Coad/Coode family blog

DIASPORA - THE COADS, CODDS AND CODES of CANADA

2011-09-04T20:21:00.001-07:00

This one-name study is supposed to collect information about all people called COAD, CODE or COODE – but we have up to now avoided a majority who were not called CODE at all till they emigrated to Canada and the USA from Ireland around 1820. In the south-west of Ireland they were called CODD– a very ancient name that dates back to the first Norman invasion of Ireland pre 1200. But for some reason, independent CODD families arriving in North America changed their name en-masse to CODE and later, sometimes to COAD.

This may seem very peculiar – but it should be remembered that exactly the same thing happened in Devon and Cornwall after 1600, when many widely spread and independent families simultaneously changed their names from CODE and COODE to COAD.

In the USA it can be postulated that the change occurred when their immigration was processed through New York, and in Canada, possibly because most of them went to the one small farming town of Kitley in Ontario north of the Great Lakes. But not all.

We have reconstructed all the Coad, Code and Codd families of Canada to see if any pattern emerges. In this we have been helped by the substantial work of Brain Bailey at http://www.yclc.ca/indexzp.html who has been working for some considerable time on both the Canadian and Irish families. Others who have contributed to the family history of the Irish Codds include Annette Code, Zoe Mollot Code, and Sherry Twamley.

As we have done in other parts of the one-name study we have mapped all the people called Code, Coad and Codd in the 1901 Canada Census back to an immigrant ancestor – with less than 5% who are strays. There were some significant tangles (for instance there were 10 William Codes born 1840-7 and another seven born 1862-4) but we were aided a great deal by "Ontario Marriages" at Familysearch and Ancestry, which lists the parents of marrying couples.

In 1901 there were 387 CODEs, 170 COADs and 41 CODDs in Canada – a total of about 600 people. Up to that time we have chronicled 490 males that lived in Canada, including about 77 males that emigrated from the British Isles, alone or with their families.

The distribution of origin of these is somewhat similar to the USA, but very different to that of Australia where the Cornish dominate, reflecting both local recruitment practices and the 1850s Australian mining boom.

As the figure shows, in Canada about three quarters of people called CODE, COAD or CODD were Irish Protestants, with about half the remainder being West Country COADs. In the USA by comparison, which had about 1200 people with these names in 1900, about a quarter of the total were Codds and another quarter were West Country Coads.

In Canada, almost all the Irish changed their name from CODD to CODE. This seems to have started very early, by 1830 or so, and after that all newcomers adopted the new variant. Later on, about a sixth of the Irish changed their name again to the Cornish COAD. The few Catholics were less prompt in changing their name – but one Catholic family in Nova Scotia, apparently having no contact with the Protestants in Ontario, was COAD from the beginning.

It is not clear whether this variation was known in Ireland prior to emigration, since the records are poor. We do know that the name CODD flourished there for over 800 years, mostly in Wexford in the south east corner. One theory is that CODE and COAD did not appear in Ireland until the emigrants began returning home in the 1860s. The Irish Census 1901 shows 17 CODEs, 25 COADs, 43 COADEs and 440 CODDs, showing that by that time the minor variants had some hold.

46= Leeds (Kitley), 44=Lanark, 13=Renfrew, 17 = Huron, 22= Middlesex (Ekfrid), 23=Perth, 24 = Oxford (Zorra), 38=Peterborough, 39=Northumberland, 36= Victoria (Mariposa)

With a few exceptions, all these families lived in Ontario, the English speaking area which lies between Hudson Bay to the north, Quebec to the East, and the Great Lakes and St Lawrence complex on the south and south-west marking the border with the USA. This is where the growth was taking place in Canada until later in the 19th Century.

As in the USA, Canada works on a geographical system of counties and "townships" for administrative purposes within each Province (a township is not a town but an area). The counties of Southern Ontario are numbered in the map.

THE WEST COUNTRY FAMILIES

Of the 80 Cornish and Devon COADs in Canada in 1901, about two thirds were from a single family of Brannel Coads: John Coad who emigrated with his 5 sons around 1860, and his brother James who arrived slightly earlier with his two sons. They farmed in Mariposa, Victoria about 50 km north of Toronto and Lake Ontario, and over 50 of them were located there by 1901.

Another family descended from Richard Coad, an only child who left his widowed father to manage their farm in St Ive while he made a new life in Ekfrid, Middlesex near Lake Erie. Three of his sons married there, and we can find Richard and 11 other members of the family in 1901.

The woodworker William Coad from St Ewe arrived in Oshawa near Toronto in 1866 and had a large family there, most of whom married after 1901.

Five other Coads turned up in Ontario during 1846-1902, all from completely different families – but none of them flourished and in 1901 they each had at best two or three representatives in Canada.

Zorra Ontario

The only one from Devon was the doctor John Foote Coad, one of the Ermington family, who arrived in Zorra, Oxford around 1864 with his eight sons. All these sons went to the USA before long, and only John Hooke's widow and one daughter were left in Canada – called Code in 1901. One grandson was later involved in a spectacular murder-suicide in West Virginia.

MANNINGTON, W. Va., June 29.-Returning to town today James L. Coad, an oil dealer, shot and instantly killed his wife as she lay in bed. He dangerously wounded Samuel Williams, a boarder, whom he found asleep on a lounge. Coad then committed suicide, Williams will recover. LA Examiner 1906.

THE ENGLISH CODDS

Like the Coads, the English Codds did NOT change their names and all Codds in Canada after about the 1860s were English. Like the Coads, the English Codds were a number of small, independent families, and many held white-collar jobs. Of 13 Codd immigrants, half never had children. The following are the three larger families

The largest family were the descendants of two sons of Reverend Charles Codd of Letheringsett Norfolk. Alfred 1843 the younger son was a physician who went to Winnipeg and became the regional surgeon. Donald the eldest was a railway land commissioner in Calgary and his son Edward 1872 was an engineer.

Another Codd family had a sad story. George Codd (1821) was a merchant's clerk in Kingston at the exit to Lake Ontario. After his Irish wife Catherine died, he placed the three children in a Catholic orphanage. But when he remarried, he did not bring the children to join his new Episcopal family in Montreal. His son Louis by the second wife was a fireman in Montreal, but the elder three children disappeared. George had a sister Eliza who married a sergeant in the Quebec (English) garrison.

James Codd 1831 lived in Quebec and worked as a labourer and general orderly. His wife Mary was an Irish Catholic and the eight children took her religion. His son William also married an Irish girl and was a hotel keeper in Ottawa.

DIASPORA! THE WICKLOW CODES

The Wicklow Codes differ in major respects from every other emigrating group we have studied. They proceeded as an organised diaspora rather than the usual haphazard single-family emigration. Here I describe only the general features of these CODEs - Brian Bailey's website has much more detail about many of the families.

Cottage near Aghowle Wicklow

Almost all the Codes were Protestant Codds from the one small area around Aghowle in Wicklow Ireland, south of Dublin. In this area, a number of men had been killed defending the village in the 1798 Rebellion. According to Brian Bailey, the English army put down the rebellion so brutally that even neutral or pro-rebel Protestants that remained within Catholic areas were treated with contempt, and they began to seek alternatives.

Table . The emigrating families

Male founders	Birth	Arrived	Clan name	No in 1901
John Codd with James	1792, 1815	1818	POWERS	32
Thomas Code with 5 sons	1773, 1800-21	1820	TWAMLEY	74
George, John, Thomas Code	1799, 1805	1821	GROVES	86
George Code, with 7 sons	1783, 1811-30	1832	BLACKBURN	88
William Code	1813	1832	WILTON	31
Joseph Code with 5 sons	1798, 1823-42	1843	JOSEPH	22
John, with James, John	1799, 1817-19	1847	BAYLEY	35
Richard Coad	1825	1850	WHYTE	20
William and Joseph Code	1829	1860	BARBER	13

Note: We have mostly named the clans for the female founder. There are also at least eight smaller families, each represented by 5 or less people in the Canada Census 1901.

Early Lanark setters - the men cut roads while
their families waited at the landing

The first three families emigrating to Canada 1818-22 (the POWERS Codds, the TWAMLEY Codds and the GROVES Codds) joined the small settlement of Kitley in Lanark County, about 20 km from the St Lawrence and 100 km south of Ottawa.

In 1832 another large family, the BLACKBURNs, arrived. Around the time of the potato famine, another wave of Aghold Irish settled slightly further north in Lanark Country. The original families also began moving west in 1848 to Perth and Huron Counties. Eventually some families moved to the major cities, Ottawa and Toronto, and further west right across Canada.

By 1901 specific townships were entirely or largely occupied by members of a single family – for instance

Bromley, Grattan and Renfrew by POWERS,
Ottawa, Alvinston, Ramsey, and Beckwith by GROVES,
Lanark and Elma by TWAMLEY,
Oxford and Montague by BLACKBURN,
North Elmsley by JOSEPH and BARBER.
Red Deer by WILTON

Old Smith Falls

A few towns like Smiths Falls, Perth, Almonte, Winnipeg and Toronto hosted representatives of multiple families, as did the Drummond area in Lanark where the geographical core of the emigration remained.

Abraham Code 1828

One worthy is Abraham Code 1828 of the GROVES line, who started as a cooper then set up a large woollen mill in Carleton Place; later he was a member of parliament. The family were educated and became barristers and civil servants, while several sons and great-nephews also went into manufacturing in Innisville.

Only one Protestant family is known to have kept the name Codd in Canada – the sons of James Codd and Mary Doyle in Shefford Quebec - and they disappeared soon after 1871.

The Relationships

Deciding which of these families are related to each other is difficult because of the paucity of Irish records, though Brain Bailey and others have made valiant efforts. One useful clue is the unusual forename Abraham, which half the families used (BLACKBURN, GROVES, TWAMLEY, JOSEPH and WHYTE) indicating they might be descended from Abraham Codd, of which there were a number in Wicklow starting from a man who lived in the late 1600s.

A more accurate method than using forenames is the use of Y-DNA testing. Only two tests for these families have so far been conducted – for WHYTE and POWERS, showing they have very different male-line origins indeed. The POWERS line belongs to the R1b1a2 clade so common in West European men, but the WHYTE line is the unusual E1b1b1 haplotype, thought to arise from Roman soldiers from Illyria settled in Britain (Bird 2007). Further testing will reveal which of the families are connected.

Gravestone of Matthew Code, one of the Groves family

THE CATHOLIC FAMILIES

The Codds were originally an English or Flemish family, but they arrived in Ireland 300 years before the Reformation, so most of those near the original Codd site in Wexford were Catholics. Nevertheless, the Codds identified themselves with the English and many became Protestants. We know of only three Catholic Irish families who came to Canada – surprising because it was the Catholics who suffered during the famine and left en-masse.

The only one with descendants was the family of Matthew Coad, a farmer who must have arrived at Nova Scotia around 1844 with his young wife. He had seven sons and as a result there were 25 descendants in 1901 – with surnames equally divided between Code and Coad.

THE NAME CHANGE

It remains a mystery why the Irish CODDs should change a venerable surname which must be one of the oldest in the world. The change to CODE started immediately in the 1830s, and was not restricted to the Protestants – even Catholic Matthew Coad in far away Nova Scotia changed his name (though he was the only one to use COAD immediately). By contrast the English Codds and Coads showed very little desire to change their name.

It cannot be due to illiteracy – if anything the Irish show higher literacy and more "modern" occupations than the Cornish in the 1901 Ireland census. Also it was done universally, with no discernable backsliding, and it was obviously done on purpose.

The same name change to Code happened in the USA, in Australia and in England when Codds moved there. Two possible reasons have been advanced.

They pronounced the name with a long European "o", somewhere between Code and Cord, and English scribes heard it as Code. However – the modern pronunciation of the name in Ireland does not take this form, and the families do not seem to have been dependent on local scribes.
They were ashamed of their Irishness and were disguising it. But then, why move from an English name Codd to one which has not been used in England for centuries?
According to Bailey, the 1898 rebellion destroyed their sense of a closeknit community and they were eager to make a new start with a new name. But this does not explain why others not connected with the Aghold community did exactly the same thing.

The sheer deliberateness and ubiquitousness of this name change is extremely unusual – and it does appear to be associated with a dislocated sense of personal and community identity.

The supplemental change to COAD was much more irregular and involved the typical vacillation we usually associate with name changes. A typical example is George Code 1835 of Beckwith, who called himself Coad when he first moved to Portland Ottawa around 1869. In 1891 he is Coade, in 1901 Code, and in 1911 Coad.

Most of this second name change happened after 1891 - by 1901 a quarter of the BLACKBURN, BAILEY and TWAMLEY family members had adopted COAD, and 15% of the GROVES. The change seems more or less haphazard, though in at least one case it was reported that it was due to a family rift.

COODES OF ST AUSTELL

2011-06-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

DRAFT SUMMARY OF COODE CHAPTER

The Coodes of Cornwall emerged from an obscure background as well-off yeomen who had been living near the town of Liskeard for centuries. Several enterprising members of the family moved to Kerrier around 1570, and arranged for a marriage of their nephew John into a family of local minor gentry on the remote coast at Breage “good only for tinning, wrecking and smuggling”. After John’s death his brother Edward arrived and took up land in neighbouring Sithney. Slowly over three generations the family built up enough capital to buy the manor of Methleigh and to open up the tiny fishing and smuggling port of Porthleven.

Three generations later, Cornwall was on the verge of a great economic boom brought about by improved deep mining methods. At this critical time an extraordinary individual was born to the family. Edward Coode, third of the name, was a self-effacing clerical superman who simultaneously held down seven jobs – partner in two banks, solicitor, landowner, County Treasurer, Clerk of the Peace and Undersheriff. As well as managing the whole county, Edward also accumulated by age 45 at least five manors – many times more land than all previous generations of the family combined. At the time of his death in 1845, Edward left an estate worth at least ten million pounds in today’s money – obtained purely through clerical activities.

At the time the County was crying out for efficient management and Edward provided it. He laid down a successful and novel family business model which his sons and grandsons emulated and shared between them until the formation of the Cornwall County Council in 1887. Although the nominally honorary county positions they occupied were obviously lucrative, the impression one gets is that the Coodes were not strictly trying to line their own pockets like the majority of their peers, but were acting in the public interest and according to the extent and intent of the law. They also did not peddle influence or try to play politics like the great families, but simply “got on with it” – which could be their motto. They garnered little public exposure but instead gained a great deal of respect which enabled them to be trusted by all parties. The family might therefore be called Cornwall’s first public servants.

In marriage too they rarely sought out the great families, as the “elder Coodes” had done, nor to any extent did they marry the offspring of industrialists or traders. They married into the families of the new state on which the British Empire was based – the military and the parish clergy – and the Coode descendants served throughout the empire in the military or as engineers.

This role was even more pronounced in the descendants of two younger brothers of Edward III. Sir John Henry Coode reached the naval rank of vice Admiral and virtually all his male descendants were navy or army officers, several of whom had key roles in important military events. His nephew Sir John Coode was probably the most famous marine engineer of all time, and his works can be found all over the Empire.

ROTTEN AND POCKET BOROUGHS – THE TREGONY ELECTION

2011-06-10T05:46:00.000-07:00

In the original House of Commons prior to the 1832 reforms, each borough and shire in England could elect two members to Parliament. Rotten boroughs were boroughs with representation in the House of Commons with so few freedmen electors that it was an easy matter to bribe ones way into parliament. These boroughs were particularly well represented in Cornwall - Cornwall elected 42 members to Parliament, one less than Scotland. Its favoured treatment was in part due to the presence of the Duchy of Cornwall, and the Cornish members were sometimes called the “Prince’s Party”.

Most of these tiny Cornish boroughs were created in the period of post-Reformation instability 1550-1600, as a result of local petitions for a borough charter, often engineered at the instigation of a wealthy patron. Each charter differed in the means of establishing the franchise: in the large town of Truro for example, only the 25 members of the corporation could vote – creating a pocket borough for Viscount Falmouth (Boscawen), whereas in St Germans adult resident male suffrage was universal but very small. One of the most infamous boroughs was Mitchell near Summercourt, where two competing lords pulled down almost all the houses eventually leaving only five electors. This particular seat often served as a quick government vehicle for electing key personages – Walter Raleigh and the Duke of Wellington both represented Mitchell.

“Burgage tenements” formed the basis of the franchise in a number of boroughs. These were specific narrow-fronted town blocks which paid rent to a private Lord. In some places it was possible to purchase a majority of the designated tenements to control the elections, while in others voting was public so that tenants could not afford to alienate the lord by voting against his nominees.

This article is about the involvement of the Coodes and their heirs in the trade in parliamentary seats, most specifically the case of Tregony, where “young Mr Coode”, later a prominent barrister, evicted nearly half the town when they voted against the patron in the 1812 election.

Peddling influence

Many of the boroughs were “closed” or “pocket”, under complete control of a private patron or “Lord” who allowed his relatives or friends to sit. Many members of the Lords controlled four or more seats in this way. The patron able to place seats at the minister’s disposal might gain advantage in many ways – places, favours, even promotion within the peerage. The trade in seats by governments of the day was overt – for example the Prime Minister Lord North advised a note to Lord Falmouth in 1774, “I hope he will permit me to recommend three of his six seats in Cornwall. The terms he expects are £2000 a seat, to which I am ready to agree.” Subsequently he complained that Falmouth was “rather shabby” as he required guineas instead of pounds (Baring Gould 1909: 37).

The Bullers, the heirs of the Coodes of Morval, controlled West and East Looe and Saltash at various times. John Buller 1721-86 quite explicitly offered his seats to the government in 1761 in exchange for positions he coveted – comptroller of the mines, or commissioner for excise – but was turned down. Eventually by strategically voting against the government he was finally appointed a lord of the Admiralty in 1765 – a position with considerable perks- and for the rest of his life he never again voted against the government. (Christie 1970).

Buller left the seat when he died in 1786 to his son John Buller jr who had been in India since 1777. The son in his absence made various Buller relatives his agent in offering the seat to “friends of the Pitt administration” for £900 – and East Looe also for £2000. When he returned 16 years later in 1802, he nominated himself and his brother to the two East Looe seats. They held these seats till his death in 1807 – despite the efforts of the Trelawneys to petition for a new borough charter which would allow them access. (Thorne 1986: 71).

Bribery

The first recorded case of election bribery was in 1536 when one Thomas Longe “a simple man and of small capacity to serve” acknowledged that he had given £4 to the returning officer and to electors. The borough was fined, the member was removed, and the returning officer was fined and imprisoned. However, even though miscreants could be fined and imprisoned both through statute and in criminal law, it seemed that little could be done to stop the practice proliferating.

By 1700 the extracurricular pastimes of the gentry had moved away from piracy and duelling to vote-rigging and influence-peddling. A major sweep of corrupt customs officers in Cornwall was undertaken in 1690 by customs inspector William Culliford of Corfe (who had himself previously been arraigned for embezzlement). An accused official called Keate who faced suspension at Penryn, claimed that “Culliford’s informer Thomas Coode was a papist, a solicitor on behalf of local dissenters, to elect burgesses”. Coode, so Keate claimed, had spent so much money on trips to London pursuing his cases that he wanted Keate’s position to reimburse his expenses.

After 1702 the returning officer was required to take an oath against bribery and corruption and for the due execution of his office the day before the election. The electors could also be compelled to do so – but attempts to enforce these oaths might be hampered by threats of violence.

