George here was clearly a son (I suspect there were several) of George Ginn of Nevis - see my post of 28th June 2020 who clearly prospered. I know very little genealogical information about George jnr here, the Nevis registers have not survived or if they have are not yet digitized, but I suspect he was born in the 1750s and therefore on Nevis.
George Ginn senior died after 1765, I do not know when and as yet I have not found any entry in any existing and available records for Nevis dealing with any inheritence, but George junior followed in the footsteps of his father and became a Millwright and Carpenter.
Carpenters were essential on the Caribbean Islands, the sugar plantation owners needed them to build and repair the windmills that processed the sugar and to build and maintain the other buildings and infrastructure on the islands. You thus find quite a lot of carpenters and they were treated with respect often referred to as "Mr" in the church registers.
I know that George married, likely about 1770 and I know that the couple had children, but most were clearly born on Nevis and sadly the entries are in general lost to us at present as I say.
St Vincent is in the Windward Islands, nearly three hundred miles from Nevis. And you have to wonder what other islands these Ginn carpenters may have worked on, most of the records gone, a few not yet researched, because it is clear that the trades people who worked the plantations (George was not alone in this) were often itinerant contract workers, they went where the work was, and there was a lot of work in St Vincent in the late 1790s.
St Vincent was originally French (the Windward Islands include Martinique) but were taken by the British after the Seven Years War in 1763. The British then attempted their own settlement and people arrived from the British Isles, many from Scotland. It was not easy to colonise because, ironically, St Vincent was one of the few places home to a good number of the original indigenous Carib people of the Caribbean, and they did not like strangers. So there was dislike and fighting and the Caribs kept pretty much to the north of the island, the British to the south.
With the French Revolution and the wars with Britain that followed, the French stirred the Caribs up against the British and supported and instigated more fighting which eventually led to the Second Carib War which ended in 1796/7. During this the Caribs marched south, armed by the French, and devastated many of the sugar plantations and destroyed many of the sugar mills and related works to the east and west of the island.
British troops arrived in numbers and soon the Caribs were defeated and (not a glorious part of British history) expelled from St Vincent, the majority subsequently dying of disease.
St Vincent obviously had to be rebuilt, and word clearly got around because there appears to have been quite an influx of new blood to the Island, including George Ginn and his family, the first entry for them dates to 1797.
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Nr. Calliaqua in 1827
We know that George settled in Calliaqua, a town to the south of Kingtown the capital of St Vincent.
The end of the Second Carib War brought the first period of stability to St Vincent since the British had acquired it. The stability was good for commerce. And it brought greedy opportunists, because when the Caribs were expelled their lands in the north were confiscated. It was good land for sugar production and the Crown made land allotments and hived it off. Among the opportunists who arrived were one William MacKenzie, a Scottish aristocrat and his relation Robert Sutherland, both of Ross-shire in Scotland.
These gentlemen and others acquired former Carib lands, bought hundreds of slaves to work them and did very well for themselves. The Caribbean (unlike the southern "Cotton States" of America, were not really settled by the plantation owners. The Planters of these islands were exploiters, absentee landlords, the plantations were managed on their behalf and worked by the slaves, the infrastructure maintained by resident whites like George Ginn. McKenzie for example made his will while in Bath in England, dying and being burried on the "Grand Tour" while in Florence, Italy in 1819 aged 43. Sutherland was buried in Hastings in Sussex in 1828.
William McKenzie owned the estate known as "Tourama", Sutherland those known as "Waterloo" and Orange Hill", a map below shows the general layout at the time quite clearly.
So where in all this was George ? Well he was a cog in the wheel. The Plantation owners were related to and in business with those who ran the Merchant Houses and Banks who financed the slave trade and the sugar plantations, the money they made slopped back and forth between them like gravy in a jug. Money made money, just as it always has.
George was born in the West Indies, had grown up in the system and I have no illusions, George had aspirations to be a Sutherland or a McKenzie for George was acquiring slaves. And this is sadly not a passing mention for this gets personal - we have names
British Library EAP 688/1/1/22
George had a workgang of black carpenters - Jacob, Douglas, Fortune, Peter, Yaco, Grey, Dublin, Robert and Pompey.
