JOHN1 CHINN, the original immigrant to America, is said to have been
born around 1640 in England and arrived in America in 1657. Chinn is an
ancient family from England and Scotland where the orthography of the
name has been changed many times from the Norman-French title
‘De Cheyne’, with ‘Chinn’ adopted as the spelling of the name in America.
The family settled in Virginia and Kentucky and then moved down to
Louisiana where Judge Thomas Withers Chinn (1791–1852) operated a
plantation on the Mississippi. His grandson and namesake relocated
to San Francisco where he married Lillie Belle Smoot, the adopted daughter of
the SF District Attorney, David L. Smoot. Their daughter was Lillian
Frances Chinn who married John Henry Saunders (1880–1940) in 1905.