By the early 1800s the whole system had become incurably corrupt. Russell’s (1820) speech refers to “small decayed boroughs, finding their suffrages eagerly sought for, have sold their seats to the highest bidder” referring to one case in which a “mark of infamy was affixed to the houses of those voters who were too honest to receive a bribe”. He also described men who speculated their whole fortune on getting elected, in order to have debts owed to them by the government repaid, or to repair their poverty with office.

With the lords of the land and the local gentry trafficking so freely in electoral favours, it is hardly surprising that the voters on whom the elections depended also sought payment, though these were usually for small amounts. It was actually in the marginal pocket boroughs such as Grampound, Tregony and Penryn, where indigent electors regarded selling their votes as almost a right; that the troubles arose. Outsiders trying to muscle in on cosy local arrangements were accused by members of the Corporation of bribery - and the subsequent inquiries exposed the system and ultimately led to its reform.

Sir Manasseh Lopes, a wealthy Sephardic Jew from Jamaica, spent part of his fortune in acquiring influence in the boroughs and was soon elected in 1802 after converting to Christianity. He was later so successful in exerting his influence on behalf of the government that he was created a baronet in 1805. Reformers sought to make an example of him, and in 1829 he was accused of having bribed electors in his own Barnstaple for a total £3000 and his election was found void. As well he was fined £1000 and jailed for two years over his intervention in notoriously corrupt Grampound, which lost its constituency after the Inquiry (young Thomas Coode, later a high-ranking banker and attorney, was one of the named electors). However, as Lopes already had a burgage electorate in Wiltshire his pocket, he returned himself and his nephew there the following year.

Tregony

Tregony had in early times been a port and woollen textile centre on the Fal River, but the river silted up due to tin streaming works and deforestation, and its commercial importance vanished. By the 1800s “Many of its houses were then in ruins, and the scene of desolation was spreading". In the heyday of seat-peddling the constituency was controlled by Lord Darlington (William Harry Vane 1766-1842, fox hunter and patron of the turf); a member of the Whig opposiiton who was known to go to extreme lengths to maintain his grip on his electorates (Thorne 1986:46). Darlington bought the borough of Tregony around 1807 in order to have control of the two members, thereby furthering his push to be made a Duke.

There were however others who sought these seats, and could sometimes obtain them for considerably less than the cost of buying a whole borough. For that purpose, disreputable “agents” (often local publicans or tradesmen) matched up groups of local voters who were prepared to sell their votes with suitable fee-paying candidates (Thomas Code jr of Penryn in 1698 was clearly one of these).

There had been a tradition in Tregony as elsewhere of evicting tenants who supported opposition candidates to the Lord (Thorne 1986:84). This was possible because most of them were so poor and had been in rental arrears of up to two years. In 1806 following the death of the previous patron, Lord Darlington was still negotiating the purchase of the borough and in the meantime bought the two seats from the lord’s widow for £10000. However a local publican Middlecoat offered to seat Sir Jonathan Miles for £4000. The returning officer for Tregony, who had been “tampered with” struck off votes from Miles, ensuring the sitting members were re-elected. Miles petitioned, and send Middlecoat £4200 for expenses of the petition – but the sitting members paid him a further £2500 to hold the witnesses back, and they were duly pronounced elected, with Middlecoat receiving money from both sides.

These machinations were merely highjinks compared to the scandal of the 1812 election - at which the Lord’s candidates actually lost their seats to a determined and organised opposition in the face of local discontent. Edward Coode was at that time only 20 years old. He was Darlington’s agent and attorney in the borough, collecting the rents and acting as returning officer for the elections.

What actually transpired at the election is rather hard to establish from the petition hearing (House of Commons 1813). It seems that several “agents”, local tradesmen Croggon and Woolcock, were negotiating with the sitting member for Grampound, a Captain William Holmes, but were finding it difficult to re-elect him even though he had offered funds of £6000 for both seats “to be deposited for the borough”. It seems that these funds actually came from Lord Yarmouth, Warden of Stannaries, on the Treasury interest. A chance meeting on the road between Holmes and the rector of Tregony, the elderly Rev Richard Gurney , who told him of “great oppression and dreadful treatment of the inhabitants of Tregony from those who have the management of the Borough” convinced Holmes to try a coup there. Through Croggon he set up a fund at the Miner’s Bank in Truro on the pretext of paying for the construction of a dwelling. Canvassing parades with drums and fifes proceeded through the town, and a party lasting several days held at two hotels gave free beer and gin to the opposition voters. Holmes also made promises to both Croggon and Woolcock to arrange entry for their sons to prestigious London schools.

Kings Arms, Tregony, where the Opposition held court.

At the election a notice from the Mayor and sitting member was read out and provided to opposition voters accusing the opposition team of bribery and saying that any votes for them would be thrown away. Nevertheless it is believed Lord Darlington also distributed £5000 to his supporters to try to hold the seats. Holmes demanded that the Bribery Oath should be administered to all voters (as he had not yet paid anyone) but nothing came of it.

Immediately after defeating the patron’s nominees, Holmes took off to London without meeting his promises to the “agents”. Croggon was severely disappointed and blew the whistle to Coode – who launched a petition to Parliament.

The following day, Coode and his agents made demands for rent and brought bailiffs to evict 98 of them onto the streets. They refused to accept payments from the successful candidates for the rents. For the few who were able to pay, he had them “mulcted in costs” (fined) for £98 - when their annual rents were typically only £8 (according to Baring Gould 1909) . The tenants were only reinstated when a kindly local woman rapidly put together a loan fund for their relief. A few days later, the new candidates met the rental arrears

The election results were upheld, but because of a letter he had incautiously written, Thomas Croggon was was found guilty of “openly and corruptly endeavouring to procure the return of two persons to serve in parliament for the borough of Tregony.” He was sentenced to Newgate Prison, but released after a week. The whole episode smacked so thoroughly of corruption all the way down from the Exchequer through the agents to the village parson and poor tenants that singling out one man as scapegoat was not advisable. Croggon’s main complaint about his treatment was that he had been required to pay two guineas to be put in the Superior Master Felons side of the gaol but he did not receive superior accommodation.

Darlington was used to moving his money around from one borough to another where his chances seemed best, but he held out in Tregony and secured the seats in the next election without opposition – though control of the borough continued to prove troublesome and he eventually disposed of it.

In the parliamentary proceedings Coode is rarely mentioned despite his key role, and attempts to do so tended to be ruled invalid. Rev Gurney (who himself had received his living through interfering with a previous election, and had been caught with a "woman of poor character") clearly disliked young Coode and reported that he held a rod over some voters who were very much afraid of him. Gurney defended his own role by saying he never exhorted anyone or saw them offered money but “everyone in the place was so disgusted and so exasperated that they waited only for an opportunity to oppose the Darlington interest. Some were in arrear and they would be oppressed by Mr Coode if they had not relief”.

“Young Mr Coode” was no doubt keen to make his mark in what was probably his first position, representing his patron’s interests in Tregony, which it appears he pursued with ferocity. Although he organised the mass evictions on extremely short notice, it seems unlikely that he did this unilaterally. Although there would not have been time to contact Lord Darlington, he was probably directed to go ahead by the losing candidates. Whether Coode retained his position after the 1814 debacle is unknown. Hopefully he learned an important lesson from this disaster, because he went on to become one of Cornwall’s most famous attorneys.

As the 19th century progressed, reformers pinpointed cases like Tregony and other revolts of electors. The mood was changing away from the politics of patronage and towards more abstract ideas of principle and party politics (Jaggard 1999). In the great reform of 1832, 13 out of 20 Cornish boroughs were disenfranchised and the seats were transferred to the newer industrial towns Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield which up till then had not been represented in Parliament at all.

REFERENCES

Baring-Gould, S (1909). Cornish characters and strange events. (London: John Lane).

Blackstone, Sir W, E Christian, J F Archbold, J Chitty, B Field (1765). Commentaries on the laws of England, Volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Christie, I R (1970). Myth and reality in late-eighteenth-century British politics. Private patronage vs government influence: John Buller and the Contest for control of parliamentary elections at Saltash. University of California Press.

House of Commons. (1813). Parliamentary Papers. Report from the Select Committee on the Tregony Election Petition. 53 George III.

Jaggard E (1999). Cornwall politics in the age of reform, 1790-1885. Royal Historical Society.

Russell, Earl John R. (1820). Speech of Lord John Russell, in the House of Commons, on December 14th, 1819 with extracts from the evidence on the Grampound bribery indictments. Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown.

Thorne, R G (1986). The House of Commons 1790-1820, History of Parliament Trust, Secket and Warburg.

Whetter, J (1974). Cornwall in the 17th century: an economic history of Kernow. Lodenek Press

Worth, R N (1877). Ancient boroughs of Cornwall. Journal of the British Archaeological Association 33: 21.

EARLY MOVEMENTS OF THE DEVON CODES

2011-04-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

We have been puzzling for a long time now about the movements of the COADs and CODDs etc within Devon, and the existence of so many spelling and linguistic variants in that county. The CODEs who lived in the remote manor of Gidleigh in Dartmoor from 1420 to 1490 or so are the first men in Devon we know with our surname. Some time ago I came up with the idea that the name might have been spread by younger sons of the CODEs of Gidleigh, prior to their move to Morval in Cornwall before 1520. These sons are poorly documented if at all, but if they existed there would not have been anything for them to do in a remote manor like Gidleigh,and they would fairly naturally travel to the nearest market towns. Here is a map of the possible movements of the Gidleigh CODEs.

Theory 1. Movements of the CODEs of Gidleigh up to 1500

However, quite recently I had a dialogue with the COYTE family association. This is an even more ancient surname than CODE, with references back to the late 1200s. They lived near the south coast of Devon, and are especially associated with the parishes of Aveton Gifford and Modbury. The Coyte family association maintains an excellent website at http://www.coytefamily.com/.

I have just received transcriptions of all the Tudor tax records for Devon, and it is clear that COYTE and their possible COYDE relatives in nearby Brixham are by far the most "developed" and well-established family having related surnames to ours in Devon. This leads to an alternative theory - that perhaps all the similar Devon surnames are descended from COYTE.

COYTE=>COYDE=>CODE=>COADE, COWD=>CODD=>CUDD, CUDE

Possible movements of the COYTEs in the 1400s or earlier.

The idea here is that the family travelled around the coast by boat, and up the rivers or on the "Mariner's Way" into Dartmoor.

We wait with considerable interest for Y-DNA results for the COYTEs, which may confirm or otherwise this new theory.

Finally, there is the theory that the surnames stayed pretty much within "spheres of influence" as the following map of names around 1550 shows

The South Hams are pretty much the province of Coyde and Coyte at this time, with Coydes often switching back to Coyte, and with a lone COYETT to the north. The Cowdes occupy the area east of Exeter and also across the border in Somerset, where COWARD can also be found. The CLODEs are a discrete groups near the Dorset border. The CODEs are scattered through this seemingly randomly, while at this early stage COAD, CODD, COARD and CAWDE do not exist.

ACCOUNTS OF THE BOROUGH OF LISKEARD

2011-03-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

The mayors’ and portreeves’ accounts of the Borough of Liskeard make interesting reading and give the some idea of borough life in late mediaeval times. A substantial amount went to the King for rent, and rents on mills and borough property were significant. The councillors and especially the mayor received considerable sums for expenses and their time.

Hospitality for visiting gentry took up some considerable budget: Wine and sugar was frequently given to lords when they came to town, and soldiers had to be billeted or fed.

- (1466-7) 1 bottle wine for William Code and John Trelawney 3d
- bread and beer for 700 soldiers that went through the town 4s
- wine and sugar bestowed on many gentlemen of the district
- wine for the courts 9s 6d
- two dozen capons, two dozen chickens and a dozen of geese to Sir F Godolphin at lammas assizes 58s

Public entertainments on feast days were a regular expense. Cock fighting and badger baiting were common sports, the latter up until about 1800 when badgers became scarce “ Betting and drinking invariably attended, and often drunkenness and fighting”. Blood sports finished in 1835 with the Cruelty to Animals Act.

Bull baiting was also popular in London and the towns. The last event in Liskeard was held in 1777 - “The Bull Post, a large stone with a ring fastened to it, was sunk in the ground for the inhuman purpose of securing bulls to be baited for diversion.” The bull was tethered to a rope about 30 feet long. Before the event started, the bull's nose might have been blown full of pepper to enrage the animal before the baiting. Specially-trained dogs would be set upon the bull one at a time, a successful attack resulting in the dog fastening his teeth strongly in the bull's snout. Many dogs were kept for the event, and the now-extinct Old English Bulldog, a small mastiff, was bred especially for this sport. Women would try to catch the dogs being thrown through the air in their pinafores.

- for cleansing the market bell rope after they had use of him to beat a bull 7s
- divers gentlemen at the first cock fighting 6s8d
- to players 20s;

Bread and cloth were quite frequently given to the poor, and the maintenance of the church, the local alms-house and other borough property was a significant expense. Corrections and the local prison were an expense item, but fines could be levied on wrongdoers

- paid Barnabas for whipping a woman 4d
- for whipping Alice Piper 6d
- paid for amending the pillory and cage 2s6d
- (1652) to the undersheriff Mr Coode for freeing the town from going to the assizes 6s8d.
- fine from S Champion for ill behaviour in the guild hall on Innocents-day 20s

The borough had to incur ceremonial military expenses in the 1600s; and ransoms sometimes had to be paid

- Crocker for making the duke his arms 30s,
- repairing the chests that hold the armour 2s
- paid to J and T King who had their tongues cut out and towards the ransoming of their owner and ship from the Turks 2s6d

Source: John Allan (1856). History of the Borough of Liskeard and its vicinity.

MINERS OF PERRANZABULOE

2011-03-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

Cornish mines
Life could be tough for the mining families of Cornwall and the people who did the mining were tough. Ann Kitto, born around 1800, was not exactly our embodiment of a good mother – her ten children had little schooling and she sent them all to work in the local lead mine at the age of 10. Granted, the children under 12 did not go down the mines but were ore dressers, picking and chipping their way through the crushed ore with small fingers to find galena. Back in the 1830s it was not known how much damage lead could do to children’s mental and physical development - although the condition of adult miners was obvious. Frederick Engels writes in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,

“The inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen and mixed with dust … seriously affects the lungs, disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs … so that men who begin this work in early youth are far from reaching the stature of women who work above ground that many die young of galloping consumption and most in middle age; that they age prematurely and become unfit for work between the 35th and 45th year … work above ground, breaking and sorting the ore, is done by girls and children, and is regarded as very wholesome, being done in the open air.”

Like many miners Ann was not much for rules although she lived in a time of strict social convention. In 1823 when she was seven months pregnant, she married William Coad, a man from the farming community of St Ewe who had chosen to become a miner rather than being born to it. The couple did not bother to have three of their seven children baptised, although this was essential for official recognition or benefits. When William died in 1834 at the age of 41, probably from miner’s disease, she took up with William Sobey, a lead miner 16 years younger than herself, and had three more children, marrying him in 1838 some time after the birth of their first child.

In 1846 James Coad her eldest son was killed in one of Cornwall’s worst mining disasters, the East Wheal Rose disaster

TERRIBLE DISASTER AT EAST WHEAL ROSE AND NORTH WHEAL ROSE MINES - THIRTY-NINE LIVES LOST. - East Wheal Rose mine is situated in a capacious vale, or kind of basin, at the bottom of several hills, which arise around it somewhat in the form of an amphitheatre. …Between twelve and one o'clock on the day we have named, immense masses of black clouds overhung all the hills surrounding East Wheal Rose, and extended as far as the eye could reach in the horizon. A terrible thunderstorm commenced; the lightning was very vivid; the rolling of the thunder was at times awfully loud; and about one o'clock the rain poured down in such a lashing torrent as eye-witnesses state they never before saw in England. Persons who had been in South America state that they have known such torrents in those regions, but they never before saw such masses of water falling from the clouds in Europe. The consequence was that in an incredibly short space of time large streams of water poured down the hills surrounding East Wheal Rose, with impetuous force, and, uniting at the bottom, formed almost "a perfect sea of water," which rushed on from south to north in the direction of the narrow ravine we have mentioned, and directly over the area of the sett. … The consequence was that the descent of water occasioned a rush of air throughout the mine, which blew out the candles, and left the poor miners in total darkness… As the kibbles descended in Gower's shaft the drowning men caught hold of them, and were drawn up in clusters, as many as could hold on. The men also frequently caught hold of the chains, and were drawn up; one man, it is stated, coming up with merely a finger or two hitched in the chain.. The distressing fact was, however, made known on the Thursday evening, that forty-two poor fellows were missing, being still in the workings of the mine.

West Briton and Corwall Advertiser.

Lead mine Wisconsin

The second son Samuel, who had left home young, married Frances Truscott in 1847 and headed for Mineral Point, a largely Cornish mining town in Wisconsin, where he named his first son James after his recently deceased brother. He had the good sense to leave mining, and by 1860 he had three children and was doing well as a wheat merchant. By 1870 he was rich, worth about $20 000 – at least $340 000 in today’s money, and more like $4.8 million in comparison with GDP or wages.

The remaining two sons William 1826 and John 1832 were not quite so fortunate. They emigrated to the mining town Clunes in Victoria Australia in 1852-3. It seems there were other hazards for miners than disease and mining accidents because in 1860 William was knocked off his horse on the way to the pub and died.

An inquest was held at the Kent Hotel, Clunes, on Wednesday, before W B Lees, Esq., on the body of William Coad, aged 34 years. Thomas Mark deposed that on Tuesday last, in company with four other persons, he was returning from witnessing a prize fight. Deceased rode past them, and when a few yards ahead, was by a low, projecting tree knocked off his horse. He never spoke afterwards. The accident happened near Antrim Arms, whither the body was taken. Dr Robinson attended, and ascribed his death to concussion of the brain.

Creswick and Clunes Advertiser 16/11/1860 Shocking Accident :

William had managed to save the not inconsiderable sum of £375 from his mining endeavours, including cash, a house and a share in the Clunes United Mine. A probate hearing was held soon afterwards in which it emerged that his illiterate brother John, assisted by “advisers” had managed to squander most of the estate on a lavish funeral.

John presented a deposition to the Supreme Court which was very articulate for a man who could neither read nor write, explaining that the costs were higher because his brother had been buried at Ballarat rather than Clunes “in consequence of a wish to that effect expressed by the deceased” (unlikely as he never regained consciousness). Because John was illiterate he had to take a team of three “sureties” to Melbourne several times to obtain administration of the intestate will. Twenty men were invited to the funeral, and wages for men to replace some of them had to be paid for two days each, as well as wages to cover his own time. An extraordinary level of administrative, hotel and transport expenses was incurred.

Thomas Randall, agent, for meetings and affidavits £34/5/6
Coffin and grave 12/1/0
Mr Marks for mourning 17/9/6
Mr Marshall Undertaker 14/10/0
Tombstone 13/0/0
Railing around grave 17/0/0
John George hire of carriages 15/0/0
Horse and coach hire for self, Bennet and sureties to Ballarat 23/13/0
Paid men to work their shifts while attending to administration 6/0/0
Hotel expenses during administration 6/0/0
Hotel room for corpse 6/10/0
Hotel rooms twenty mourners 20/12/0
Hotel expenses for same [presumably alcohol] 9/1/6
Paid men to work shifts of mourners 17/10/0
Collecting vouchers and receipts 4/15/0

TOTAL £216/3/0

(a pound in 1860 was worth about $120 today based on retail prices, or over $1000 based on average earnings).

