I have a group of DNA matches that I've labelled the Rickling Skinners. As far as I can see at the moment they have nothing to do with my Witham Skinners who either stayed in Witham or moved down the A12/old London-Colchester road through Hatfield Peverel and the Walthams to West Ham. The Rickling group are descended from a William Skinner who married Elizabeth Stubbings in Wendens Ambo on the 19th October 1790 and settled in Rickling, and their descendants stayed there and in neighbouring Quendon. Elizabeth Stubbings was born in Debden in 1764 and was the daughter of John Stubbings and Hannah Stanley. Born in Debden in 1726/27 Hannah was the daughter of James Stanley and Anne Scotcher, and so the sister of my four times great grandmother, Martha Stanley who married John Smart. William Skinner was a native of Rickling and a lot older than Elizabeth Stubbings; having been baptised in Rickling in 1748 to parents William and Ann (née Knight) who had married in Quendon in 1744. It's possible that William's marriage to Elizabeth in 1790 was a second marriage. He died in Rickling in 1822 but was buried in neighbouring Quendon on the 7th July aged 77. William and Ann's first two children were baptised in Quendon: Mary in 1745, and Robert in 1747; they had five more children, including William, baptised in Rickling. The Essex Record Office have a settlement certificate in Rickling in 1747 for William Skinner of Newport, a carpenter and his wife Anne and family, and this sounds very much like the right family, which takes this Skinner line back to Newport. Is this William Skinner senior (b. c1720) related to the Edward Skinner (1746?-1824) who was a carpenter in Newport during the 1770s? William Skinner junior and his wife Elizabeth Stubbings had two daughters, Mary and Sarah, who both produced illegitimate children before settling down to married life. Mary was baptised in Rickling on the 23rd October 1791, and had a daughter Keziah baptised on the 14th April 1811. A bastardy order identifies her father as William Perring the younger, labourer, of Rickling, and Keziah used his surname when she married John Wratten in Cambridge in 1834. Mary went on to marry William Bell of Debden in Rickling on the 24th October 1815. Sarah Skinner, baptised in Rickling on the 30th June 1793, had three illegitmate children born in Rickling: Lucy in 1812, William in 1815 and James in 1817; only James is the subject of a bastardy order, and his father is named as James Bond of Stansted Mountfitchet, labourer. Sarah married the much older Edward Reid in 1819 in Rickling and they had a daughter Jane before he died in 1823. Sarah appears in the censuses as the wife of a George Reed, but I can find no obvious marriage for this couple.