Sally Ginn

Wife of Rowland Tyler, married 28 Mar 1804 (Brigham), and mother of Hannah Read Tyler.

Her parentage is the one conflict that runs through the whole Ginn side. Mollie Pfeiffer’s Ginn chart makes her a daughter of Capt. James Ginn and Ann Riggs; Brigham’s Tyler Genealogy (1912, vol. 1 pp. 220-221, no. 701) calls her “daughter of William H. Ginn, a shipbuilder of Ellsworth, Maine.” Both give her birth as 20 Feb 1784. The research follows Mollie provisionally, so the Ginn, Genn, Riggs, Millett, Greenaway, Wheeler, Yeoman, Allen, Goodale, Stanwood and Messer ancestry here stands or falls with this link.

Two ties support Mollie’s version (inference): her sister Anna (if she is James’s daughter) married Josiah Brewer in 1793, and Josiah’s sister Lavinia married Ebenezer Tyler, Rowland’s brother, in 1799 (BHM 1). So the Ginn, Brewer and Tyler families were already linked when Sally married.

WikiTree’s profile of Capt. James Ginn (Ginn-138) lists her as his ninth child, “Sally Genn; b. 20 Feb 1784 at Orrington, Penobscot, Maine,” and gives her death as 12 Mar 1834 “at age 50”; it cites no record for her. The same profile, an imported tree, has the intention at Bucksport, 25 Feb 1804 (“she and Rowland Tyler were marr pub.”), again with no specific source for the line. Upton’s The Ginns and Their Kin (1963) also counts her among Capt. James’s twelve children. Porter’s list of his children (BHM 4:237-238) leaves her out, but Buck says Ginn had “six sons and six daughters” (BHM 1:105), and that count works only if she is included (inference).

Open questions

• Who was her father? The Bucksport intention of 25 Feb 1804, the 1804 marriage record, the Orrington town records of the Ginn children’s births (1776-90), or a Ginn probate (James Ginn, Hancock County, 1818) naming her would settle it.
• The colonial tree marks her link to James Ginn and Ann Riggs as inference and says Brigham’s “William H. Ginn” “cannot be right,” being a garbling of her brother William R. Ginn (b. 1786). The page keeps the link compiled and possible, with Brigham’s reading as a possible alternative, since her father is an open research task (to-decide.md).