It is hard to say whether John, who might have been rather slow, was led astray by unscrupulous advisors collecting commissions, or whether he truly intended to give his brother a royal send-off.

The remaining money £154/10/0, John said, should go to William’s only next of kin, being himself, his brother Samuel and sister Elizabeth, who were the only persons entitled to a distribution (neglecting to mention his mother Ann or his three half siblings).

Ann, the true next-of-kin, petitioned for letters of administration within a few months but it was too late. With her two younger daughters married off and her husband also dead at the age of 50, she did the sensible thing and set sail for Wisconsin, where she could be found living with wealthy eldest son Samuel in 1870. There is no sign of any of this family after that time.

John Coad married a Cornish girl, Mary Jane Nankervis, in 1863 and had eleven children in the spa town of Daylesford Vic, including six sons with offspring. He called his eldest son William James Coad in honour of his brothers and father. There are Coad descendants of John living today on the Victorian goldfields.

The Perranarworthal Coads

2011-01-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

Perranarworthal Church

One of the very first puzzles we encountered in the Coad project was the question of the Perranarworthal Coads. Three brothers had large families in the early 1800s in this parish, which is north of Falmouth along the Fal inlet. Two of them, John and Benjamin, were baptised in Perran in 1801 and 1806 as children of Walter and Peggy Coad, while the middle brother Walter was also likely to be their son.

• John the eldest born 1799 in Kea was a gardener and had 13 children with his wife Elizabeth Trengove; he married again a few years after she died in 1856. They have descendants in Cornwall, Devon, Durham and Minnesota.

• Walter the second was a copper miner and had 9 children; he died at age 56 well before his wife Grace Collins. His sons were all skilled workers – a wool merchant in Australia, two foundry workers, and Richard a former miner who travelled the world giving lectures on the evils of drink. They have descendants in Victoria, South Africa, Canada, and parts of Britain.

• Benjamin the youngest started out as a miner but became a foundry labourer by about 1843. He had seven children and died at the age of only 45; his sons were labourers in industry or miners. His widow Mary Ann Vise from far away Dover apparently had a child out of wedlock in her early fifties. They had descendants in Cornwall, Illinois and Nebraska.

Who were this Walter and Peggy with so many descendants? The answer has eluded us until now.

There are two main lines of Truro miners. The first is descended from Richard Coad and resided in Kenwyn and Feock; while the second is descended from John Coad ~1660/Honor Davie and was largely restricted to Gwennap, Kea and Perranarworthal. Walter has been a reasonably common forename among the main line Truro family, so at first we sought for Walter in this line without success.

Perranarworthal is one of the key parishes for the Truro Coads. Several of the main line Truro miner families had a few Perran christenings: Charles Coad and Susanna Gill, and Robert Coad and Jenefer Williams. The second “Gwennap” line of Truro miners are more properly called the Perran line as most of the children from 1711 to 1802 were christened there.

The online publication of parish records for Perranarworthal in the OPC database has now shed some light on this problem. We find that a Walter Coude died in Perranwell in 1819, age 66. This makes it clear that Walter was an older man, probably in a second marriage, when he had this family. We also find that a Margaret (Peggy) Allan had a base daughter Sarah Coad in April 1794, and discover Walter Coad marries her in far off Crediton Devon in December of that year.

Now the only eligible Walter Coad is Walter bp 1757 Kenwyn, youngest child of Edward 1727 Perran. He married Catherine Oates in 1780 Kenwyn – but it is unclear if the couple had children. It seem that Walter, presumably a widower, must have had a child with Peggy Allen, 20 years his junior, and then the couple eloped to Crediton and married. When the scandal had died down they returned and had four more children, who founded the modern Perran line.

So it seems the Perran Coads are descendants of the Gwennap/Perran line after all, and it is fitting that the family should have continued their association with the parish into the 20th century.

Cornwall was a farming and mining county, and apart from a little shipbuilding there was not much in the way of industry. There were however several considerable iron foundries built to produce mining equipment and engines, of which the one at Perranwharf was the first.

“It was the home of the Perran Iron Foundry, an innovative concern, run by the Fox family of Falmouth and other Quaker business families. It was set up on the site of a tin smelting works in 1791. The foundry was later operated in partnership with the Williams family, and in 1858, it was sold to them. The creek serving the factory silted up and mining in Cornwall declined. The wharf had been used to import timber for the mining industry from Scandinavia. The slump in the mining industry during the 1870s hit Perran Foundry badly and it closed in March 1879 with the loss of 400 jobs, causing great distress in the parish. In April 1879, the 'Royal Cornwall Gazette' reported that a soup kitchen had been open since January: '793 people had attended and 1,240 quarts of soup were distributed' Wikipedia

All three families of Coad men worked at this foundry. Benjamin worked there from 1837, and his eldest son Richard (1833) later joined him, along with Walter’s second son William (1830). John’s eldest son John (1824) worked at different jobs and ended up as a moulder at the plant from1854
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
There are a couple of other puzzles associated with the Perran Coades. First we cannot find a baptismal record for Walter jr. But we do find that Walter and Grace Coad and the two eldest children were the subject of a settlement order in which they were removed from Perranarworthal to Probus, 45 miles away. This is most odd since it would usually require Walter to have been born in Probus, or to have worked there for a year. Walter had been born and brought up in Perran, and he is unlikely to have worked for a year in a farming parish like Probus. Also this would normally be the result of Walter applying for parish relief in Perran, and as he seems to have worked steadily as a miner from at least 1829, and the family appear reasonably well off, his situation must have been dire in 1830. Somehow the couple returned to Perran in 1831 for the baptism of their two eldest sons.

Next – the family of Walter senior who eloped with Peggy is also very poorly documented and we cannot find baptismal records for several of his siblings. In fact the only evidence we have of their existence, or of his wife Margaret, is another removal order.

Sessions held at Lostwithiel - ref. QS/1/2/168-174 - date: 14 January 1755
Appeal by Feock against order of 7 October last, for removal of Edward Coade, tinner, wife Margaret, and their children John (10), Sarah (7), Margaret (4), and Jane (1), from Kea to Feock: order reversed.

Another puzzle has been John Coad working in Plymouth as a furnace man or as a boilermaker in the Stoke Damerel dockyards, and claiming in different censuses to have been born in Perran variously from 1835 to 1839. He married Eliza Matilda Simpson and had eight children in Devonport. Walter’s fourth son John 1835 is an appealing candidate, but he was buried in Perran in 1855. The only other candidate is the youngest son John 1835 of Francis and Jane Coad. We have no baptismal record for this man, and it is generally thought he was born in Gwennap. But he is with his family in Cornwall in 1851 and not in 1861, so he might well have tried his luck in the great shipyards of Stoke, like many other Cornish.

There is still room for a good deal of work in firming up these mining families, and we believe that DNA will be an important guide once we get sufficient numbers.

STREETS OF LONDON

2010-10-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

“They left behind them a world of certainties and limited opportunities, a world of fixed social classes dominated by an ancient regime of gentry and church. London was their magnet. What drew them to the capital was the chance of betterment. They were weary of restraint, weary of country business; they had an itching desire to see London.”

Ludgate 1898 - "Bright Lights"

The “bright lights” of the capital city have always attracted those seeking a wider range of employment or education opportunities. What is most surprising is just how few Cornish went to London and in fact far more emigrated. Prior to the advent of rail travel, it was just as easy to emigrate from more remote places like Cornwall as to move around the country. The closure of the mines caused a wide diaspora to the colonies and the North of England, but the general recession in the local economy after 1850 also led some young men to try their hands in London.
To many of the Cornish, who had a different culture, London must have seemed like a foreign country, and city life was hard on immigrants. Many of them found their way as recent immigrants to the rapidly growing manufacturing areas of London such as Tower Hamlets (West Ham, Wapping, Stepney, Limehouse) in the East End docks area, or to Lambeth south of the river. Here disease was rampant, life expectancy was short, and there was little social safety net for those who fell by the wayside. But for others who had skills, the growing metropolis offered great opportunities in the building industry, in trade, and to a lesser extent in the manufacturing sweatshops.

Market Court Kensington before 1860 – now an up-market area

As well there were several local families in London who went by the name of Cood – plus some Codds from Suffolk and Lincoln that slowly adopted the COAD variant.

ARRIVALS BEFORE 1820
As far as we know, the first Coade to live in London was Eleanor Coade, sculptor and entrepreneur from Lyme Regis Dorset , who operated her factory for Coade Stone monuments in Lambeth between 1769 and 1811. She is covered in a separate article.

A contemporary was Joseph Coad, the well-known bookseller and stationer of Brewer Street Hoxton, who was in London by 1782 and died in 1809 after marrying three times. He may have been Joseph 1743 Redruth, son of Nathaniel Coad and Mary Stephens. He had only one daughter Sarah by his first marriage.

Coad, Joseph. Recorded at No. 12, Silver-street, Golden-square. An announcement of the publication of the first part of J.Coad's Sale and Circulating Catalogue for 1782 (LDA 13 Feb 1782).
Died on Monday last [16 Jan] at Hoxton, Mr. Joseph Coad, late of Brewer-street, wholesale stationer (Courier 19 Jan 1809).

The next Coad to arrive in London was bootmaker Jonathan Coad 1777-1843 of St Stephens in Brannel, who married Margaret Bishop in St George Hanover Square, London 1803. (Jonathan was the cousin of Edward Coad who was one of the pioneers of Edwards Illinois). Their son William Bishop Coad 1804-1853 was a carver and gilder. He had a large family of nine children in Westminster 1827-46, but the last three died as infants and there were only four grandchildren. Their mother died in 1847 and it appears that William had difficulty looking after his progeny. Charlotte 1835 the eldest girl had two daughters out of wedlock and ended up in the Strand workhouse in 1854. In 1861 Charlotte was living with her unmarried brother Charles and sister Sarah, while her two little girls were kept separate from their mother, living with their 21 year old uncle Charles and a widow called Isabella Barton or Leaver, a shoe binder who took in children.

Bastardy was a considerable disgrace in those days, and at their weddings in 1874-5. the two daughters came up with a nonexistent deceased father Edward Coad at their weddings in 1874-5. Charlotte jr had a large family with her butcher husband Alfred H Storey. Descendant Christine Neill has written "I think that Charlotte snr. was perhaps a lady of the night because looking at a Bible done by someone in Storey/Waters family there has been a rubbing around Charlotte jr and especially her first born to Alfred H. Storey of Alfred D.Storey b.4/10/1875. and that Alfred H Storey's parents were not present at the marriage" It seems possible that Charlotte sr was cast out by her father when she became pregnant in 1854, and may have subsequently turned to another man. However she remained unmarried in domestic service after 1871.

Another Brannel cousin of Jonathan, bootmaker James Coad (1789– 1856) married in Holborn about 1816. His first four children were christened “Lying-In Hospital, City Road, Finsbury London” – which normally meant that a clergyman was called to the hospital to officiate at a stillbirth or for a sickly infant not expected to live. James ‘ three younger children were better favoured and all emigrated. We believe son James Coad 1830, also a bootmaker, arrived with his wife Jane as an assisted migrant in Broken Hill on board the Kate in 1851, and proceeded to Broken Hill, His grandson James III produced three girls there in the early 1900s. Caroline the next daughter married James Ward in Queensland 1871. Matilda 1832 the youngest first had banns with a Henry Vincent in 1851 , but then married James Beavers in 1853 and went to Barbados in the West Indies, returning about 1880 with an infant daughter Adeline Beavers. In 1891 Matilda and Adeline are living with Jane Beavers, a female foreman of a stone works in Lambeth.

Isaac Coad 1786, carpenter of North Hill, married Margaret Morgan in Mitcham Surrey, an agricultural area that was industrialising by 1817, and had three sons there. He moved to Westham Essex before 1841. The second son, Isaac jr who became known as James, was also a carpenter and married there in 1844, having nine children. One of these, William 1853, was an innkeeper and plasterer and had seven children in the same area in 1877-83. His three sons James, George and Wilfred were also plasterers.

The youngest son of Isaac, Samuel George Coad 1833, was also a carpenter like his father, and later a farrier. In 1861 he moved to Bromley in the outer south east of London (south of Greenwich). He had seven children with two wives . The eldest son George 1855 was the first educated Coad in London - a schoolmaster. His younger half-brother Walter 1876 was also a schoolmaster. A sister Emma married a chemist with the peculiar name Charles Lickfold Smout.

BRANNEL COADS

Many men in the Brannell family of Coads were farmers or agricultural labourers, but those with a trade might be attracted to London. This was particularly the case for carpenters or other construction workers, as London was rapidly expanding in the first half of the nineteenth century.

1. Carpenter John Coad 1817 of Kea married Joanna Hean in Truro and had three sons in Pimlico 1849-55. His eldest son John worked for a fishmonger and then in a gas warehouse. His second son Thomas Henry 1849 lived in Clapham where he had seven children 1874-93. He worked in various labouring and retail jobs but by 1881 had obtained a job on the railways where he worked a s a time keeper and carriage cleaner. His sons were apprenticed to a variety of skilled occupations – mason, wheelwright, blacksmith, and brass worker. One son Edwin 1882 went to South Africa, enlisted and was killed at the Somme.

2. Samuel Coad 1825, eldest son of the tin miner Peter Coad of Fraddon St Enoder, was apprenticed to a rigger (construction scaffolding worker) in Tower Hamlets London at the age of 14. He had three sons by two wives, and died in Bethnall Green at the young age of 38, after which the family disappears.

3. Samuel’s young brother James Coade 1835 of St Enoder had one of the more interesting occupations. He was first sent to work as a miller’s boy in 1851 but by 1860, like his brother, was working as a rigger in London where he married and had eight children. In 1870 he was making iron shutters, and before 1881 he began constructing gymnastic equipment in Wapping. He had 25 grandchildren . His eldest son James Peter 1863 also worked in a variety of woodworking jobs including coach framer and machinist. Second son John Calvin Coad worked on gas engines and had six children in Clapton, a suburban area north-east of London. Third son Samuel was a petty officer in the Navy, based in Kent. Youngest daughter Elizabeth Mary Ann married Albert Bridges from Ipswich Suffolk in 1887, moved there and had nine children.

4. Another carpenter, Charles Richard Coad of Mawgan in Pydar, moved to Islngton London in the 1860s but died at the age of 35 in Reigate Surrey (to the south near Gatwick). His wife Mary Ann remarried in a few years, to a butcher John Elgar Weston from her home town, and had three children.

5. Samuel Coad 1849 from Redruth, an iron moulder/engineer, moved with his wife Sophie and child to Kensington in 1877, where he had eight more children. The eldest son Joseph Anthony Coad was in the Army Medical Service. He went to Silver Bow Montana to join a friend copper mining, and had a family of three girls there.

6. The brothers William John 1873 and Alfred Hender Coad 1877 were carpenters in Paddington 1901. They were the two younger sons of Henry Coad, a farmer on small acreage in Lanlivery.

Special mention should go to the inventor Theophilus Coad 1835, a miner’s son from Camborne. The family had a technical bent: his uncle Theo had been a gas engineer, and his two brothers were watchmakers. He married his cousin Selina Vivian in 1863 and had one son who died in 1870 at the age of four, and another Howard Vivian Coad in the same year. Theo began his patenting career with:

Patent to Theophilus Coad of Truro, mathematical instrument maker, for "improvements in the construction of sewing machines" Lond 1869 fol 10d
June 16, No 2486 1874. Letters Patent to Theophilus Coad of Park Cottages, St Clements , for "improvements for stoppers in bottles."

Theo had moved to Surrey by 1881 working as a telegraphic engineer. Shortly thereafter the London Morning Post gushed,

"Those sanguine investors who have lately been buying dynamo light and power shares at almost absurd premiums, will not be comforted to learn that, in a day or two, there will be exhibited at the Westend, simultaneously with its introduction by an influential Company, a beautifully simple apparatus, just patented by Mr Theophilus Coad, C.E., called the 'Portable Voltaic Generator,' which seems to combine the whole of the long sought desiderata for electric motion and illumination, especially economy, efficiency, simplicity, freedom from heat, smell, or danger, and portability. It can be put into an ornamental box the size of a writing-desk or small work-table, carried , under the arm, and placed in any room of a house or the saloon of a Cunard steamer; may be managed by a page boy or a ship's cook (only requiring five minutes' attention once a week), is quite independent of all machinery, requires no Faure's or other storage arrangement, and is cheaper than gas."

He continued making inventions till the end of his life though few of these were commercialized. After his remarriage in Bloomsbury in 1888 to Agnes Hornblower, daughter of an army captain, his inventions included:

1889 Australia Specifications for registration of patent by Theophilus Coad titled - An improved lens for deflecting light
1890. Application for registration of patent by Theophilus Coad titled - Improvements in fluids for primary batteries. national Archives Australia.
1892. Theophilus Coad. Improvements in the method of and apparatus for propelling vehicles upon railways
Specifications for registration of patent by Theophilus Coad titled - An improved miners portable electric incandescent safety lamp
1891, 1893 Electrical Engineering. Improvements in electric primary batteries. Theophilus Coad Quality Court Chancery Lane London.
1897 An improved miners portable incandescent safety lamp

Theo was given to public demonstrations of his inventions for the benefit of public and press:
Daily News London 27/1/1890. Mr Coad demonstrates at Soho Square his miners safety lamp with lens, zinc/carbon battery and compressed air diaphragm. Also his buttonhole light and dentists drill driver.

An inventor’s life is not an easy one, and not everyone was impressed by Theo’s versatility . We read “Howard V Coad, the son we are told of Theophilus Coad of primary battery notoriety, whose worthless appliances have on various occasions been treated in our correspondences"
Howard carried on the tradition by being a steam pump fitter and electrical engineer in Southwark. He also married twice.

ST IVE/NORTHHILL

The St Ive Coads were mostly farmers but had an entrepreneurial streak. Richard Coad 1806 of the ancient Coad parish of Menheniot married Mary Beard in Plymouth 1837 and had ten children. He gave up farming and took up the unusual occupation of cheese warehouseman in the trade area of Bethnal Green around 1845. He died at age 34 but most of his children followed in his footsteps in the docks. Richard Coad the eldest was unemployed for a period and died unmarried at 32. George Thomas Coad 1841 moved into the wine trade by 1871 and was recorded as a wine bottler or cooper in subsequent censuses. He had eight children with his wife Lydia Iveson; his two eldest sons were constables or dock policemen. Second son William Henry Coad 1843 became the foreman at his bonded warehouse, Elizabeth 1849 married a warehouseman. Mary the eldest girl married Joseph Ridley, an agent for Kelly’s directory who was also a commercial traveller in the glass trade. Second son Thomas Beard Coad was an innkeeper who supported his mother and his three younger siblings Catherine Amelia and Robert after their father died.

The origins of John Coad 1804-61, mariner and marine engineer of Limehouse, are uncertain, but we believe he may be the John mentioned in the will of his unmarried uncle George Coad 1751-1825, grocer of Rame. The couple had only one daughter Elizabeth Kate Hannah Coad, who married a plasterer Thomas Lane in 1862.

“From its foundation, Limehouse, like neighbouring Wapping, has enjoyed better links with the river than the land, the land route being across a marsh. Limehouse became a significant port in late medieval times, with extensive docks and wharves. Although most cargoes were discharged in the Pool of London before the establishment of the docks, industries such as shipbuilding, ship chandlering and rope making were established in Limehouse.