Then Daniel, Alexander, Isaac, Edward, Howell and Charles ("Field negros - men") Catherine, Juliet, Frances, Love, Amy, Jennet, Phillis [sic} Ann and Cudjoe "her child" [a babe in arms) Siley, Jane, Nancy, Betsy, Biddy, Sukey, Fanny, Venus, Harriet, Prudence, Cordelia, Patty, Belinda and Lucretia ("women" -some would be field and others house slaves) Dick, Archy [sic] George, Abraham, Richard, Nelson, Franky, Ned, Dary, Blackie, William and Roger ("boys") Annabella, Charlotte, Polly, Catherine, Pheby [sic) and Kitty ("girls")
In all, George had 56 slaves. The carpenters and house slaves apart, (he seems to have had little or no land) - the rest were hired out as "jobbing slaves" to the plantation owners, Sutherland and McKenzie doubtless amongst them. This was of particular profit after 1807 as we shall see. The vast majority of these slaves by the way were born in Africa - they had known what it was to be free.
Cutting the sugarcane
Things took a turn of the worse for the plantation owners (and thus the economy of the West Indies) in 1807 - because moved by public sympathy back home, the British government abolished the slave trade. It was rigorously enforced by the Royal Navy, by far the biggest in the world - there were no more slaves coming out of Africa. This led to a labour crisis for the slave owners as existing slaves were no longer dispensable and could not easily be replaced by "fresh blood". It was the beginning of the road to emancipation of the slaves, and the planters knew it. For George it meant that he got more for the jobbing slaves he hired to others.
George Ginn died in early 1812 - we have no way of knowing his age - but I would put him as 50-60. He made our "friend" Robert Sutherland (below) his executor, in my view because even if George had adult sons to succeed him (he clearly did) they would not be as well versed in the detail of investing and buying and selling as Sutherland was, for George left something in the region of £5000 - his slaves alone worth nearly £4200 and some of those probably already working for Sutherland.
Now the annoying this is that George left a will calling himself
"George Ginn Esquire". But poor conditions in the Court Office in Kingstown where it has been stored have meant that it has not survived intact, although I am looking into whether anything can be retrieved. But we know that he provided for several legacies as it is mentioned in the deed books, and we know that he provided that his slaves be quote "rented out" for a year or so to provide the income to pay those legacies and any debts he left at his death. Then the capital was to be realised - ie the slaves sold, and Robert Sutherland sold them all to William McKenzie in 1813 - McKenzie to pay for them in yearly instalments of one third of the price over the ensuing three years - taking us to 1816. Who got the money ?
"George Ginn Esquire". But poor conditions in the Court Office in Kingstown where it has been stored have meant that it has not survived intact, although I am looking into whether anything can be retrieved. But we know that he provided for several legacies as it is mentioned in the deed books, and we know that he provided that his slaves be quote "rented out" for a year or so to provide the income to pay those legacies and any debts he left at his death. Then the capital was to be realised - ie the slaves sold, and Robert Sutherland sold them all to William McKenzie in 1813 - McKenzie to pay for them in yearly instalments of one third of the price over the ensuing three years - taking us to 1816. Who got the money ?
I have no way of knowing whether George's wife survived him. But at least one son clearly did.
We do not know how many children George and his wife had, because he moved to St Vincent so late but
William
Is clearly George's son. I know very little about him. He was likely born in the mid 1770s and in 1797 he married Elizabeth Selby at St Vincent's Anglican Cathedral in Kingstown. The old building had been destroyed in a hurricane and the new and current building was not completed until 1820, so it must have been a somewhat makeshift affair. He and Elizabeth had a son William Samuel baptised there in 1802 - his great uncle had been a Samuel of course and he may have had a brother of that name.
The Selby name in the West Indies is unique to St Vincent. A Thomas Selby clearly arrived in the 1780s with his first wife and Elizabeth and her brother Tom jnr. The first wife died and Tom snr remarried a servant from the Governor's House (at Calliaqua funnily enough) the Governor being a James Seton - below.
Thomas Selby jnr died (accounted a Gentleman) but Elizabeth had two half brothers by the second marriage - (Charles James and Joseph) who are listed as slave owners in Kingstown in the earliest surviving slave registers until emancipation in the 1830s. There are people of that name still on St Vincent, supposedly those descended from people who working for the Selbys, took the surname post emancipation in the 1830s.
I have assumed that William was a Carpenter and this is currently all I know of him. There is no Ginn or Gynn in any West Indian Slave Register which mostly commenced in 1813-7. There is no further mention of him in the St Vincent records which survive forward to 1820 (there is then a huge gap). The consensus is that he left the West Indies- the economy was in decline. He could have gone anywhere - England, another Colony and the USA is a distinct possibility.
NB "a son of George Ginn Carpenter" was buried at St Vincent's Cathedral in Kingstown in 1799. The clerk was not that efficient and he was clearly a young adult
