
GINN:  ST NEOTS
GINN:  OVER & SWAVESEY
GINN:  STAUGHTON
GINN:  TRALUCIA
GINN:  BLUNTISHAM
GYNN: BLUNTISHAM
GYNN: HOUGHTON and WYTON

I have a lot of general information on Ginn soldiers during and before the Crimean War, a particular knowledge as to who was who in London before 1800 and where they came from and a head full of long deceased Ginns, so the plan is to put it out there

ENJOY!



Thursday 14 May 2020

John Ginn of Arkesden and Chigwell died 1770

To be honest I never expected to trace this man, so tracing him in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic was a bit of a shock.  And this research is fresh, and further investigation large shelved at present because of the said epidemic.

John was born in Little Hormead in  Herts in 1704 - son of John and Mary (nee Rayment) see my post of post of 13th January 2013. His parents moved to Rickling in Essex in or about 1707. I knew all this in 1995 but I did not have a clue as to what happened to John junior.

John senior ("Farmer" in the register) died in 1717.  The children's stepmother died in 1718 and they were left to their own devices, none were much older than 20.  Their daughter Mary married at Ricking in 1720, but the younger John and Margaret I searched for for years, and then in 2011 I discovered them both in Arkesden in Essex (up the road) where Margaret married in 1724.

John Junior would have inherited a few pounds on his father's death and in 1727 he married Susannah Catmore from Albury in Herts (born 1704 to William) at Albury.

John and Susannah settled at Arkesden (below) and it seems likely from what has been discovered that John had a few acres there and was a smallholding farmer.



John and Susan/ah had two children  in Arkesden and then, after 1733, they were gone.  In May 2020 I finally traced them.

John Ginn did what his uncles had done, he went south, in this case to Chigwell in Essex, like most men in this family, still "hugging" the Essex/Herts  border area.  I would assume that he and Susan arrived there in the 1730s, no further children are yet known.

Chigwell is not far from London of course, and even in the early 1700s it was influenced by it, prosperous merchants living in Chigwell on the more residential western side, whilst the eastern side was predominantly rural, I would assume that Jon's smallholding was there.

The "King's Head", the pub that Dickens immortalised in is "Barnaby Rudge" as the "Maypole Inn" and which he knew well, was already old in John's day, I am sure he downed a few pints there.

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At the moment all I know (research awaits) is that John farmed in Chigwell.  The  manorial records survive for this period and when I can research again in the actual archives, I intend to try and find records of his lands, though I suspect he only had a cottage and a field or two, also relying on his rights regarding the common land.


Susan Ginn died at Chigwell in early 1752.  John did not wait around, because by 1753 he had found himself a new lady, who I suspect was younger than himself (she was not a widow) and decided to take her up to London to get wed.

Before 1754 (when it was declared illegal) it was common for people in the Home Counties (and pretty much the norm in London) to go up to London to be married by the clergy who operated in taverns, rooms and, in some rare cases even chapels, in the vicinity of the Fleet Prison (below).


The Fleet Prison was for debtors, and it was legal (if frowned upon by the Church of England) for clergy (often debtors themselves) who did not have a parish or other church income, to conduct marriages for a fee much less than the usual.  Marriages at the Fleet were not only cheaper, the clergy did not ask too many questions about the age or status of the participants, the marriages were private (ie away from the prying eyes of the villagers of the couple) and the whole nature of the event gave the proceedings a carnival air.  The couple and their entourage all ended up in a London Tavern and a good time was had by all.

One such Fleet clergyman was a certain Peter Symson, who married people for many years until he was banned in 1754, and who in 1751 was up before the Old Bailey for knowingly allowing a man to enter into a bigamous marriage, his defence being that if he had not done it someone else would, which was undoubtedly true.

Symons married his clients a the "Old Red Hand and Mitre", a chapel just off Fleet Street, now long gone.


                                    Marriage at the Fleet

It was at the esteemed "Old Red Hand and Mitre" then that John took his new bride, Mary Rice or Rece, also allegedly of Chigwell and a spinster.  They were married by Symson and the entry, in Symson's own handwriting and written up in his book and signed by him is below.



There is no evidence that further children were born to John with either wife at Chigwell.  John died there in 1770 aged 64.  Mary stayed on, not remarrying and died there in 1785.

Chigwell Church in 1795 and today


John Ginn and Susannah had two children

Susannah - died infancy

William - born in 1733 is untraced.  He is not the guy sometimes given as "Ginn" online marrying at Epping in 1761 (that guy's name was Tinn)