John Boydell's view of the riverside at Limehouse in 1751 shows respectable houses and shipyards crowding onto the riverfront. On 12 February 1832, the first case of cholera was reported in London at Limehouse. First described in India in 1817, it had spread here via Hamburg. Cholera visited again in 1848 and 1858.

TRURO

The miners of Truro were less attracted to London and only ended up there after intervening generations. The nine children of Peter Coad 1777, barge man of Feock, and his wife Mary Behanna, were attracted to more unusual occupations. Peter Coad 1808 the eldest, a blacksmith, moved to Pimlico in London before 1841, and married Eliza Oates in Truro 1847. His son William Henry was born in Westminster 1851, worked in the tobacco business of his cousin Richard, and eventually became an innkeeper.

Richard 1808 the second son of Peter and Mary married Elizabeth Catt in Kent 1835 and had four sons in Westminster. I am unable to find him in the census but he died young and his widow was keeping a lodging house in Tonbridge Wells Kent by 1861. William Richard Coad 1839 their eldest son went to live with his aunt in Kent before 1851 and by 1861 was working as a grocer’s assistant in the seaside town of Hastings Sussex. There he married a local girl and had two sons, one a commercial clerk the other a boot repairer. Second son Richard Henry 1842 started out as a grocer and by 1871 at the age of 29, had a tobacco manufacturing factory in Hornsey Middlesex employing five men including his cousin William Henry. By 1881 he was employing 15 men and had four children. Son Percy Arthur 1875 was an architect and tobacco dealer by 1901. The two younger boys went with their mother back to Kent. Thomas Peter Coad 1844 the third son was an assistant draper but died at age 22. His young brother John 1847 was an errand boy for a draper in Tonbridge Wells Kent by1861, and became a carpenter and builder with two children.

Factory workers Stepney/Bethnal Green

A younger son of Peter of Feock, John Coad 1823 was a master tailor and draper and a Methodist preacher. He had six children in Devoran Feock and two of his daughters went to Chile in South America, returning to Wembury near Plymouth. His eldest son George Chapman Coad went to Yorkshire preaching. The youngest son Frederick Charles Coad 1853 combined the odd occupations of grocer, income tax collector and Methodist preacher. He married in Plymouth and had five children there. Frederick’s eldest son John Henry Taylor Coad1878 was a coal merchant initially in Plymouth but moved to London about 1914.

LOOE COADS

Thomas Coad 1798, a carpenter of Polperro, moved to Lambeth about 1830 and had three children, to Woolwich Kent where the Royal Navy Docks are located about 1842 where he had another child. He returned to Polperro around 1851, but after Jane died in 1854 he went back to Newington near the mouth of the Thames, where he married Mary Ann Hay in 1856, and died in 1860 in Stoke Newington about 10km north of the City. His three daughters emigrated to New Zealand and Australia. His son Thomas Henry was a grocer in Stoke Newington. He married Patience Strudwick in 1865 and had seven daughters and a son. Two of the younger girls were teachers in government schools in 1901.

COODE

While the wealthy Coodes tended to maintain their base in Cornwall or Devon, at various times in their training or careers several were posted to London. Sir John Coode1803 the famous marine engineer lived in Plymouth, Dorset, Weymouth, the Isle of Man and in Paddington in 1871. His daughter Eleanor married a vicar and lived in Clapham. His son John Charles 1844 the civil engineer travelled frequently but his home was in Ealing. His sons were Charles Coode a solicitor, Arthur Coode an engineer and navy commander, who played first class cricket, and Maurice an army officer. One grandson was a rubber planter in Malaya.

Henry Coode 1795 was possibly the unluckiest of the Coodes. He was apparently born in London, although his father, the wealthy Treasurer of the County of Cornwall, resided in St Austell. He had seven children but only one survived. In 1838 his wife and two children died, probably in an epidemic. He was a Clerk in Chancery in 1841 in the property court – a position that was usually bought with family money. This did not last long:

The government had initially intended the 1832 bill to go further and abolish the Six Clerks of Chancery, but the Clerks successfully lobbied to prevent this. This did not save them, however; in 1842 the "nettle" of the Six Clerks Office was grasped by Thomas Pemberton, who attacked them in the House of Commons for doing effectively sinecure work for high fees that massively increased the expense involved in cases. As a result, an Act of Parliament was passed in the same year that abolished the office completely.

He died in 1843 at the age of 48. His son Frederick, an attorney, married and moved to Lewes Sussex where he had nine children, and then to Chertsey Surrey about 30km SW of London, dying himself at the age of 48. I can find offspring for only one of the children.

DEVON

William Woodley Coad 1839 of Tormaham Devon (near or Code or Codd was the only child of Richard Codd, a poulterer who ended up in jail. Like others he started out as a grocer’s assistant, but after he married Adeliza Rawle in 1862 he moved to Deptford Kent on the docks south of the Thames and became a commercial traveller to support his seven children. By 1881 he was a tea salesman and did very well in the tea trade. The family were educated and became clerks for the tea trade, stockbrokers and stock jobbers. The photo below shows the prosperous family in the early 1900s. William died in 1923 at the age of 84 and Addie followed him soon after aged 89.

One of their great grandsons Alex , who lives in France, has taken the DNA test and we believe the family are related to the Ermington Coads.

STRAYS

Some of the more interesting families around London of the name were not from the West Country. Most of these were name changers from CODD of Suffolk or Lincoln.

1. The largest and oldest family of local Coads in London were the Currer Coads, bootmakers in St Pancras, descended from James Codd who married Elizabeth Currer in 1767 St Clement Danes. The 1868 Gazetteer writes of St Pancras ,

“Few places exhibit in a more striking manner the extraordinary increase which, within the last century, and particularly during the last twenty-five years, has taken place in the numerous districts bordering on the metropolis. In 1251 this parish contained 40 houses, but it subsequently declined, and in 1565 contained only 60 inhabitants, being described by a contemporary writer as "a remote and isolated spot, the resort of roages, vagabondes, and thieves;" it now has a population of more than 200,000, and in the magnificence of its streets and public buildings rivals the best districts of the metropolis.”

The couple appear to have had four sons William ~1772, George 1778, John 1780 and most notably Hugh Currer Codd ~1784, known as Carrn Coad, who plied his trade in Clarendon Place Paddington, just north of Hyde Park. Carrn married twice which has led to some confusion – first to Sarah Brown in 1804, with whom he had seven children, then to Rachael about 1822, with whom he had two more daughters.

Three of his sons continued in bootmaking. John Currer Coad 1813 had only one child, Charles Coad 1842-1901, who moved a little further north to Islington and became a sawyer or builders labourer, as was his only son Charles Coad 1869-1937. High Currer Coad 1817-1864 the youngest son also married twice and had six children, though he died in his forties. His eldest son John Currer Coad 1847-1923 became a cooper in Chiswick nine miles to the west where he married Harriet Jennings in 1868 and had nine children; the sons took on a variety of labouring jobs.

2. An early article has covered the Benson Cood family of London, South America and the Channel Islands, including the distinguished and disgraced lawyer George Benson Coode and his uncles who were merchants in Valparaiso Chile.

3. Gipsies The gypsy family known as Etherington COODs were travellers who made their base in the gipsy camping ground in Wallthamstow Essex. One wonders given the frequent middle name Etherington used by this family if there is any connection with another old family COOD who owned an estate in Eastrington Yorkshire in about 1770.

Essex gypsies 1914 (University of Reading)

Records are not good, but the family seems to have begin with John and Mary Codd or Cood who had nine children in inner London. Of these, Richard Cood married Sarah Wood 1796 in St Giles Cripplegate and had three children. The eldest son, saddler William Cood 1806 also had three children 1829-41. The youngest, painter and glazier John Cood 1810 and his wife Siney or Matinea (gipsy names) had a son Richard Hetherington Cood 1839, who himself had six children in Walthamstow with his wife Matilda Dell. The 1901 census shows Richard and Matilia with two younger sons:

1901 census. Tottenham Msex. Caravans of the Hale on piece of land opposite nursery. Richard Coode (50, Walthamstow Essex, hawker) and Matilda (50) with Henry (26) Solomon (18)

We are in contact with a descendant of Richard.

4. The Fleetwood Coads. A man with the wonderful name of Fleetwood Codd (1766 Great Finborough Suffolk) had seven sons there 1790-1809. The family had a tendency to call themselves Cood or Coad .One great grandson James 1834 married in Stepney 1857, moved to Yorkshire about 1860 and was back in London by 1863, where he was a barman in the Limehouse district. All but one of his eight children were born in Limehouse or Stepney. One son John Richard Coad or Cood worked on the docks at Barking The youngest, James Robert, died in Salonika in the Great War

5. Capel Coodes Another family from Capel Suffolk were descended from the whitesmith Robert Codd 1804 who changed his name to Coode in London before 1841. After his considerably older wife died in 1854 he moved back to Ipswich and remarried, but his only son Robert 1824 who had married in 1846 remained in Bermondsey, an area of wool stores and wharves, , working first as a constable and then as a house painter after 1876. His sons were occupied there in manufacturing – the eldest Charles Robert Coode (who had been born in Ipswich 1849) in cigar making and then as a signal fitter and machinist; the second Edward William Coode as an iron cock maker and a brush finisher in Bermondsey (he had nine children) and the third George Alfred was a machinist and labourer in metallic cast works with seven children. The daughter Martha Francis Coode 1852 was widowed in her thirties and eked out a living as a machinist and brush drawer, fixing the bristles onto brushes.

6. Haughley Coodes. A third line from Ipswich Suffolk started with William Codd, Coote, Code or Coad 1847. who married Mary Louise Espiner in St Pancras 1873 and had six children called COODE. William’s mother had remarried to a police constable called Redgrave and he was apprenticed to a turner at age 12. By 1871 he was a sewing machine fitter in the City, and after 1881 a bicycle fitter in Berkshire and London. Two of his sons cut items from lace paper, while John Edward Coode the youngest was a clerk in the Painters Union.

7. Norfolk John Coade a builder from Norfolk (he may have been Coate or Coote ) married Mary Slap in Greyfriars Newgate 1824. Their younger son William George Coad was a carpenter an d married Ann Prior 1861 in Chessington, outer SW London (now the site of a theme park).

8. Corker Coads. John Codd married Elizabeth Corker in St George Cripplegate 1734. Their son Charles Codd was born the next year and he married Elizabeth Slograve there in 1759, having six children baptised at St Luke’s Finsbury. The youngest, shoemaker Stephen Codd or Code or Coad 1771 married Sarah Ann Kidgel in Shoreditch 1792 and had five children variously known as Codd or Coad. Stephen junior 1807 Shoreditch was also a shoemaker and married twice, the first marriage to Susanna Jennings resulted in three children. The family cannot be located after Stephen died in 1851.

CONCLUSION

For those already privileged, or who had a trade in demand, London was a place of opportunity. A few immigrants did well but most battled along and by and large the colonies were much kinder to immigrants. But the average life expectancy of men who went to London seems to be lower, particularly those who lived in the slum areas.

In 1881 there were about 180 Coads or Coodes living in Greater London, of which 78 were local or from Suffolk etc. The distribution of different West Country families largely reflects their size – with 38 from Brannel, 36 from North Hill/St Ive, 15 from Devon, 6 from Looe, and 8 from Truro (numbers of these are low because they were mostly miners).

THIRD ANCIENT WEST COUNTRY FAMILY CONFIRMED

2010-03-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

We have yet another big success for the Y-DNA project. We have believed for a long time that the Coads of SE Devon are a different family from the Coads and Coodes that originated around Liskeard in Cornwall - and now it is proven in a most surprising way.

Dennis Coad was one of the first to take a DNA test about three years ago and his long wait for a match is over. He has a match with Michael Coad, our first St Stephens in Brannel Coad to be tested. As with our DNA matches in other families, their common ancestor dates back to the 1500s or early 1600s.

The Brannel Coads mostly descend from Anthony Coad or Cood, a farmer and tinner who settled in the area about 1670. Anthony had eight sons and his descendants are easily the largest family of Coads in Britain and the world - I have about 3300 descendants in the database. So we have the surprising result that the largest group of Cornwall Coads are actually from Devon. Very few of them seem to be interested in their origins however and Michael is the only family representative with whom we are in touch.

Ermington Devon is about 55 miles away from Brannel, probably 2 to 3 days travel in those days. The Ermington Coads begin with Robert ~1700. However there were CODDs and COARDs in nearby Ughborough and Slapton since before 1600, and the family is probably descended from these. The Ermington Coads were quite an educated bunch and they appear in several entries in this blog.

Exactly what someone from distant Devon was doing in St Stephens in the 1670s is a mystery. However there seems to have been something of a population explosion in Brannel around that time and three other Coads, Edward, Theophilus and William, also turned up in the parish around the same time. It is possible the family had already been in Cornwall for generations.

There are several other old Devon families we have not yet been able to test or trace - the aristocratic CODEs of Gidleigh and Morval, who are believed to be of Cornish stock and extinct, the COADs of Marystow who may possibly be their descendants, the COADEs of SE Exeter - who were first to use the variant and were probably COWDE (Cowherd) originally, the COADs and CUDEs of Tiverton and the Somerset border (probably their relatives), and the wealthy COADE family of Axminster and Lyme Regis in the 1600s, now extinct.

Article in ISOGG newsletter

2010-01-01T03:15:00.000-08:00

We have the lead article in the Dec 09 issue of online Journal of Genetic Genealogy - which elaborates on the previous post

Unravelling the Code
by Dr Joe Flood, Coordinator, Coad-Coode one-name and DNA study
Melbourne Australia

As a child in Perth Western Australia I lived much of the time with my grandmother, whose maiden name was Rene Coade. I used to cycle down Coode Street to school every day – named for Britain's most famous colonial marine engineer Sir John, who had designed many of the harbour works near the mouth of the Swan River.
After the death of my mother, my aunt asked me to investigate the Coades, who were an old mining family of Cornwall. Working backwards I soon hit a brickwall with Samuel Cood or Coad or Code who had a family in the 1690s in Praze-an-Beeble near Truro, where the family remained until the mines played out in the 1850s. Only a few miles away at that time had lived the Coodes, subsequently one of the most eminent and wealthy families in Cornwall, and I was not the first to conclude that somehow we must be related. I began to collect everything I could find on the families, and the Coad-Coode one-name study was born.
It turned out there were at least a dozen apparently unrelated families of Coad from Cornwall and Devon, many of whom had emigrated to SE Australia or the USA in the 1850s. The first recorded use of the name in the West Country was Richard Code, mayor and MP for Liskeard around 1360. Because the paper records were solid in most cases from 1600, it appeared any branching had occurred extremely early – at a time when only a few families in Cornwall actually had hereditary surnames. This was a situation in which DNA might reveal the answers.
It was very difficult and slow to get people to take the test – and first results were not encouraging, no-one seemed to match. My two co-researchers Nigel and Ed Coad were 4th cousins from the small port of Looe near Liskeard – and they matched 37/37 as expected, but did not match anyone else. Finally through a bulk mailing exercise I tracked down my own cousin Russell Coade who lived only a few suburbs away, and after a year he took a test which matched Nigel and Ed 33/37, indicated an ancestor probably around 1600. I thought at long last I had discovered the ancient Codes of Cornwall.
In the meantime I had managed to contact the wealthy Coodes of St Austell, who were initially reluctant to communicate. They were a very private family who had kept their own family records since 1580, and they were extremely sceptical about whether DNA would show anything useful. Their main interest was finding out whether there were surviving Coodes in the United States who were descended from their cousin Reverend Colonel John Coode, colourful governor of Maryland in the 1680s.
With the aid of a highly skilled group of researchers in Maryland, we tracked down a family of Coodes in Nashville who appeared to be the lone descendants of Col John. We were encouraged to find that both families pronounced their name Code while spelling it Coode – a tradition dating back to the 1400s. After some considerable coaxing, a member of both families agreed to test – and the results exceeded even my expectations. Not only did the two Coode families match, but they provided a missing link between two apparently unmatched (26/37) Coad families – miners of Truro and farmers of North Hill. We had found four 8th to 11th cousins from the 16th century with surviving intact male lines – and this was clearly the ancient Code family of Cornwall!
So who were my own Looe/Crowan Coads? Well – my family were a DNA match for a branch of another ancient family, the Callaways, who also have a very active one-name and DNA study. And sure enough, in the early Tudor tax records of 1524, Codes and Callaways were neighbours in both Liskeard and Lansallos – so an illegitimate birth is the probable source of the relationship.
There are still a number of large Coad families who have not tested and we have plenty of work ahead convincing them to get involved – but at least we have laid out the framework. After much detective work, we found the DNA of the ancient Codes, from whom most of the modern Cornish Coads and Coodes are related – and we found that my own family were a very early illegitimate line.

VERY MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH

2009-04-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

MYSTERY OF THE COADS SOLVED!

For some time we have been aware that the name COAD did not exist in Cornwall or Devon prior to 1600. Before that time, everyone was known as CODE or COOD(E). We had eight separate old families between whom we could not establish a relationship. Slowly we pieced together some hypotheses using old wills and the hand-typed book “Families of Stithians”

Our first major breakthrough was when we found using DNA that the Looe and Crowan Coads were related. This was not entirely surprising as both small families were skilled tradesmen and miners with some education, and fond of the name Samuel.

But because of the absence of volunteers for testing, we were unable to make progress with the larger families. That has now changed with the receipt of our sixth Cornish DNA sample. We have discovered the original CODEs of Cornwall, who stretch right back to 1300 and are one of the 20 oldest families in the county!

Some time ago Nigel Coad obtained an old will of William CODE of Trevagithicke Lansallos 1606. This showed his five sons John, William, Thomas, Edward, and Stephen. We now know that from the eldest, John Code of Breage, descended Gov John Coode of Maryland and his descendants, from Edward of Sithney descended the eminent COODEs of St Austell, and from Stephen of Quethiock – the North Hill and the St Ive/Liskeard COADs. This is not surprising as all three families were gentlemen farmers, merchants and professionals.

What is more surprising is that we have discovered the main line of Truro mining COADs are also relatives. We believed they were descended from a Walter Reed or Cood who was mentioned in the wills of Luke Cood of Stithians and his son John as a full member of the family. And we knew that Luke was a grandson of John Code~1520/Blanche of Menheniot – who is in Vivian’s Visitations of Cornwall. It now seems that this man John was an uncle of William of Lansallos rather than a direct ancestor of the Coodes as Visitations shows, and that Walter Reed was truly a son of Luke and not adopted.

The Looe/Crowan Coads are not related to this larger older grouping down the male line, but because of their very close proximity near Looe for centuries, it seems very likely there is a family relationship, possibly through an illegitimate birth or adoption.

Therefore we have now tied over half of the Coads and Coodes of Cornwall together. The rest still await DNA volunteers before we will know their origins. We need many more male Coads to test in order to flesh out these major discoveries and complete the survey.

COADS OF NEW ZEALAND

2008-02-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

Taranaki NZ - Middle Earth

Although the numbers of Coad families emigrating to New Zealand has not been large, it has been quite difficult to reconstruct them because of the absence of census information or BMD. New Zealand is a small place, and different Coad families tended to congregate in the vicinity of the New Plymouth settlement, making their separation difficult.

However, by using shipping and newspaper records and especially the SoG marriage and burial indexes, the families have now largely been reconstructed in an intensive collaboration between David Stevens and myself. Work still needs to be done on more recent members of the families and in writing more detailed family histories.

