If you have read the home page you will know that my inspiration for researching our family history came from my uncle, Roy Cowley.  Roy had done much of the groundwork and I still have his original tree which goes back to the mid to late 1700s.

Roy’s tree was my starting point and, thanks to the proliferation of internet based information, it was relatively easy to check the bulk of Roy’s tree and, indeed, add to it.  However, he has some branches in his tree which I have still not yet been able to verify.

One thing that quickly became clear to me was that there are several different variations of our surname - Cowley, Coley, Coaley, and Cooley are the spellings that I have come across during my research.  Whether these variations are a just a “normal”  evolution of the name, whether they result from illiteracy and the inability of  our ancestors to read and write in the 18th century, or whether there are just errors in transcription from original documents it is impossible to know.

The complexity of the research task is illustrated by searching for the name Cowley in Sussex.  For the period 1700-1900 there are 144 documented matches in census, baptism, and burial records and, no doubt, there are many more which have not yet been found and transcribed.  Any one of these could be linked to our own “branch” of the family.  Much of the information cannot be checked electronically and, one of these days, I will have to abandon the electronic research and take a trip to Brighton to try and check paper records.

© Peter Cowley 2008