George Ginn of Nevis in the Leeward Islands died after 1765

George Ginn here was the son of William in my last post and brother of Samuel.  He was born on April Fool's Day 1716 - which was an unfortunate start.  I first came across an entry that related to him on a very busy day of research at the Guildhall Library in the City of London, many, many years ago.  I had no idea who he was, made a note and moved on.  So it was a huge shock to find that he has a place here.

George was an orphan at the age of seven.  In the City, in an age of smallpox epidemics and numerous fevers, with the likelihood of  the Overseer of the Poor taking charge of him - he had virtually zero chance of survival.  But survive he did.   Something intervened.

 That "something" was the institution known as Christ's Hospital.

Christ's Hospital (which still exists but now in Sussex) was set up in the 1550s in Grey Friars in London in Newgate Street.  It was set up for destitute children, mostly boys, and particularly (as it turned out) for the sons of City Freemen, ie those members of the London guilds who died with their children unprovided for. whether as orphans or leaving a destitute widow.

                      The original admission & discharge for Geo.

                                       Christ's Hospital 

The parish of St Bartholomew the Less were left with at least three orphaned sons of William and Catherine when William died in 1724. Two, the parish dealt with in the way that parishes dealt with destitute children at this time, but George here the parish presented to Christ's Hospital who took him in.

Admission was granted at the age of seven and, you guessed it, George became a "Bluecoat" boy in 1724, the children wore blue coats.

By George's day, the School had also acquired premises in Hertfordshire of all places, actually in Hertford and Ware, and I know the premises well for some later buildings are still there.  It would appear that from the age of seven to twelve or so George would have been sent to Hertford, to learn to read and write and get a passable education.  The school (purpose built in Fore Street in 1690 (below in 1830)

was a rather grand affair.  The Hospital owned some similarly purpose built terraced cottages there and in Ware which, were each occupied by some ten or so boys and in the charge of nurses paid by the hospital, some of which were diligent, others less so.  The cottages at Place House in Ware are shown below.

  So for a few short years George, came "home" to Hertfordshire. He would have  then returned to Newgate Street.  There, in the evening the "Blues" would have supper in the Great Hall, below.  Somewhat reminiscent of "Harry Potter" and Hogwarts.

When  a boy reached 14 or 15 he faced a crossroads.  If he were gifted academically, then he could be chosen to stay on at the school to be prepared for university - ie Oxford or Cambridge at that time.  If he were not, and the vast majority were not, then he was put to an apprenticeship or indentured, often to the colonies.

                            Blue coat boy of c1720 from

                         an original illustration at Christs

George was indentured out in 1730, with the agreement of his cousin Anna Maria Harding, of which more below * . Christ's called her in to sanction George being indentured to the Plantations of Thomas Butler in Nevis in the West Indies no less.  The indenture was for seven years, assuming George survived the voyage (Child Apprentices in America from Christ's Hospital - original record above)

Thomas Butler (d. 1744) was a Merchant of Camberwell in Surrey.  His father, Captain Thomas Butler who died circa 1688 had acquired two sugar plantations in Nevis, one called The Grove and the other New River.  The Butlers are famous (or infamous) on Nevis and had estates there (there is a Butler's Estate there still) until emancipation of the slaves and later, because of course we are dealing with slavery here.

The slave voyages followed a triangular route.  The voyage would start in Bristol or London and the ship sail to West Africa where it would pick up it's cargo of slaves from the slave traders.  It would then sail across the Atlantic to the West Indies or North America, sell what was left of it's cargo (many slaves died en route) to the Plantation owners and then pick up it's new cargo of sugar or cotton and sail back to the UK.  It was hugely profitable.

The owners of the plantations in the West Indies were largely absentees, being on their estates on occasion, but mostly living in Britain and giving power to those managing the plantations on their behalf.  There would then be under managers, and under them the slave overseers and supervisory staff, the managers, overseers and the majority of the rest white, often born in Britain (because there was a prejudice apparently against the native, island born white man, a "creole" (who could also be of mixed blood) so the plantations needed a fresh supply of  young white men from Britain on a regular basis, to replace those dying of the numerous tropical diseases in these islands and those leaving for home or America itself.  This is just a synopsis of how this worked and for further information please read the excellent study of the team from Bristol University on the Mountravers Plantation on Nevis at this time - https://seis.bristol.ac.uk/~emceee/mountraversplantationcommunity.html

Now George must have felt a mixture of excitement and terror at going out to the West Indies in 1730.  This was the tail end of the period of "The Pirates of the Caribbean" (roughly 1680-1730) and Nevis "The Queen of the Caribees" had been devastated by pirates several times after 1700.

I despaired of finding any record of George once he had left Britain's shores.  The Nevis parish registers are not available.  The Nevis records generally have not been cared for in Nevis with the lack of any archives office locally.  Given that, and the fact that tropical disease wiped out most of the British emigrants and George was only fourteen when he went, I thought that was it,  Not so.

The British Library have been funding the preservation and digitizing of what they consider to be "endangered"  Caribbean records, and the University of Bristol under a  team lead by D. Small and C. Eickelmann have been trying, heroically, to preserve what is left of the records on Nevis..  I contacted Christine Eickelmann and, to my astonishment, she had George Ginn here in her notes.

This research is currently live, and in the absence of parish records is likely to take years and I may well be dead myself before I know that much more, but George got to Nevis safely and finished his time working on the Butler Plantations in 1737 or so.

At some point he was trained as a Carpenter and Millwright, ie the highly skilled men who build and maintain mills.  This was a vital job on the plantations, as skilled men were in short supply and the sugarcane was ground down by the mills as part of the sugar producing process.  Every plantation had at least one mill and most several.

 George clearly started working on his own account as we start to see court cases concerning him in the Nevis court records regarding small debts (see below), money he was owed for jobs done and money he owed for materials supplied, and these continue through to 1765 at least (I am still researching) when George was nearly 50.

Due to a similarly amazing discovery, it became apparent in 2021 that George Ginn both married and had issue.  The records of this are at present not available but work is apparently afoot to try to digitize the parish and other records on the Island for this period ( court and council minute records are now available), but until that is completed I cannot really move forward.  But we now know that he had at least one and likely more sons.

George obviously died after 1765.

Known issue

George jnr - see post of 15th August 2021

*  A Richard Harding married Susanna Van Limput at St Olave's Southwark, Surrey in 1701.  Susanna was Dutch.  A lot of Dutch people came into England when William of Orange became King in 1689.  The family lived near Grub Street, St Giles Cripplegate.  Richard Harding was a member of the Turner's Company. In 1707, the couple had Anna Maria Harding who later claimed to be a cousin of George Ginn in 1730. I do not know how.

                        from Christ's Hospital

Anna Maria Harding (there is a story within a story here) married Adrian Crownfield in London in 1735.  Except his real name was not Crownfield but a corruption of it - for Adrian was the eldest son and heir (born 1699) of Cornelius Crownfield of Cambridge, Printer and Bookseller (connected to the Cambridge University Press no less) who was a Dutchman!  Sadly, whilst Adrian had children from a prior marriage, he and Anna had no children and they both died very prematurely within days of each other in 1740, likely of smallpox.

Acknowledgements:  I am indebted to Christine Eickelmann of the University of Bristol and Clifford Jones and Ken Mansell of Christ's Hospital for their help and assistance in researching George.