The Coad families are, in order of arrival:

1. Ermington: Ephraim Coad arrived 1843 in New Plymouth
2. Looe. Thomas Coad and Mary Bradley arrived 1851 in Canterbury
3. Lizard Gwennap: Stephen Coad and Mary Ann Terrell arrived before 1857 in Taranaki from USA.
4. Looe. Ambrose Coad arrived 1863 in Timaru/Auckland
5 Lizard. John Coad arrived 1874 in Christchurch
6. Brannel. William Henry Coad and Catherine Hollow arrived 1876 in Thames
7. Battrell. Oliver Rule Coad arrived about 1876 in Auckland.

There were also several later arrivals from Australia.

Ermington Coads

Ephraim Coad, brewer, was born in Ermington 16/04/1818, youngest son of the yeoman farmer James Hooke Coade. His brother John Foote Coade was a medical practitioner who emigrated to Canada in 1864, and John Coad who married Jenny Jeffrey was his uncle. Ephraim arrived in New Plymouth, Taranaki NZ in 1843 on the Essex, and married Teresa Rathbone Keet in 1854, having three children.

Ephraim joined the Militia and was one of the few settlers killed by Maoris in the wars of 1860. His son James Hook Coad (named for his grandfather) received a war medal on his behalf on 6 Apr 1889. The application reads: He "joined the Taranati Indiaturs in 1859 was present at the battle of Tairitea (mentioned as having conspicuously distinguished himself) subsequently joined the Mounted Forces and was present at several engagements until he met his death the following year in service, being that by an ambuscade of the enemy near the town of New Plymouth."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taranaki_War describes how the Maori "out-thought, out-planned and then out-fought the British" despite being outnumbered and faced with heavy artillery.

Teresa received a fairly substantial widow’s benefit and compassionate allowance, and used it to take out a hotel licence (she was subsequently engaged in several land disputes). Her son James Hook Coad (1857-1931) was sent briefly to Scotland at the age of 13. On his return he followed in his father’s footsteps, leasing a hotel and becoming a brewer. He stood unsuccessfully for council in 1881 and married Ann Venters Mclauchlin in that year. Unfortunately he became bankrupt in the depression of 1893-4. From that time on, he had constant problems with excise officials who took him to court repeatedly on trivial matters, such as placing excise stamps on the wrong part of the barrel.

James’ eldest daughter Nellie Euphemia (1883-1974) was a well known educator and author; her biography is given under “Notable Coads”, Arthur Reginald, the eldest son, was an accountant, who became Public Trustee for Wellington. A keen debater, he was treasurer of the St John’s Debating Society. Edgar Albert, the second son, moved to Geelong in Australia, married in 1921 and had four children.

Looe Coads

Thomas Coad (1821) a carpenter of Devonport, arrived with his wife Mary Bradley and their infant daughter to Port Lyttelton, Canterbury New Zealand, in the Castle Eden 1851. His father had worked as a blacksmith in the naval dockyard. Not much is known of the family; Mary may have died in 1856 having their son Thomas (later known as Thomas Nodder) and Thomas remarried in 1857 to Emma Deverell, with whom he had a son Herbert James, who seems to have been childless. Thomas died before 1881, as did Thomas jr.

His distant cousin Ambrose Coad 1836-1922, a shoemaker of Looe, arrived in Auckland in 1863 on the Claramont .

"On February 20th an albratoss was caught with a wooden label attached to its leg, on which was written: "Alarm, New York to Hong Kong"",

In Auckland he formed a partnership business Colbourne and Coad with another bootmaker Jesse Colbourne, which was dissolved in 1867. He took shares in a goldmining company in 1869, and was involved in local politics, nominating a friend for the local council in 1873.

He had met Louisa Crocker on shipboard and married her in 1865, having six children over the next 14 years. Three of his daughters remained unmarried. Two of his sons were heavily involved in the formative years of posts and telegraph – William Thomas Coad1868-1951 was the chief telegraphic clerk in Wellington and in 1909 became Registrar of marriages births and deaths for the Patea district. Samuel James Coad 1879-1938 attended telegraphic conferences and gave talks to local school groups on the telegraph.

Lizard Gwennap

The largest and most colourful family of Coads in New Zealand were the descendants of Stephen Coad of Kenwyn and Mangorei 1823-1908. After the death of their parents in the mining village of Chacewater, Stephen’s whole family emigrated to Australia. Stephen arrived in South Australia in 1847 on the Cressy and married Mary Ann Terrill in Timaru two years later. He decided to try his luck in the California goldfields in 1850, the year before gold was discovered in Australia, and headed to California on the Colonist.. He arrived in New Zealand before 1857 with three children in tow, and took up land in Mangorei near New Plymouth. The couple had a further six children before 1874.

In 1869 Stephen was involved in an elaborate court case with a man named Hunt over a wild bullock. The court had ordered Coad to return this bullock to Hunt who had left it with him some years before. Coad pointed it out to Hut in the paddock but both men were afraid to approach it. By the time Hunt returned a couple of months later, the bullock had escaped. So Hunt appropriated a number of cattle of Coad and sold them for less than value. Coad applied for restitution and two juries were hung on the question of whether Coad had in fact ‘returned’ the bullock. The Great Bullock Case was settled out of court.

By 1875 Stephen’s behaviour had become increasingly erratic and he was placed in a lunatic asylum with his second son Thomas~ 1856. His eldest son Stephen wrote a heartfelt letter to the newspapers pleading that they should not be transferred to Wellington, far from their family, but to no avail. In 1880 Stephen escaped from the asylum and stayed at large for three months,

Taranaki Herald 22/04/1880 Stephen Coad was arrested yesterday,
charged with being a dangerous lunatic. Inspector Bullen stated at the Police Court this morning that Coad had escaped from the Lunatic Asylum at Wellington about three months ago, but as he then appeared not to be dangerous he was not apprehended. Recently, however, it had become necessary to get Coad confined. Two doctors had examined Coad, but they were unable to come to a decision respecting his case, and they desired to be allowed two or three days to make further examination.
28-4-1880 "Stephen Coad, who has been remanded several times
on suspicion of being non compos mentis, was brought up again yesterday at the Police Court. Inspector Bullen stated that three doctors had examined Coad, and were of different opinions respecting the case. Dr. Gibbes was of opinion that Coad was insane, while Drs. St. George and Rawson stated that the man was in his
right mind. Under these circumstances he would ask that the case be
dismissed. The justices dismissed the case accordingly. "

It is odd that Coad should have had to escape to be deemed sane. He died nearly 30 years later:

“A very old settler, Mr Stephen Coad, died-on the 20th inst. at the age of 84 years'. The old gentleman has been incapacitated for many years. There is some- talk of the Government taking over his farm and after clearing it relet it or sell it for settlement. The drought has been broken at last”.

His son Thomas had apparently been released quickly, because it seems he found gold in the South Island in 1879, married in 1881 and died in Auckland 1889 at the age of 33.

In 1885 two sons, Stephen and Charles, were involved in a case for restitution where a neighbour’s dog had killed their sheep and Charles had shot it with the consent of the neighbour.

Two of the sons, Charles 1864- 1946 and William Henry 1866-1952 had unfortunate accidents in 1886

17 Jun 1886. Taranaki Herald. An accident happened on the Egmont Road this morning, by which a young man named William Coad, aged 19, sustained injuries which necessitated his being brought into the Hospital. It seems that a rata log in some way rolled on his head and shoulders. Owing to the bad state of the road, ho had to be carried about five miils to Egmont Village. A brother of his named Charles Coad is now recovering from a serious accident sustained in the same locality.

Four of Stephen’s children had offspring – Stephen jr, Charles, William Henry and Elizabeth Ann.

Charles was keen at athletics, competing in various races and the high jump 1887-1890. He married Mary Ann Batten in 1890 and had nine children.

William Henry married Minnie Langman in 1889 and had eight children before he was widowed in 1902 (this was not an easy matter to work this out because there were four William Henry Coads around at the time). He remarried the following year. He was elected to the Mangorei school district in 1894, and passed the senior civil servant exam in 1902.

Another Lizard Coad, John Coad 1852-91, arrived in Christchurch on the Stonehouse in 1874. John was a carpenter, and his father had been a shoemaker and a postman in Gwennap and Falmouth. John married Mary Ann Denby in 1878 and had four children, the youngest of which was born on a trip to Melbourne Australia, and all of whom married. John died at the age of 38 but his wife lived on more than 50 years.

Arthur John Coad 1883-1959 moved to New Plymouth by 1909; he was a monumental mason and worked for a local headstone company in New Plymouth. He built many prominent land marks in Taranaki. His interests were mountain hiking and gardening. The eldest of his five children, Arthur Harold Coad 1910-1979 was a law clerk and justice of the peace.

The second son Ernest John 1881 -1956 had some problems with the law over an assault.

Evening Post 29 Aug 1898 A number of drunkards were punished, the Sabbath-breakers being fined twice the ordinary amount. J E Coad who had been brought up from Christchurch, was remanded to Masterton

He traveled to London as a ship’s stoker by 1901 and married his landlady’s daughter Mary Ann Ross there in 1903. The situation with his children is not clear but it is believed he was the father of the poet Cyril Leon Coad 1913- 1967, who had four children including the well-known bass opera singer Conal Coad, who has performed in Australia, New York and all over Europe. http://www.opera.net.au/opera/oaweb.nsf/lookups/CONALCOAD-PERF-?opendocument
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conal_Coad, http://www.musichall.uk.com/pages/bass_CC/resume.htm

Brannel

In 1876 the Brodick Castle arrived in Christchurch, carrying William Coad (40), Catherine (37) Samuel (7 ) Sarah (4) Albert (1), and single men William Coad (19) and John Coad (18). The trip had been eventful; she was disabled off the Bay of Biscay and had to be towed back to Plymouth to refit, leaving two months later. Some of the crew behaved mutinously during the trip and were put into the charge of the Water Police on arrival.

William Henry (1834-1906) was a son of the miner Anthony Coad of Perranzabuloe Cornwall. He had already emigrated to Lichfield Connecticut in 1867 with his wife Catherine Hollow, 6 children and two of his brothers. In New Zealand, the family settled in Thames on the north east coast. Catherine died in 1893, and William married the much younger widow Mary Ann Danby (nee Morton) in 1896 – she was only 37.

Four of the nine children had offspring. William Henry 1857-1917 was a director of a dairy company and had seven children in Thames; three of these died young. John Hollow 1858-1939 the second son moved to Auckland and had two sons. Albert Charles 1874-1947 had one daughter in Auckland 1889, but died in Ballarat Victoria, separated from his wife Ethel Amy who lived another 17 years.
Battral Coads

The Battrals are a mining family from Camborne, probably related to the other Truro miners, and have descendants still in the area and in the USA. The miner James Henry Coad 1845 married Elizabeth Jane Rough in 1867 but died three years later having had one child, Oliver Rule Coad 1868-1952. Elizabeth remarried William Uren in 1872; it is not clear when they moved to New Zealand. Oliver married Annie Stewart in Auckland 1893 and they had four children who attended school in Auckland. Not much more is known about the family.

Akaroa

Later immigrants from Australia

The picturesque town and small peninsula of Akaroa near Christchurch is a former French colony, and many of the people are of French descent. Sapper John Coade, to whom another article is dedicated, came across to New Zealand around 1900, presumably to investigate the gold strikes in the South Island, and married Rachel Reynish in 1904. John returned to mine coal in Victoria. After his death in 1918 Rachel returned to the South Island with her three children; nothing is known of their fate.

In 1860 two Looe Coad sisters, Jane and Maria, emigrated to Melbourne. Jane married and Maria went to Wellington in 1874 as a nurse. She married John Hallam there in 1878, and there are descendants in the area.

Cornelius Coad, also known as Reardon, a bushman from Sydney who lived in Hihitahi near Wanganui, was killed in a tree accident in 1912. Nothing is known of his origins.

CURRENT ACTIVITIES #2

2008-01-21T19:47:00.000-08:00

It has been an exciting time for the COAD project and a great deal has been happening over the past few months since the analysis of the USA Coads was completed in October.

THE COODS OF STEPNEY AND CHILE

Enrique Cood Ross, Chilean lawyer and politician

The first big surprise was a contact by Jorge Cood, a teacher and artist from Chile, who had traced his family back to English merchants of Valparaiso, sons of Thomas Cood and Jenny Beck of Stepney, London. I had known of this family from the South American IGI and had wondered if they were related.

Jorge had collected some old business documents from the family, most notably an Oath between mother and sons to share profits - and much to my astonishment, one of the children of the couple turned out to be Manners Benson Cood, father of George Benson Coode who has an article here. I have been in contact with descendants for a full two years, both of whom are impressive genealogists and historians (a well known expert on muscular dystrophy, and a member of the Fonseca/Guimaraens port-making family) but we had made no progress to speak of on their ancestry.

But with Jorge’s help, a whole new world literally opened. Valparaiso 1810-1820 was swarming with English merchants eager to capitalize on local opportunities. The Coods rapidly became involved in many different businesses, including, we believe, the silk, haberdashery and nitrate trades. Enrique Cood, grandson of Thomas and Jenny, was a foreign minister of Chile and instrumental in pursuing the Pacific War of the 1860s against Peru and Bolivia, in which the rich nitrate deposits of the Atacama were ceded to Chile, leaving Bolivia landlocked. So it is reasonable to say that a Cood changed the map of South America.

Another brother of Manners, Thomas Cood jr, opened a highly-frequented wallpaper shop in the Strand, with an office in Chile. One of his daughters became a French citizen, the other married a well known portrait artist John Whitehead Walton. A grandson Rienzi Giesman Walton was a landscape architect who designed and laid out the Elphinstone Circle Gardens in South Mumbai.

Jorge and I have continued to lay out the genealogy of the family in England and Chile, making many new discoveries which have continued to surprise the descendants. It is not very often one gets to combine three stray, apparently unrelated, families from a single document, the Oath of Jenny Beck Cood and her sons.

THE LANSALLOS CODES

Equally as significant has been the progress Nigel Coad and I have made on tracing the early history of the Codes, Coodes and Coads of Cornwall , using Nigel’s listing of the Lansallos parish records and some 25 early wills he has kindly purchased and abstracted. These make a big difference to our perception of the families since it has become increasingly clear that there have continued to be significant numbers of CODEs in Cornwall since the earliest times.

Since early in the Coad-Coode project I have presumed that everyone in Cornwall is related – because they were all originally CODE and lived in adjacent parishes. This presumption is unchanged. HOWEVER I have also theorized, with others, that we must be descended from the “elder” Codes of Gidleigh and Morval, because their family tree 1350-1580 in Visitations of Cornwall is the oldest one around. This working hypothesis has become increasingly uncertain however, as one line after another has proven not to be sourced in the Gidleigh family – till all that are left are a few possible descendants of Rev Gilbert Coode of St Wenn and his brother Rev Arthur of Marytavy.

I believe we are now in a position to say that the CODEs are an ancient family of Cornwall from before 1300 who remained there while the clerical Gidleigh Coodes were busy doing their thing with heiresses in Devon – and that the oldest Cornish families are descendants of the root Cornish stock from Lansallos (or possibly St Keyne). That is – despite our early DNA results – the COODEs, the North Hill/St Ives COADs and the Looe COADs all plausibly share a common ancestor, probably about 1475 in Lansallos, while the Morvals branched off the main stock earlier.

I will publish the (admittedly scanty) evidence for this rather radical proposal shortly.

COADS OF NEW ZEALAND

I have continued the momentum from the reconstruction of the families in the 1900 US census by looking at New Zealand, with the assistance of David Stevens, Philip Duke and others, and originally spurred on by a helpful post from Brenda Law.

Although New Zealand does not have BMD or Census online, it does have a good marriage index and good shipping and cemetery coverage, which is enough in many cases to reconstruct the families.

There appear to be six separate families from various Cornwall clans – several of whom arrived in New Zealand via the USA and/or Australia. The provisional trees have been laid out in a COAD-L post and are undergoing revision following comments.

Some colourful stories have been obtained from the excellent newspaper site http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

LOOE COADs

We have discovered several new branches of tthe Looes – one in Rockland Maine, descended from John Coad, a blacksmith who was one of the earliest Coads in the New World – which has been explored with the aid of a descendant who was very surprised to find their local repair man was a cousin!

W also have a new line in New Zealand earlier than the two already known – descended form Thomas Coad (1820) a carpenter from Devonport who married Mary Bradley, arriving on the Castle Eden in 1851.

ERMINGTON COADS

Quite a bit of work was done during the US exercise, trying to establish if there were lines in the USA NOT descended from John/Jennie Jeffrey – but none could be found, so the couple seem to be the sole ancestors of living Ermington Coads there. John’s brother Henry had many children in Pennsylvania but the line seems to peter out. The descendants of John’s nephew, John Foote Coad the surgeon, drifted down into the USA from Canada and there may be descendants in West Virginia.

There are however Coad descendants of John Foote’s brother Ephraim, the brewer in New Zealand; and it’s possible there are descendants in Britain.

Given the colocation of the Coads and Codds just south of Dartmoor, we believe they must be related and we are seeking more descendants to undertake DNA testing.

TRURO COADS

The document Families of Sithney (by Edwin A Martin) provided to us by Ed Man gave us a whole new perspective on the origins of the Truro/Redruth miners (which include my own family), the nearby Sithney Coodes, and their relationship with each other. It has become clear that the miners are intimately associated with the family of Luke Coode of Sithney through an adopted child Walter Reed. This child is possibly a descendant of the second wife of Robert Code of Lansallos and Sithney. One line of miners may be directly descended from Luke.

With the aid of Families of Sithney. we straightened out most of the “spaghetti lines” of Truro – but there remain a few problem areas.

Coads of the USA

2007-10-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

Breakdown of Coads etc, 1901 US Federal Census

As I have done in Cornwall, I thought it was time to get an overview of the Coads etc of USA by reconstructing the families in the Census and seeing what the distribution of clans was. I used the 1900 Federal Census because it has the most useful information.

There were 579 COADs and COODs that could be identified in the USA 1900. This compares with 940 in England 1901, 537 in Canada 1901, and rather more in Australia. The gross breakdown was

- 183 Cornwall descent
- 183 Irish descent
- 84 Devon descent

- 16 Black
- 64 Other names
- 49 Unknown

The pie chart shows the ones that could be traced. This is a very different distribution to elsewhere. As far as we know Devon Coads are extinct everywhere else. In Australia, Irish Coads are a few descendants of a single prison guard in Tasmania. It is very surprising that such a large number of different families called CODD in Ireland would all change their name independently to COAD when they got to the New World

Of the Cornwall Coads, the breakdown is (shown in the smaller pie):

- 70 Brannel
- 40 North Hill (includinng the Licking family)
- 25 Looe
- 11 Lizard
- 6 Coode
- 29 Truro miners (including the Pincombes and the Perrans)

This is fairly similar to Cornwall except that the miners and the Coodes are under-represented, and the Looes are much more numerous.

The distribution highlights the fact that the agricultural Cornish (Brannel, North Hill and Lizard) made a larger population contribution than the miners (Truro) – although the number of miners was considerably higher than in the general population..

The above analysis does not include CODEs. This variant is uncommon in England and Australia, being largely restricted to a few Irish families – but it is very common in the USA, with about 681 Codes in the 1900 census, more than all the other variants put together. An analysis of the CODEs will be made later.

