Dr. Jasper Gunn’s wife presents one of the most persistent uncertainties in his record. Passenger lists, church records, town proceedings, land transactions, and probate documents let us reconstruct much of Jasper’s life. The woman who shared his migration and helped establish the Gunn family in New England is harder to fix. Later records and genealogies give her three different names: Anne, Mary, and Christian.
Combining the names solves nothing, and there is no basis for treating them as interchangeable. Each arises from a different body of evidence, and each must be weighed by the nature and date of its source.
The strongest surviving evidence identifies Jasper’s wife — and certainly his widow — as Christian Gunn.
Anne Goun and the Voyage of the Defence
The earliest possible reference to Jasper’s wife appears in the 1635 passenger list of the Defence, which sailed from London. Jasper appears as “Jasper Goun,” aged twenty-nine. “Ann Goun,” aged twenty-five, follows immediately after him. The shared surname and adjacent placement strongly suggest they traveled together, most likely as husband and wife. The commonly cited printed version of this list is Hotten’s List; the original manuscript is a separate matter, addressed below.
The list does not describe Ann as Jasper’s wife. It records neither their relationship nor their destination. Adjacent placement on a seventeenth-century passenger list often marked a household grouping, but placement alone cannot prove that Ann was the woman later known as Christian Gunn.
The entry establishes only that a woman recorded as Ann Goun accompanied Jasper across the Atlantic. Whether “Ann” preserved her name accurately, reflected a clerk’s error, or belonged to a different woman remains unresolved. The passenger-list tradition gives evidence for Anne without identifying Jasper’s wife across the rest of his life.
The Appearance of Mary
Local histories, cemetery compilations, family genealogies, and online trees have long attached the name Mary to Jasper Gunn. Some call his wife Mary Gunn. Others reconcile the competing traditions by calling her Mary Christian, Christian Mary, or Mary Christian Baldwin.
The Charles R. Hale Collection of Connecticut Cemetery Inscriptions is one potentially significant source. A Works Progress Administration project of the 1930s, the Hale Collection recorded legible inscriptions from more than two thousand Connecticut cemeteries. It retains value because some of the stones its workers transcribed have since worn away or vanished. It remains, however, a twentieth-century transcription rather than a contemporary colonial record.
A Hale entry reportedly links Mary to Jasper Gunn. That reference proves nothing until the original manuscript page is examined. The examination has to establish whether Hale’s worker copied the name from an original seventeenth-century gravestone, from a later replacement or commemorative monument, or from supplementary cemetery notes — and it has to separate the manuscript’s wording from names a later database indexer supplied.
The Hale Collection shows that Mary belongs to the later Connecticut record tradition. It does not establish that Jasper’s wife used that name in her lifetime.
No sound basis exists for treating Mary and Christian as interchangeable Puritan names either. Both were independent feminine given names. Mary was a biblical name in wide use across Protestant England and New England. Christian — related to Christiana, Christina, and Christine — was an established female name in Britain. Mary was never a customary diminutive of Christian. Jasper could conceivably have used Mary as an undocumented household name or term of affection, but no letter, diary, or family record supports it. The idea stays conjecture and cannot account for a formal record.
The Probate Evidence for Christian
The clearest evidence comes from the end of Jasper’s life and from his widow’s estate.
Christian Gunn, widow of Jasper Gunn, made her will on 6 May 1690. The inventory of her estate was completed on 31 October of the same year. Her will named children and grandchildren belonging to the family represented in Jasper Gunn’s own will, tying her firmly to his household. A recent article in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register likewise names her “Christian Gunn, widow of Jasper” and discusses the family members her estate identifies.
Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration study accordingly records Jasper Gunn’s wife as Christian _____, married by about 1637, dead between the making of her will and the taking of her inventory in 1690. Anderson did not accept Mary, Anne, or Baldwin as established elements of her identity.
This evidence outweighs the later family histories. It was made during Christian’s lifetime, for a legal purpose, in the community where she lived. It identifies her not as a woman merely associated with Jasper but explicitly as his widow, and it connects her through named beneficiaries to the known Gunn family. Christian must therefore stand as the best-established name of Jasper Gunn’s wife.
One Wife, or More Than One?
The competing names leave open a further possibility: Jasper may have married more than once.
Ann Goun, aboard the Defence in 1635, could have been an earlier wife who died after the family reached New England. Jasper might then have married Christian before some or all of his children were born. A record naming Mary could likewise point to another wife rather than to Christian.
No known marriage record, death entry, probate proceeding, or guardianship document establishes a succession of wives. The children named in Jasper’s and Christian’s wills appear to belong to one connected family, though the wills do not prove Christian bore every child. Multiple marriages remain a legitimate hypothesis, not a fact.
The Baldwin Identification
The maiden surname Baldwin raises a separate problem. Later genealogies routinely name Jasper’s wife Mary Christian Baldwin and place her in the Buckinghamshire Baldwin family. The identification is plausible: the Gunns kept close associations with Baldwins in New England, and several Baldwins migrated from Buckinghamshire during the Great Migration.
Plausibility is not documentation. No contemporary record yet examined identifies Jasper’s wife as a Baldwin. Her will calls her Christian Gunn, not Christian Baldwin Gunn, and Anderson’s Great Migration account leaves her maiden surname blank. Baldwin should stand as a traditional identification that remains unproved. Confirming it would require an English baptism or marriage record, a Baldwin will naming Christian as Jasper Gunn’s wife, or another contemporary document tying her explicitly to the family.
Historical Determination
The evidence supports a single conclusion:
Jasper Gunn’s wife and widow should be identified as Christian Gunn. Christian is the name her own probate record establishes, confirmed by the family relationships her will documents. Anne is tied to Jasper through the 1635 passenger list of the Defence, but the relationship between Anne Goun and Christian Gunn is uncertain. Mary appears in later cemetery, local-history, and genealogical traditions with no established documentary foundation. Baldwin is a plausible and longstanding maiden-name attribution that remains unproved.
The conclusion does not make the competing names disappear. It acknowledges them and assigns each the weight it has earned.
The uncertainty itself carries historical weight. Seventeenth-century records identified women through husbands, fathers, estates, or church membership rather than through full accounts of their own lives. Their names were abbreviated, mistranscribed, misread, or omitted. Later genealogists filled the silences by merging traditions that may have referred to different people. “Mary Christian Baldwin Gunn” offers a reassuring completeness, and it may conceal the problem rather than solve it.
The more responsible identification is:
Christian Gunn, wife and widow of Jasper Gunn; maiden surname unproved.
Where the traditional identification is relevant, it can be expanded:
Christian Gunn, traditionally identified in later genealogies as Mary Christian Baldwin.
This form keeps the accumulated family tradition while separating it from what the records establish.
Research Still Required
Several records should be examined before the question is closed:
- The original or archival image of the 1635 Defence passenger list — the placement and handwriting of Jasper and Ann Goun — checked against the printed Hotten’s List.
- The original Milford and Hartford church records, for any reference to Jasper’s wife as Mary, Anne, or Christian.
- The full Hale Collection manuscript page in Connecticut Headstone Inscriptions, volume 29, with the gravestone or monument it transcribes identified and dated.
- Jasper Gunn’s original probate file and the complete probate file of Christian Gunn.
- English parish and probate records for the Gunn and Baldwin families, especially any naming a Christian or Anne who married Jasper Gunn.
- The earliest printed genealogy or local history to introduce the names Mary and Baldwin.
Until one of these yields new direct evidence, Christian remains the historically established name.