RootsChat.Com

I, too, have a Ginn brick wall.  My GGF is a William Ginn, born in 1833. He was an orphan (his mother had died and his father emigrated to Australia).  He came to America at the age of 8 in the company of a Hugh Whiteford family and settled in the DeKalb Town area of St. Lawrence County NY, a dairy region. He had an uncle, also named William Ginn (b. 1812) who emigrated to the same area, though I do not know if he came at the same time. I noted somewhere that my William Ginn's father was a George Ginn, born around 1810, but for the life of me cannot find the source of this info. I do not know where these Ginns were from, but the Whiteford family was from Ballynure in County Antrim. Growing up, the young William lived with the Whiteford family, as well a with a Jenkins family from Ballynure or Carrickfergus. I have a significant number of DNA matches with people descended from Hugh Witeford, so I greatly suspect William's mother was a Whiteford.  My DNA admixture also suggests that William was Scots-Irish, and the Whitefords are known to have originayed in Scotland.

Gary Stevens

I was delighted to find this site by Googling, and hope it will help me with one of my stickiest genealogy problems, involving a potential Whiteford ancestor.

I'm looking for information about my maternal ancestry line, the Ginn family of County Antrim, Northern Ireland, possibly from the Ballynure Parish area, and it may involve a Whiteford 2nd great-grandmother.

According to my family's oral history, my second great-grandfather was George Ginn born around 1810. His first wife, name unknown, died not long therafter, leaving him with a 5 yr. old boy, my great-grandfather William Ginn (1833-1895). George Ginn remarried and emigrated to Australia, never to be heard from again. Son William was left in care of a family by the name of Whiteford, and a Hugh Whiteford brought him to America at the age of 8 (around 1841). They settled in the town of DeKalb in St. Lawrence County, New York and William lived with the Whiteford family and also with a family named Jenkins until he married Finetta Burton, from England, in 1857 and founded a robust dynasty of Ginns.

The Whiteford family who raised my great-grandfather is known to be from the Ballynure vicinity, as was the Jenkins family. There apparently was a history of families from the immediate Ballynure environs emigrating to the same area of St. Lawrence County, New York, particularly the DeKalb/Kendrew Corners/Rensselaer Falls area. In addition to Whiteford and Jenkins, other family names apparently in this migration were Clements, Kirk, Ballantine, Dollar, Scott, McAllister, McAdoo, Moore, McCullough, and Weatherup. However, I have not found any other references to Ginn families from this area.

I am almost convinced that that George Ginn's first wife may have been a Whiteford, but I have no direct nformation to support this supposition, other than the fact that he was raised by a family of that name. However, my DNA matches for from Ancestry.com include quite a number of distant relatives with Whiteford ancesrors, with several  traceable to Hugh Whiteford.

I posted a query on an Irish genealogy board and was informed that "Ginn" there was likely to be shortened from McGinn, and my DNA admixture shows me to considerably more Scottish and less Irish than I suspected.  Then there's the fact of my 2nd GGF migrating to Australia, which apparently he had in common with some other Whitefords.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Gary Stevens, San Francisco, California