CURRENT DISTRIBUTION

http://www.intelius.com/ shows:
130 Coads in California
101 Coads in Illinois
87 Coads in New York
63 Coads in Michigan
56 Coads in Indiana
54 Coads in Maryland
45 Coads in Kansas

more than 20 in most other States

THE IMMIGRANTS

The reasons why people emigrated to the New World from Britain are manifold. At first they were adventurers or came to escape religious persecution. Later, during times of economic hardship, they were encouraged by various advertising schemes offering work or cheap land, by news of goldrushes, or to follow relatives who reported favourably on the New World.

The first few emigrants from Cornwall and Devon to the United States with living descendants are

- 1672 St Marys Co Maryland. Rev Col John Coode (1648 Penryn Cornwall), later Governor of Maryland. He has descendants in Nashville Tenessee.
- 1714 Boston. Stephen Code (probably 1676 Quethiock Cornwall), possibly a Jacobite avoiding retribution. It is believed the Coads of Licking Ohio are his descendants.
- 1817 Edwards Co Illinois. Edward Coad (1778 St Stephen in Brannel), Jane Best and family. The family still live in the area.
- Abt 1824 Bridport Maine. John Coad (1795 talland)
- 1828 Pennsylvania. John Coad (1788 Ermington Devon), Jennie Jeffrey and family. All the Devon Coads in the US are their descendants.

The first Irish Codd or Code to emigrate was Samuel Code , one of over 250 inhabitants of Northern Ireland who, in 1718, petitioned Samuel Shute for permission to emigrate to New England. He settled in Londonderry, New Hampshire along with most of the others.

Coodes and Coads Of St Marys Maryland

Several researchers have been working in detail on the Coodes/Coads of St Marys Co, Maryland, but their efforts have been confounded by the presence of two very old unrelated families in the area. These families have only been untangled by the recent work of Linda Reno, a specialist on old St Mary families.

The first family are the Anglican descendants of Col John Coode 1643 Breage, Governor of Maryland, a cousin of the modern Coodes of St Austell and a one of the more flamboyant characters in early US history, whose story is told elsewhere here. John was the fifth in a line of John Codes, and his main line of descendants were also called John Coode or Coad for seven generations. They married into many of the old inter-related families of Maryland – the Gerards, the Blackistones, the Guiberts and the Neales. The first of the line to appear on the Census was Demetrius A. Gerard Coode, a farmer, who moved to Nashville Tennessee after 1882. His descendants operated a livery stable, a shoe store and a grocery business there.

The second family were devout Catholics, closely connected with the Jesuit St Ignacius church at St Inigoes across the St Marys River from their farm at Cherryfields. James Coad or Codd, the first of the line left Puritan New England to avoid persecution, and headed for Maryland, which had been established as a refuge for English Catholics. It is possible that he was Midshipman Edwin Coad (or his brother) who joined the colonial forces and fought at Carthagena and Porto Bello in the West Indies under the command of Admiral Vernon Thomas about the year 1740, together with Lawrence Washington the brother of George. As far as we know, the only Coad in North America at that time was Stephen of Quethiock and Massachusetts, who emigrated to the USA in 1714 the year of the first Jacobite rebellion, possibly deported or escaping persecution like many Jacobites, and he is most likely James' father. At any rate the family were involved in piloting ships in Chesapeake Bay.

This family also had a number of colourful descendants who were strong supporters of the Confederacy and the Catholic community; several of the daughters took orders. Col William Coad 1803 was collector of excise along the river and built several bridges as a contractor, while his son Joseph Edwin Coad was elected to the State Legislature in 1867, and held the sinecure of State Flour Inspector. One of his sons Frank was a university Professor and President of the Southern Maryland Telephone Company.

It is believed the Coads of Licking Ohio, descended from John Coad ~1775 Virginia and Drayden Hebb, are a Protestant branch of this family

Coads Of Edwards Co Illinois

The Coads of Edwards County Illinois are one of the oldest and largest Coad families in USA. Edward Coad, known as “Old Neddy” was one of the first pioneers of Edwards Co Illinois, settling at French Creek around 1817-1818 (some sources say 1812). His sons Thomas, Edward (and Robert?) took up substantial acreage there in the period 1836-53. The family still had a strong presence in the county in 1930.

The origins of the family have been confused by the presence of falsified material of long standing - a three generation detailed family tree which is entirely fabricated. For example, the founder of the Edwards colony George Flower writes in 1882 in his History Of The English Settlement In Edwards County Illinois, “undocumented reports indicate (Edward Coad) was born Dec 5, 1776, Truro, Cornwall, England, the son of Edward and Elizabeth Ann (Logan) Coad of Truro and married Feb 20, 1776, Jane Taylor of Truro”. There was no such baptism or marriage. The misleading information may have originated in the work Genealogy of the Coads : with a partial history of Cowles, Kelletts, Cowlings and others Coad, James Edward, 1884

In fact it is clear from the matching of the children’s names that Edward Coad was from St Stephens in Brannel and married Jane Best there 29/04/1806. Jane had given birth to their first daughter Nancy Coad best three years before the wedding and Edward had been placed under a filiation order. Embarassment over this may be the reason for the deception. There were three Edwards in Brannel of the right age, but he is most likely the son of Thomas Coad and Ann Hockey, baptised 25 January 1778, and a half-brother of John Job Coad.

The story of the Edwards colony can be found at http://www.iltrails.org/edwards/fordhams_laserres.html and at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion,_Illinois

Coads of Maine
After almost a hundred year gap, the second Coad to arrive in the New World was Edward, arriving 1806 to Limerick York Maine. He is the same age as Edward Coad of Edwards Illinois.

British aliens in the United States during the war of 1812. Edward Coad, age 35, 6 years in US, 2 in family, Limington, York Co Maine, joiner

He was married but had no children, and died after 1840. His origins are not known

John Coad (1795 Talland) a blacksmith of the Looe Coad family, arrived in 1825 on the “Henrietta”, married and had six children in Maine. His youngest son Mathias (1836) was a painter and later a physician in Bridport Maine and in Michigan, and had two daughters with his second wife Alice. Joseph Coad (1826), the eldest son, died around 1863 leaving three young children. His son Joseph S Coad (1852) did a variety of odd jobs, making iron gates and shoveling coal, and also had two daughters and a son by Sarah, who had been previously married. He was widowed before 1910 and lived with a much younger woman called Annie Leonard; his children went to live with their half brother Charlie Salisbury in Pennsylvania, working in a cotton mill. There do not appear to be living Coad descendants, but there are descendants NILES in Rockland.

Ermington Coads Of Iowa And Pennsylvania
This is the largest family of Coads in North America and it appears that all present Coads of this line are the descendants of John and Jane/Jennie Jeffrey of Ermington Devon. John married Jane in Ermington 1808 and they had eight children there. Five accompanied them in 1828 when they emigrated on the “Oxford” to Pennsylvania with John’s sister Jane Bennett and her nine children . It was difficult to locate the record as they came via Lehavre France and the manifest was "frenchified":

Oxford, 14 Aug 1828, barque 288 tons Lehavre to New York
John Coud (40, England) and Jeanne (37) with Louis [Louisa](18, male!) William (13) Robert (11) Presillia {Priscilla] (9) Majurina {Mary Ann](7) Jean [John](1)

Five years later John picked up his young brother Henry with his new bride Diana Blackler in Jamaica. John and his family moved to Iowa before 1860. There, four of their sons produced 20 grandsons on their farms in Iowa and Indiana, from whom the modern Ermington Coads have descended. Henry and Diana stayed behind in Derry PA. They lived till their 80s and had 11 children, but there seem to have been few grandchildren, while great grandchildren are not recorded.

The elder brother James Hooke Coad of John and Henry had a son John Foote Coad 1836 who was a doctor in Yealmpton Devon. He emigrated to Canada in 1864. John Foote had 10 children several of whom drifted down in the 1880s from Canada to New York (John), Ohio (Septimus) Wisconsin (Henry) and West Virginia (James). There may be living descendants of the latter line
John Foote's young brother Ephraim emigrated to NZ where he was killed in the Maori wars as described another article here. This essentially ended the male Ermington line in Devon., which now only continues in the USA and New Zealand.

The Ermington Coads were quite well off and educated, and a number of descendants have been professionals, including the authors and educators Nellie Coad and Oral Sumner Coad.

Coads of Wisconsin
As in Australia there were a number of mining areas which became magnets for the Cornish, who eventually took up non-mining pursuits. The agricultural Cornish also flocked to these areas, which included Mineral Point Wisconsin and Grass Valley California, to be near their countrymen.

Mineral Point was the site of a major lead strike and was largely settled by Cornish in the 1830s. In the late 1840s three separate, distantly related Coads of Brannel arrived in the town. They were

Samuel Coad 1824, a young lead miner from St Ewe, Gwennap and Perranzabuloe. His father Thomas was a farm bailiff with 12 children who won several awards in the 1830s for having brought up the most children without parish relief. Sam married Frances Truscott in 1847 and emigrated before 1850. He became wealthy by 1870 as a produce merchant. He had three children and married twice, but no grandchildren are recorded.

His nephew William Coad (Kenwyn 1859, son of Arthur) was the only Coad known ever to move to Somerset, where he married a local girl Mary Jane Rowe. In 1890 he emigrated with four children to Michigan where he applied his skills as an iron miner. He had four more children in Michigan. The family moved to Mountain Iron, Minnesota, where it appears that William and a number of the children died before 1920, while Mary Jane adopted the American name Martha. Three of the sons continued to work on heavy machinery and rail associated with the iron mines, but there appear to be no Coad grandchildren.

- John Coad 1819, Truro and Calstock, was a third cousin of Sam and the youngest son of John Coad and Temperance Dumble. His father was a miner with five small children who became ill in Calstock in 1821 and the parish had them forcibly removed to Ruan Lanihorne; he died soon after. John emigrated to Mineral Point before 1845 where he married Frances (Fanny) Strongman, daughter of a Cornish miner. The couple had three girls and moved to Grass Valley 1850 where they had three more. In 1860 Fanny was on her own in Wisconsin, living with three children next door to Sam and Fanny, but John rejoined her by 1870. John was a labourer and the family remained poor.

Several other members of this family emigrated. John’s cousin Nicholas (1806 St Neot, parents William Coad and Thomasine Dumble) emigrated to Mineral Point in 1841 as a miner. By 1870 he was a wealthy farmer with four children, though grandchildren are not reported. John’s nephew Nicholas Edward Coad (1839 Ruan Lanihorne) arrived in 1861 and moved to Garden City Minnesota as a gold digger; he eventually became president of a cheese factory.

- William Coad (Truro 1823) was a carpenter and the eldest son of Thomas Coad, a wealthy yeoman farmer of St Erme. He married Elizabeth Oates in 1846 and emigrated to Mineral Point with his wife’s family the following year. Before 1870 he also had become a produce merchant and the family purchased a drugstore. A son Nicholas was a druggist and physician in Iowa, while William was a miner and John a farmer in Colorado. William’s brother Thomas Edward emigrated to Victoria an downed a property near the Grampian ranges; he never married.

These three families were distant Brannel cousins – but another family from St Keverne also moved to Wisconsin. Nicholas Coad 1785 Grade and Jenny Cuttance emigrated to Yorkville Racine with four children in 1846 when Nicholas was over 60. Their elder children had already established families in St Keverne. The younger children have left descendants in Wisconsin, Washington and Missouri.

However six years earlier, middle sons James and John went to South Australia on the “Java” the “Floating Coffin”, one of the most infamous voyages in the history of Australian navigation and one of the worst examples of misleading advertising of all time. http://www.geocities.com/java1839/index2.htm Most of the steerage passengers starved and were stricken down by an outbreak of whooping cough. James died on arrival and his wife and child were left destitute, though both sons ultimately left many descendants on the female lines.

EMIGRANTS AFTER 1850

From 1850 the great mines of Gwennap and Redruth began to close, leaving Cornwall in a state of permanent economic depression. For the next 50 years, 10% of the male population emigrated each decade. Many different Coad families emigrated during the period.

Brannel Coads

The Brannels were a farming family, but Thomas the bailiff was not the only Brannel Coad who moved to Gwennap and took up other occupations.

Samuel Coad (1778 St Stephens) was a wire worker who moved to Gwennap about 1806 and had eight children. His eldest son John, a carpenter, went to Canada about 1850, then to Australia where he and his wife Eliza Blamey have a very large number of descendants. Second son William, a miner and wire worker, emigrated to Tennessee, with his family following in 1854. After 1860 we lose track of this family except for eldest son Samuel (1837 Gwennap). Sam was a coal miner and moved around, marrying his wife Jane Alice Hembree in Georgia and having children in Tennessee and Michigan before settling down in Murphysboro Illinois in 1868. he left mining and set up a grocery business, accumulating considerable property. The English are a small minority in Murphysboro, but Sam became an Alderman and township treasurer there. He remarried in 1898 after his wife died but did not get on with his new spouse. Unable to negotiate a separation, he took matters into his hands and in a lurid incident in December 1899 shot himself and his wife. Some of his descendants remain in the city.

Anthony Coad (1800 St Ewe) left the farm and became a tin miner in Perranzabuloe. His three sons and their families all went to Lichfield Connecticut in 1867. Samuel the youngest surviving son was a farmer and it is believed his descendants remain in Lichfield. William Henry and John Anthony Coad were underground miners. Their families disappear after 1870 except for William’s son John Hollow Coad who worked with his uncle Sam for a while then went to New Zealand before 1895.

Looe Coads

The Looe Coads have been the smallest and oldest family of Coads in Cornwall, and like the other small families, the Ermington Coads, Crowan Coads and Lamerton Coads, no longer exist in their home county. They have had a long tradition for three hundred years as blacksmiths and skilled metalworkers.

John Sweett Coad (1836) was a merchant clerk in Devonport who married Mary Jane Carne in 1861. He came to New York on the Java in 1872 and his family arrived several years later. His son Edwin Ernest Coad (1862 Plymouth) was a railroad clerk in New York and had 10 children, 6 of whom had issue. The family moved to New Jersey to New Jersey about 1907 and to Luzerne PA several years later, where there are still descendants.

William Paul Coad (1834 Looe) was a carpenter, the son of Joseph Coad and Jemima Pengilly, and nephew of Joseph Coad of Maine. He emigrated to St Louis Missouri in the early 1860s, married Ada White in 1863 and started a used furniture business. They had three sons, and also adopted two young relatives of Ada in the 1870s. One son Joseph was an architect, another, William, a carpenter like his father, while the third Ambrose was a florist.

Truro Coads

The Coad family of the Truro region have been tinners since the1600s and are the second largest family in Cornwall. We have made a lot of progress in straightening out the complex lines in Truro – but there are still problems on several side lines. These happen to include the ones in the USA.

William Travis Coad (1858 Truro), miner and son of William Coad ( a waiter and servant in Kenwyn ) and Mary Ann Travis, arrived in the USA in 1876 on the “Dakota”, headed for the mines at Clear Creek Colorado, and married in 1887. In 1900 he was a street car conductor in Valverde Colorado, and in 1930 a stadium caretaker in Pasadena. He had two daughters

i. The Battrells
The tinners Battrel are descendants of Henry Coad and Ann Battrell of Camborne; it is not all certain who Henry is. The eldest son Thomas Battral Coad 1787 had 9 children called Coad or Courd in Camborne; the family were still mining in the area in 1901. By elimination, Thomas’ nephew James (1845 Camborne) is the most likely to be the miner and prospector in Marquette Michigan who had 8 children 1874-91 and later moved to Nichols Minnesota..

ii. Perranarworthal Coads
Three Coad brothers John ,Walter and Benjamin were born in Perranarworthal 1801-6, to Walter and Peggy, and they have many descendants. Their origin is uncertain but they are believed to be of the Truro Coads.

The eldest brother, John the gardener, had 12 children in Mylor and Perran. George the tenth child worked as a carrier in Redruth, and died in 1876. His widow Elizabeth (nee Harris) found work as a charwoman, while three of her sons went tin mining. The two eldest died as teenagers in 1882, and Elizabeth set off with the remaining four children in 1887 to Bessemer Michigan, where she married a Scottish iron miner, John Graham. Graham eventually became mine foreman, while her son John, a bachelor, worked as an engineer and oiler for the mine machinery. His brother Richard was chief clerk in a mining office in Ely Minnesota. Although Richard had 4 children, there is no trace of the family after 1910.

Benjamin’s family were skilled industrial workers and tradesmen. His sixth child Joseph (1843) was a stonemason. He married Mary Jolly in 1866 Redruth and two years later they set off for Jo Daviess Illinois, a lead mining area, with their two children. They had two more children, then Joseph died. In 1880 two of the boys are living elsewhere. The family moved to Ainsworth Nebraska by 1900. One son Charles married there and had a single surviving son, brought up by his mother after his wife Sibylla died in 1903.

iii. The Pincombe Coads
One of the hardest problems to solve has been the ancestry of the Pincombe Coads of Washington State and Colorado, because of a trail of conflicting names and dates, and it would not have been possible without the benefit family oral tradition. In 1841 Mary Pinkom can be found living in Liskeard with her partner Richard, labourer; the couple had six children of which three survived. In 1851 she is Mary Ann Halls of Truro 1813, living with Joseph Halls of Gwennap, another lead miner, and four Pincombe children. There is no evidence she married either man, and Pincombe, Halls and Mary Ann cannot be located after this time.

Mary Ann is most likely the cousin of Robert the convict , christened late in Truro 1818 with several of her siblings, as that family had scant regard for convention.

In 1861 the eldest daughter Elisabeth Ann is married for the second time to Francis Body, a Redruth miner, and is called Isabella Body. As well as her four children, her two teenage brothers are living there, now known as John Coad (1842) and Thomas Coad (1845). Family tradition is they adopted their mother’s maiden name after converting to Methodism.

Elizabeth Ann Body arrived with 7 children in New York on the Hecla 1867 to join her husband, mining in Rockaway New Jersey. John Coad married Francis’ sister Eliza Ann Body in 1869 and they emigrated to join the Bodys before 1870.The Bodys proceeded on to Silver Springs Colorado by 1880 while John and his family went first to Nova Scotia, then to West Fairlee Vermont by 1879. They moved to Montana about 1901 and then to Bellevue Washington where descendants reside. According to family history

“John Coad was called "Pincombe the Dancer. Who had feet so small that he could dance on a dinner plate, and who danced for Queen Victoria”

Thomas Coad married in 1873 and emigrated to the USA the following year, joining his brother in West Fairlee. In 1882 they went out silver mining to Clear Creek Colorado and remained there. He had eight children and there are descendants in Colorado and Washington. He was known as a quiet devout man, perhaps unsurprisingly after the turmoil of his youth.

Family research due to Russell Coad.

Coads of the border

There are three lines of Coads from the Cornwall Devon Border, and all are believed to be cousins – the North Hill Coads, the Liskeard/St Ives Coads, and the Lezant Coads descended from James Coad and Catherine Condy.

Isaac Coad (1813 Linkinhorne, shoemaker), the son of James Coad and Elizabeth Bryan of the Lezant line, emigrated to Canada about 1844, where he married and had a son and daughter. The son, William P Coad (1849, Hope Durham Ontario) moved to Saint Sault Michigan around 1883, where he worked in a variety of jobs – government watchman, working on the canals, etc. Of his seven children, only the eldest, Sandford Coad 1879, has been traced. He was a printer who moved to Minot, North Dakota, and had six children there in 1930.

