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