Isaac’s nephew James Coad (1836 Linkinhorne) followed a similar path. He was in Canada by about 1865 and Parker Pensylvania with his family in 1880. It is not known what subsequently became of this family

John Herring Coad (1834, North Hill) was the second son of Samuel Coad (ag lab of Calstock, later foreman of roads) and Charlotte Herring. John married Ann Rice in 1861, emigratng to the USA in 1867 and settling in Brent Creek and Flushing, Genesee Michigan (shown as CODE in the census). The couple had eight children, seven of who had issue, so that 26 grandchildren are recorded (thanks to the work of Dale Moore on this extended family). Most of these were in Michigan in 1930.

Much later about 1907, two plasterer brothers Eber Coad (1875) and Claude Coad of Plymouth emigrated to New Jersey. They were sons of Francis Sleep Coad of North Hill, who moved to Plymouth before 1881. Eber had six sons and nine grandsons.

OTHER NAMES

As everywhere else quite a few families with similar names changed their name to Coad or Cood in the USA. While we have yet to work out who about 45 people were, we do have the following:

The Cudes
Timothy Cude, an illiterate orphan of Randolph North Carolina born in the 1730s, had a huge number of descendants scattered throughout the Southern states. He had 63 grandchildren and they were equally prolific. Some branches called themselves Cood or Coode, and this has led to confusion. Considerable effort has been expended to try to show a connection with the St Marys Coodes, but it seems unlikely that this could be the case.

Eastrington Coods
The only family ever to adopt the variant COOD for more than a generation or so were the Codds of Branston, Lincoln starting 1666. Descendant John Cood 1757 was a landowner who held the manor of Howden and Burland House in Eastrington Yorkshire from the Arundels. It appears that the last two males of the line emigrated to the US. Edward Coad 1820, a farmer of Jo Daviess Illinois in 1850 with two daughters, appears to be the one christened 1821 in Bubwith Yorkshire, while the wealthy broker John Cood 1840 in Jefferson Kentucky 1870 is John Askew Cood of Hull, Edward’s nephew. John and his wife Virginia one daughter and therefore both lines finished with girls.

Coard
The Coards of Accomack Virginia are a very old family dating back to William and David Coard who arrived in Virginia 1655-67. Some descendants such as Salathiel used the variants Cood and Coad.

Codds of Crooked Creek
Joseph Codd (1814 Cadney Lincolnshire) emigrated to Ohio by 1845 and then to Crooked Creek Illinois. With his wife Mary Reisner he had 9 children. The two sons Fred and George were farming there in 1900, calling themselves Coad. Joseph’s brother George arrived in 1838 and his three sons George, Thomas and Joseph also farmed there. George jr was also a butcher and had 5 children.

The Coad family, stage performers of San Francisco and New York

The musician Samuel Coad was born 1794 in Holborn and was probably descended from the Coets of Alverstoke Hampshire (near Portsmouth). In August 1837 Sam arrived in Philadelphia with his three children Henry 1826, Emily 1827 and Albert, and his second wife Catherine. The Coads were soon regular performers in the theatres of Philadelphia, New York and Cincinatti. In 1850 Henry traveled with his troupe to San Francisco in its heyday. There his career really took off as he took lead roles in performances in the new theatres that were opening. By that time Emily was already quite a star in the Park Row Theatre in New York. She traveled in an epic journey with her father Sam across Nicaragua with 75 mules to take passage up the West coast. There she married well: a great-grandchild was Margaret Thomas "Tammis" Keefe (1913-1960), the well known textile designer.

Henry was less fortunate- in 1880 his wife Elizabeth was to be found in the State asylum and his eldest daughter Minnette died.

Alfred was the only member of the family not to tread the boards. He was a machinist and woodworker who owned land; at the age of 60 he married a 16 year old, Jane Mary “Juanita:’ Smith. The marriage was not happy and Juanita supported herself with a theatrical bell-ringing act. After Alfred died in 1906, leaving his property to be divided between the widow and his daughter Sadie Zanone (from his first marriage) there were several years of acrimonious litigation in which the will was overturned.. Juanita herself died only two years later, the property passed to her new husband, and Sadie continued to press for restitiution vigorously without success until 1911.

More on this family, researched by Karen Liebert, is at http://www.nwfestival.com/Keefe_genealogy.pdf

Cudd of Texas
The Cudds are a very old South Carolina family, originally coming in from the West Indies in the 1660s as indentured servants to work on plantations. It si possiblye the Cudes are of this family. John A Cudd 1862, son of David, adopted the variant Cood with his family in1900, but cannot be found after that time.

Coads of Saline Missouri

Henry M Coad (1840) a labourer from Pennsylvania or Illinois, father from Virginia) was in Eudora Kansas till 1873 then moved to Clay Saline Missouri. He had six children and two of the sons were farming in Saline in 1920. The origin of this family is not known, but it probably involves a name change. He may be Henry M Cook, Paris Illinois 1843, father George Cook of Virginia (or Stokes NC) 1802

There also remain about 35 singles who cannot be located.

Coad/Coode DNA study - Work programme

2007-09-04T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Coad Coode DNA study, as stated in the introductory article to the blog, is trying to trace Coad or Coode male DNA, which is passed along more or less intact from father to son, to determine which of the many Coad families are related.

The initial phase of the DNA study strongly indicate that there are at least three families of Coads and Coodes in Cornwall, possibly more, and the Ermington Devon Coads are a distinct family.

To prove a line is bona fide, what is needed are two widely separated cousins to take the test. If their DNA matches, then everyone in-between can be considered a relative.

Distinct lines without a clear paper trail also need to be tested to see what family they are from.

Ideally the following tests are required from known Coad or Coode descendants:

COADS OF THE BORDER

North Hill
1 test from Nicholas Coad /Sarah Dingle line, South Australia
1 test from Isaac Coad/Margaret Morgan line of London
1 test from John Coad/Rebecca Sleep line (DONE)
1 test from John Coad/Ann Hender line in USA

St Ive/Liskeard line
1 test from Coads of Licking Ohio
1 test from John Luskey Coad line of Salcombe Devon (Robert 1733)
1 test from Charidon St Ive Coads OR
1 test from George Coad/Lydia Iveson line (desc Richard 1742)

St Cleer line
1 test from George Coad, St Dominick line of Moyston Vic Australia.
1 test from George Coad/Mary Herring line of Northumberland

Lamerton line (may be extinct)
1 test Ontario Canada

COADS AND COODES OF CENTRAL CORNWALL

St Stephens
2 tests from Edward line ~1679 (St Austell, 2 tests from the Theo line 2 tests from Samuel 1690 1 test from John 1704 (Hyrum) (Ohio, Canada and Victoria)
1 test from Penkivel line (Cleveland OH, perhaps
1 test from Richard 1796 St Enoder line
1 test from Thomas/Ann Trucker line (Iowa)

St Wenn
1 test Thomas Battral Coad line

Coode
1 test from Edward Coode 1792 line
1 test from Henry Coode 1795 line
1 test from Thomas Coode 1797 line
1 test from Rev John Coode line, Nashville TN

Constantine
1 test for Robert the Convict line, Victoria
1 test for Peter Coad/Jane Funn line (Yorks or South Australia
1 test for John/Mary Nankervis line (Daylesford Victoria)

Perranarworthal
1 test for John/Elizabeth line (Cornwall, Yorkshire, S Africa?)
1 test for Walter/Grace line (Cornwall, Devonport or Ballarat Vic)
1 test for Benjamin/Maryann line (Cornwall or Nebraska)
1 test for Richard/Mary Martin line (Cornwall

Crowan
1 test from Beechworth Vic Coades
[1 test fromWm Coad/Margaret Pearce line] NZ or Vic, may be extinct.

Lizard
1 test from Charles Coad/Eliza Eddy line (Victoria)
1 test from Francis Coad/Jane Tregortha line (Lancs or Yorks)
1 test from James Collingwood line (SA or NSW)
1 test from John Coad/Susanna Tripconey line (Cornwall)
1 test from Nicholas Coad/Jane Cuttance line (South Australia or Wisconsin)

DEVON COADS

Ermington
1 test from James Hook/Elizabeth Foote line (Canada, may be extinct)
1 test from Henry Coad/Diana line
1 test from John Coad/Jenny Jeffrey line (PA or Iowa)

Codd
Will require more research

So we require about 40 DNA tests to map the Coads etc properly (this number may be reduced as matches are received). At the moment we have four! This is going to be a long haul.

If you belong to one of the untested lines and genuinely want to know your origins and whether the paper trail is as it should be, I suggest you try to get a male Coad etc relative to take the test - and to pay for it if necessary, as I am doing for my own Coade relatives

WEST COUNTRY GENEALOGY TRIP

2007-08-20T01:20:00.000-07:00

March 2006
Monday 27 Mar 2006 I have a week to spare between Nairobi and New York, and decide it could profitably be spent in Britain, where I had three different tasks to do in three record offices. England is the easiest place for Australians to travel, as it’s all so familiar – except for a few differences in the traffic rules, such as no passing on the inside lane, no-one much obeying the speed limits, and cars parking round the wrong way. I borrow my son’s Audi, pay double what I had ever paid before for a tank of fuel, and set off into the Green and Pleasant Land. The daffodils are out, the sun is shining, and after an unintentional round trip of London find myself on the A303 by 9.30am. But then England turns on its best spring weather – drizzle, fog and high winds. I can just make out Stonehenge looming on the right . I make it to Dorchester by what I am sure cannot be the quickest route by 12:30. Dorchester (Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge) is a small, largely preserved market town. It’s straightforward to find the Dorset Historical Centre behind the Military Museum. There I am trying to track down the Lyme Regis relatives of Eleanor Coade who invented Coade Stone and was probably Britain’s most successful business woman. The centre is fairly informal with four small rooms plus a coffee room, and the staff are helpful (except for the one male librarian who is snooty as only the British can be) and they have a wide range of good indexed transcriptions. It took me over an hour to wade through the Lyme registers (thinking how easy it would be to scan and text recognize all these), finally working out that as we had suspected, the male line at Lyme died out within a generation despite there being seven sons. I also find a list of Mayors in the back of an 1820 history of Lyme, and confirm that five different Coades had been Mayor 1680-1790, in its heyday as a wool and textile centre. This has been a very good start.

Lyme Regis town square

There is more to do on this family, but I need to make it to Exeter. I pick up a very useful document showing the typical holdings of the Record Offices and decide I had time to drive through Lyme itself. It’s a well-preserved and authentic seaside resort and I find Eleanor’s house, currently occupied by the widow of the author John Fowles, which is covered with examples of her decorative work.

Exeter is a sprawling nightmare of looping motorways, heavy traffic and industrial parks. I follow very irritating “i” signs which are supposed to lead to the Information Centre and finally locate it on the fourth pass and after asking five people, hidden behind the Council Offices, by which time it is closed. Someone finally tells me that the map I had downloaded of the Devon Record Office was not in Exeter at all but out at Sowton, a labrynthine industrial area near the M5 and airport. After driving round there for another hour, I give up and look for accommodation in nearby Clyst Honiton. Most of the inns are filled up with truck drivers but I found a B w/o B where I freeze and sleep fitfully, waking up with a bad back and aching legs at 2am and working till 4.

Tue 28 Mar
Reluctantly I head for Sowton again where once more I spend an hour zooming round the M5 and A303 till just as I was about to give up and head for Cornwall, a nice Sikh gentleman in a service station tells me that the road I had just come down four times was in fact Mary’s Lane (completely unmarked like all Exeter’s main roads so that not even the locals had ever heard of it). When the Office finally opens at 10 the librarians are very apologetic, explaining they had only been there a year and the Council wouldn’t signpost it. You have to head south at the very large roundabout

The Office is a very large new setup, a history barn, with a nice coffee room/internet café at the entrance . It’s a long time since I have seen a fiche reader, statistics offices and standard libraries threw them out 20 years ago, but there are over 40 of them lined up here, and are the medium of choice for the majority of punters. Once again I’m the only person using a laptop.

The job to do today was to find as many Devon Coads as possible – and I expect many to be missing, given that the IGI covers only a few Devon parishes. Fiche are going to be too slow, given I will have to leave here by 4pm. There are only a few transcripts; I do my neck in over a couple of hours on a poorly indexed one from Tavistock – but this is a bit of a goldmine with a couple of families I have never run into before, plus several unusual possible variants – it’s still unclear whether the Gaudes and Goodes are related to Coodes but there are some intermediate forms here. After I finish, there is a beige lunch van up the road that sells passable hamburgers.

This is hopeless, I probably have 30 Devon parishes to do and if I have to switch to unindexed fiche I will be lucky to do two today. We have had computers for 35 years now, why hasn’t anyone loaded the whole of Devon up and cross-indexed it?

The library does have a couple of new CD indexes which are used so seldom the staff don’t know how to set them up – but we get it working. The Three Towns one (Plymouth/Stonehouse/Devonport.is a goldmine even though it only covers the early 19th century – it’s the most populous part of Devon/Cornwall by a long way and I extract many marriages and a few families. I also locate the trial papers of Robert Coad of St Agnes, the only Coad convict, who was transported at the age of 19 for being a bad egg and left a trail of descendants across Tasmania and Victoria. This enables me to identify him at last.

By 3:30 I have to set off. I intended to go through Plymouth but somehow find myself on the northern road which is quicker. At Launceston (Larnston) just across the Cornwall border I head south into deep Coad country, cutting across country on tiny single lane roads to Bray Shop, Coad’s Green and then Linkinhorne. It’s strange hilly country of small forests and vales. The fields are mostly marked out by high earth banks with hedges towering over the car - looks much better than barbed wire but the upkeep must be fierce. As I go deeper towards South Hill it becomes a giant hedge maze – with half the roads boggy and closed to traffic just to make it more interesting.

Menheniot cottage

I pass through the large town of Callington and make the good move of turning towards Menheniot. More one lane roads, this time with a lot of dodging of oncoming vehicles – they say people round here can drive as fast in reverse as forward. In Menheniot I feel in another place and time – maybe it’s the stone houses, the sweet smell of wood smoke, the narrow walks or the clean mountain air, but I could be back in a Himalayan village in Nepal. The fellers in the bar of the White Hart Inn are really friendly when they find out why I’m there and one of them goes off to find the Vicar. They cant recall any Coodes around; I realize that although I regard Menheniot as the ancestral home of all todays Coodes there actually haven’t been any here since the 1590s (though there was an interesting family of Coads here 1770-1800).
There’s one room left at the Inn, it’s a huge suite for only 35 pounds, lovely and comfy. I take a drive down to Looe before dinner.

The land opens up around Morval, the ancestral home of the Coodes, and a long valley leads down to Looe. The lower part is flooded, and Im driving past the odd sight of the (tourist) East Looe Rail Line sitting on levees in the water. As with a number of other resorts in Cornwall, the gorge gets higher as you near the sea and Looe is built on the steep hills at the opening. The view is splendid, the town is quaint.

Looe Harbour, historical

Back in Menheniot I see the vicar flapping past in full black robes – he has a bald spot like a monk’s tonsure. It seems he comes to the bar most nights in full regalia. The food and the ale are good, there are a lot of visitors in the Lounge Bar and I chat with a few before retiring early. Once again I wake at two and work till four.

Wed 29 Mar
The bacon and eggs are cooked perfectly and I find the vicar opening the Church, Rev Philip Conway. He’s a rather diffident youngish chap who shows me a diamond in the floor right in the middle of his church, dedicated to Robert Coad of Trevallan. He introduces me to his churchwarden Dave Kemplin, who is a lovely chap and deeply into local history. He tells me there are no real maps of churchyards unlike cemeteries. The gravestones were picked up in the 1950s and placed around the outside walls to leave a central green area, and because of all the lichen you can really only read them in the afternoon light. Prominently featured is

To the memory of Richard Prynn
Late of this village, Whos death was
occasioned by a portion of a house falling on him
while passing through Liskeard on the 7th day of June 1864.
“In the middle of life we are in death”

Doesn’t say much for local building standards. I decide to avoid Liskeard. Dave tells me to go to Truro via Austell because of roadwork delays.

This turns out to be pretty slow going too, especially as I turn off to Fowey, built like Looe in the ancient style on steep slopes at the mouth of the Fowey river. The one-way drivethrough takes awhile and its 11:30 before I make it to the Cornish Record Office. Truro is a lot more manageable than Exeter, despite an evening traffic problem, and I find it pretty quickly half way down the hill near the railway station and an iron bridge (you can enter it more easily from the Redruth road, coming from the Redruth side, once you know where it is).

The Office is just a single room with two big tables, one for maps where a lady with stocking feet is striding round measuring things on a giant parish map. It’s kind of a community thing and the librarians get heavily involved in what is going on, particularly Annie who is indefatigable.

The main thing I have to do here is reduce the 160 poor connections in my onename study. This is not too bad out of over 3000, but still they play havoc with the lines. There are 18 from the 16th century, 48 from the 17th, 27 from the 18th, 36 from 1800-1837, and the rest are post 1837 BMDs I cant afford to buy. The big problem is the 17th C, particularly in places like St Stephen Brannel and Crowan where the parish registers have only survived from about 1680. I ask to see the Bishops transcripts and at this point the wheels fall off.

First my laptop breaks down so I have to work from memory. Then working with the fiche is far worse than even I imagined. Fiche and especially microfilm are very hard to use for people who get travel sickness and I am nauseous almost immediately (my son vomited his way through his Masters history research). Secondly the fiche are almost unintelligible. Thirdly the handwriting looks like a particularly inaccessible foreign language. There is no way I am going to get through even a single page of these chicken scratches in the time I have available.

Annie suggests I start from a late 17th century will, Gilbert Coade of Illogan, and work my way back once I get the knack. I still cant read a thing. She happily looks over my shoulder and reads it out. Well that is good stuff, but this is simply not going to work, I have some severe handicaps for a would-be family historian.

A nice girl brings sandwiches and juice in an Esky, they are good but you have to be quick. I return to the transcripts, which are absolutely first rate where they exist. I do all my ancestors from Crowan first. Then I order up the Coode family endowments and photo albums for a change of pace. They come on a silk pillow with white gloves. The albums are beautiful things with pictures of little boys with long golden ringlets in dresses (for nappy access we decide) and bits of Cornish scenery (including Morval House much to my surprise, I have never been able to prove these Coodes are descended from Morval). The librarians all think they are great too and are ooh-ing over them. The endowment items are huge folded things in a ribbon handwritten on both sides of an A2, mostly relating to 4000 pounds left in trust to Mary Coode, which has to be rewritten every time her brothers marry (lawyers really earned their keep back then). Most of it is held in 4% Victorian and New South Wales state and railway bonds, with a smattering from NZ and South Africa – it seems these guys really were directly financing the colonies.

This is a very disappointing day in terms of my main objective, I have not cracked a single bad connection. I drive off through heavy traffic through Redruth and to the south through the pretty village of Constantine where my gggf lived just before emigrating, but there is no accommodation about so I head to Falmouth. The pentennial Celtic Film Festival is on and I have to ask at four places before I finally get something. For some reason British landladies always tell you they have nothing but when you question them you find out they have a “double room” which they rent you with great reluctance even though it is the same price and about a quarter the size of what you had in the night before. I manage to stay awake till 9pm but still I wake up at 2am and work till 4. The laptop decides to work again in the wee small hours so I check off the ancestors. No, it is exactly what I already have, not as complete in fact. I really am beginning to feel I am wasting my time and might as well just stick to the Internet which seems to have everything, far more accessible.

Thur 30 March
As the genealogy is not going so well I decide to tour round a little and head up through Helston into Godolphin country. The sun is up, the scenery flashes past, smugglers, Breage, Godolphin Cross, stone walls, vegetables, hedges, gorse and daffodils. High stone towers standing alone in a field of daffodils. The beautiful sweep of coast view from Marazion, around Penzance Bay all the way from St Michaels Mount to Mousehole. I cut across country to Praze-an-Beeble where my ancestors lived for 200 years, rather grim rows of miners’ stone terraces, a Jack Russell sitting in a bay window framed by daffodils. I buy a pastie at the bakery, ito seems to be the thing to do.

It’s 1130 and quite crowded by the time I get to the Record Office, the lady in socks is still pacing her way across the giant map, a cheery older couple are transcribing mazurkas and polkas from an old music book and practicing some dance steps, a pretty plump mother and daughter come in and are doing something very learned, everyone knows me today and nods hello.

I get serious, at least I can cover 1800-1830. The Gwennap/St Day transcripts and indexes are just great, for some reason the IGI cuts out there very early. It’s a big parish and it takes me over 3 hours to sort out a horrible tangle I have there and fix three bad connections. I have a half hour left and it’s time to look at my first real parish register on fiche, North Hill. Much to my surprise its beautifully laid out in the 1800s and I can scan it almost as fast as a printed document. But as I head back into the 18th century the layout disintegrates into a mess and its chicken scratches again, I feel like I’m back in the muddy hedge mazes of Lanhydrock.

Straight into the car at 5 and Im back near the outskirts of London by 9. It’s a scary thing to be driving at 80mph on the slow lane of a dark wet road, much faster than I would ever drive in Australia, and have ordinary-looking cars flash past you at speed. Even at that “slow” pace, twice I almost rammed into roundabouts. Lost in Clapham Junction, asking a lot of dumb directions like “what street is this” but I finally make it to my sons house by 1030pm. At last I sleep the whole night – and today it is time to leave.

So what have I learned?

- the record offices get smaller and the staff get friendlier and more involved as you head west. But they are all a huge repository of local and family information which would take months to adequately explore.
- Get a better laptop, learn to read appalling writing and have a lot of time to spare if you want to investigate the 17th C or even the 18th C.
- Get as much as you can off the internet or other remote source, even if you have to pay. Do not think to save money by going to Cornwall. For any reasonably extensive study, you cant do more than 2-3 parishes per day even with indexed typed hard copies, and its cheaper to buy stuff at home than to pay for accommodation. Only use the Record Offices for material that isn’t anywhere else and where you know what you are looking for. Such as family materials, poor law stuff, marriage by licence, endowments, old histories.
- You cant beat actually being there, staying in the inns, walking the streets and talking with the locals if you want to know how and where your ancestors lived and how things have changed.

GEORGE BENSON COODE AND THE VICTORIAN POOR LAWS

2007-08-20T00:11:00.001-07:00

The story of George Benson Coode is a classic Victorian story of a brilliant legislator and reformer brought down by pride and cupidity. Distinguished Barrister of the Inner Temple in London and Assistant Poor Law Commissioner, he is perhaps the principal architect of the 1834 Poor Laws, one of the most influential pieces of social legislation of that century. In the process of this reform, he published a book which is still quoted as a seminal work codifying how to frame legislation properly in plain language. Yet he lost his position in disgrace in what was one of the scandals of the century.

THE POOR LAWS

As the feudal system began to break down in the 16th century, large numbers of displaced poor people began to flock to the cities. After the Reformation and the establishment of the Church of England, many of the old values and moral expectations disappeared so it became necessary to regulate the relief of poverty by law.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, a spate of legislation was passed to deal with the increasing problem of raising and administering poor relief. Parish registers of the poor were introduced. Justices of the Peace were empowered to raise compulsory funds from land owners in each parish for the relief of the poor and the honorary post of 'Overseer of the Poor' was created to collect the tax and dispense food or money. In 1601 these arrangements were formally codified in the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Mosty people were assisted in their own homes; “outdoor relief”. Separate Houses of Correction were set up in each county to put vagabonds and the wandering poor to work – and in some of these, inmates were flogged and manacled upon entry.

Generally, the localised system was a fair and equitable system run for and administered by local people at a time when the population was small enough for everyone to know everyone else and their circumstances. However the system was not audited and regulated, and had no consistent body of practice. Some parishes resented the imposition of Poor Relief and engaged in practices such as dumping pregnant unmarried women across parish borders near the time of their confinement, or ordering new arrivals to leave the parish if they appeared to lack resources and might become a parish burden.

The Settlement Act of 1662 tried to improve the situation by stating that a person had to have a “settlement” in order to receive parish relief; which could be obtained by being born in a parish, marrying into it, or working in the parish for a year and a day. If a labourer moved away from his parish of origin in search of work the JPs issued him with a certificate of settlement saying that if the man fell on hard times his own parish would receive him back and pay for him to be 'removed'. This was a serious error with economic ramifications in that it hindered the free movement of labour required for a rapidly specializing economy. It also led to short term work contracts, so that a man might live in a parish for many years and not become eligible for poor relief.

Poor relief became very much a part of local governance and the Poor Tax was usually collected through the parish church system. Poor relief records are fertile ground for genealogists. Positions administering the poor law, were, like JPs, honorary but conferred local prominence. Edward Coode of Penryn 1735, heir to Methleigh manor, levied the poor rates for Penryn in the 1780s. He became very wealthy, founding the Coode line which has included some of Cornwall’s most eminent citizens. The Codds of Diptford Devon were also of local prominence and collected taxes for the King, including poor relief.

The Knatchbull Amendment in 1723 established workhouses which effectively privatized poor relief in some parishes, so that the parish paid a weekly rate per person to the workhouse administrator. By 1776 there were 2000 workhouses with between 20 and 50 inmates. The cost of this “indoor” relief was high. By the 1830s, many poor houses were vile and unsanitary establishments; the sick were not nursed, children were not educated and paupers could starve to death in them.

THE VICTORIAN REFORMS

By 1800 ideas of free-market economics and liberal notions of individual “freedom” were gaining sway. Adam Smith and others said that statutory poor relief distorted the free market mechanism that determined the natural levels of prices and wages. In his pamphlet, Principles of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus asserted, without proof, that the existing poor laws created the poverty that the laws were designed to relieve. He argued that because a family could claim poor relief, people contracted earlier marriages and had larger families. Therefore all forms of poor relief were counterproductive because they would be swallowed by increases in the poor population. From 1800-1820 the cost of poor relief doubled. The increasing poverty was in fact created by the Industrial Revolution and Enclosure, but the wealthy were blind to their own role in creating this new poverty. Some counties began to operate harsh “deterrent” systems in which outdoor (home) relief was abolished, and these in fact reduced claims on the parish.

Following a Royal Commission in 1834, this approach was extended to the whole country. A central Commission not under direct ministerial or parliamentary control, with wide powers, was created to administer the Poor Law nationally. Parishes were required to band together into “Unions” supervised by Boards of Guardians acting under centralized control, each with a workhouse. All relief was now supposed to be administered in these workhouses,. The workhouse needed to be as unattractive as possible to give the poor an incentive to work and save, and the sexes were to be separated to prevent breeding.

Conditions in the poorhouses frequently became just as grim as was intended. Inmates were disinfected, their clothes were taken away, and they put on the House uniform. In some unions, unmarried mothers were forced to wear yellow gowns, branding them immoral. Some also had their hair closely cropped as well. Work, although it was not necessarily designed as punishment, was often grueling and sometimes even dangerous. Inmates broke rock, ground corn by hand, picked oakum and ground animal bones for fertilizer and manufacturing. Smoking was prohibited, as was reading -- even of the Bible. Visits from "outsiders" were closely monitored. Often parents were not allowed to speak to their children. In one workhouse, conditions were so crowded that people were required to sleep seven to a bed. In another a pregnant woman died of starvation at the front steps when denied admission.

However, these harsh “reforms” were never rigorously applied since many local bodies resented national control and undermined them. The North had used the Poor Laws as a form of cyclical unemployment relief, and bitterly resisted the change. In 1841, three quarters of poor relief was still applied outdoors. Many workhouses did not change their approach. Dickens wrote, “I believe there has been in England, since the days of the STUARTS, no law so often infamously administered, no law so often openly violated, no law habitually so ill-supervised.” and most people agreed with him. However, the workhouse era did not end until 1930 when the Boards were abolished.

A 'bastardy clause' in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act (partially overturned in 1847) had made all illegitimate children the sole responsibility of their mothers until they were 16 years old. The putative father therefore became free of any legal responsibility for his illegitimate offspring. Unmarried pregnant women were often disowned by their families and the workhouse was the only place they could go during and after the birth of their child.

One sad example of the institutionalization of the poor and disabled is a blind woman, Jane or Jenny Coad born St Ewe Cornwall 1802. She lived on poor relief all her life and seems to have been fair game for the local lads, since she had three illegitimate sons in 1823, 1827 and 1840. The only survivor was the eldest boy Charles. He was deaf and dumb and was described as “idiot” in the 1851 census, but was able to support himself through mining and agricultural work. Under the new poor law Jane was placed in the Union Workhouse in St Austell, and had her third son there who died at the age of three. By 1861 she was released and reunited with Charles, but after his death in 1863 she went back to the Workhouse where she died in 1875.

Like Jane, most of the recipients of poor relief, were not in fact the working poor at whom the law was aimed, but the aged and disabled. The creation of workhouses under the new law was therefore paralleled by the creation of asylums and infirmaries. By 1845 England and Wales were governed by another centralising law, a law that required every area of the country to provide a lunatic asylum for its insane poor. Because public asylums were not yet built, all lunatic poor had to be sent to a private madhouse, which created a bonanza for these facilities. The newly built railways made it possible to send pauper lunatics from all over the country to the larger establishments, creating a unique entrepreneurial opportunity for siphoning public funds.

Lambeth Poorhouse

MOTT, COODE AND HAYDOCK LODGE

Enter our main characters, Charles Mott and George Coode. George Coode (1807-1869), the eldest son of Manners Benson Cood of Surrey, became a barrister of the Inner Temple on 7th June 1833. A year later, on 18th August 1834, Coode was appointed as Assistant Secretary of the Poor Law Commission (and Secretary in 1839). Here he was to meet Charles Mott, the man whose combination of public service and private enterprise would end Coode's service at the Commission in scandal and disgrace.

Mott had been a shopkeeper in Lambeth London when he conceived of a plan for reducing costs of poor relief by uniformly reducing the diet of the poor in quantity and quality. He went into business as a contractor for the poor and soon had all the indoor paupers in Lambeth on his books, cutting the parish costs by a third – simply by eliminating all “indulgences” such as tea and sugar, and by daily “scrubbing and adjusting the scales with nicety” so that the paupers would not receive any extra food.

Mott was regarded as a genius by Edwin Chadwick the first Secretary of the Poor Law Commission and was appointed the second Assistant Commissioner in November 1934, in charge of various Unions. Mott conveniently forgot to disclose he had also been the proprietor of a lunatic asylum in London since 1826. He was removed from his office in 1842 after a brawl with several recalcitrant Union Boards in Yorkshire when he attempted to stop outdoor relief.

The enterprising Mott then issued a journal purporting to be official and selling it to the Workhouse Unions. On Jan 1844 he also opened a new lunatic asylum, Haydock Lodge in South Lancashire, which with over 400 patients, almost all paupers, was the largest regional asylum in the country.

Haydock Lodge, Lancashire

The true ownership and control of the Asylum only became public when Coode published a letter in the Times on 8 June 1846 which read in part.
Coode objected to an allegation that "the asylum was established as a joint speculation by parties directly and officially connected with the Poor Law Commission". Apart from the ex-officer, Mott, he stated, was the only person in the Poor Law Commission "in any way connected with Haydock Lodge. My concern with it is simply and strictly that of proprietor of the house and grounds, which I let for the purpose of being used as an asylum.”

In the subsequent investigation Coode claimed he had taken over the Lodge to help Mott who would otherwise have been destitute. His sister had taken out the licence in what appeared to be an attempt to conceal Coode’s involvement. It also appeared that conditions at the Lodge had been unsatisfactory. Coode had sent in a consultant building engineer, had gone to the establishment himself in 1845 and dismissed most of the staff. He also asked Mott to leave by Aug 1846. Mott then worked as auditor to the parish Unions until his death five years later.

Further inquiries revealed the true situation at Haydock. Examination of the records showed that in fact 112 patients had died in the Lodge in 1845 alone – one in four of those admitted. Many were seriously ill when admitted, and in the poor conditions of the asylum they had rapidly died from diarrhea and other causes. Several doctors had issued complaints of cruelty:

“his body was covered by bruises, scars and discolourations... one of his toes was severely crushed ... one of his ears was as if it had all been pulled off ... his clothes were filthy and disgusting in the extreme”. (Dr Owen Roberts of Bangor, late 1845)

Roberts had in fact issued a petition to the House of Commons through his local Member, in which he pointed out, as well as the intolerable conditions at Haydock, the impropriety of Poor Law Commissioners being involved in the trade in lunatics for profit at the government’s expense. Mott had been attempting to keep Coode’s name out of the scandal for some weeks, but after Coode’s ill-advised public disclosure in the Times allegations became facts, and Coode was forced to resign.

The picture seems to be that Coode had taken up a business venture with Mott who must have had considerable charm, despite the fact that he was in clear conflict of interest and profiteering from his position,. Coode had attempted to conceal this fact by transparent stratagems. When he found out the conditions of the Lodge under Mott and his staff, he personally stepped in and tried to rectify the situation through a building programme and selecting new staff. However, the damage had been done and exposure was inevitable. It is surprising that such a clever man could be so ill-advised and naïve.

Public asylums continued to send patients to Haydock, and Coode continued his association with the asylum (one son was born there in 1848). However in 1851 the new Lancashire Public Asylums opened and all pauper patients were removed from Haydock, which came under new management (soon after, it took on public patients again). Mott also died in that year. Haydock continued as a private asylum for more than 100 years, closing in 1969.

From 1846 the law of settlement was steadily eroded as internal migration of labour became commonplace in Britain. Coode was retained by the Commission in 1848 'to go into the counties of Leicester, Cambridge and Huntingdon, and there to inquire into the practical effect of the Law of Settlement ... on the labouring classes ... on the employers of labour ... on the continuance of pauperism and vagrancy”. His massive report is a broad description and assessment of the law of settlement and its history. The report states, “I have been unable to find a single ... man who could give me any evidence how the law of settlement works". He goes on to explain the law's complexities, describing the law effecting the removal of the poor as "a law of repression ... [resulting in] universal discontent" and effectively binding labourers to the soil in an economic feudalism. The position smacks strongly of Whig liberalism and is probably overstated.

Not much is known about Coode’s activities for the last twenty years of his life. Tradition is that he received some honour(s) and was listed in Burke's and DeBrett's after his death.

COODE'S FAMILY LIFE

The COOD family were wealthy merchants with substantial interests in Chile and Latin America. George's father went by the curious name of Manners Benson Cood Esq. He and his wife Elizabeth Worster had seven children but only George had issue. Oddly, George was not baptized until he was 7 or 8 years old. The family owned property in St Heliers Jersey and in Lyme Regis Dorset. Two maiden sisters of George lived together as fundholders in St Heliers until after 1890. The elder was a talented singer who was said to have been engaged to a Russian nihilist who was eliminated before they could marry.

George married Helen Meyer in Surrey around 1824, when he was only 17 years old, and he seems to have adopted the variant COODE around that time. He had seven children, several of whom did extraordinary things. Devoted to his wife but a strict disciplinarian, he ruled his home with an iron hand in the Barret-of-Wympole Street manner, refusing to let any of his daughters marry while he was alive. The family lived on foreign securities after George’s death in 1867, first in Jersey then Lyme Regis.

Helen Hoppner Coode the eldest daughter was a gifted artist, illustrator and writer. The eldest son George Manners Churchill Coode was reputedly a heavy drinker and gambler. He had a falling out with his father when he married a policeman’s daughter Charlotte Parsons, and changed his name to George Cavendish Manners, apparently at his father’s insistence. He worked as a policemen until he received an annuity, dying without issue in Wandsworth 1903.

The second son Thomas Hoppner Coode emigrated to Chile where he owned a quicksilver mine and died a victim of violence. He introduced his sister Lilie Beatrice to his partner John Leese, an Englishman born in Chile, and they married. Their descendants have lived in Ecuador, Guatemala, Italy, Portugal, Malaya, South Africa and Australia.

The second daughter Rosa Coode married a Frenchman in 1871, lived in Avesnes, France. After she was widowed she moved to Lyme with her mother and sisters. She returned annually to Avesnes and was caught there with her maid when the German army swept into France and was forced to stay there throughout WWI. She wrote a vivid account of her experiences.

(adapted from the research of descendants Magdalena Gorrel Guimaraens and David Gardner-Medwin)

COODES LEGACY

Coode’s main legacy was a report written in passing: On legislative expression: or, the language of the written law. This influential and still highly regarded work was first published as an appendix to the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners on Local Taxation, 1843. In that report and subsequent writings, Coode formulated a formal syntax for legislation which sets the format for modern legal documents. As the leading authority on legislative drafting, he argues that most legal documents can be written in "the common popular structure of plain English.” Most modern drafting is based on these principles set 150 years ago by Coode.

However, it is the Poor Law and its abuses with which his name will always be associated. Like other forms of social engineering which it pre-dated, the revised Poor Law was based on theoretical principles which drew from prejudice rather than fact. It did have the beneficial effects of firstly drawing the public eye to the plight of the poor, and secondly in centralizing the system, considerably improving its uniform application and bureaucratic effectiveness, thereby eventually making a modern social welfare system possible.

The contribution that that the repeal of settlement made to increased labour mobility is debatable, but there is no doubt that it made it considerably easier for the workforce to move round the country. Prior to 1850 there was almost no movement out of Cornwall to other parts of Britain, but with the closure of the mines in the 1850s there was a dramatic exodus of Cornish miners and other working males, not just across the globe but to London, Wales and the North of England – thereby averting a local disaster.

George Benson Coode himself remains an enigma – a man from a privileged but mysterious background; a brilliant jurist who allowed himself to be led astray by a profiteer on the poor; a social reformer who owned one of the most degraded establishments in the country; a barrister who foolishly implicated himself with a false statement in the most public forum of the day, a brilliant and original codifier of legal terminology who only published in government reports – but so disorganized that he baptized most of his children late and incorrectly and filled out his census forms wrong; a strict disciplinarian who produced a family of adventurers. He is one of the great Victorian fallen characters.

SOURCES
Largely taken from Roberts, England's Poor Law Commissioners and the Trade in Pauper Lunacy 1834-1847. http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/Mott.htm#Coode

Hirst, David. ‘A ticklish sort of affair’: Charles Mott, Haydock Lodge and the economics of asylumdon. History of Psychiatry.2005; 16: 311-332.

Coode, George Benson. On legislative expression : or, the language of the written law. William Benning, James Ridgway, 1845.

Report of George Coode, Esq. to the Poor Law Board on the law of settlement and removal of the poor, being a further report to those printed in 1850. 1851

Reports tabled by Coode during his tenure. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mss/online/online-mss-catalogues/cats/newc_5thduke12cat.html

FROM PASTURE TO PUBLISHER

2007-08-18T05:56:00.001-07:00

Dorothy Coade Hewett, Oral Sumner Coad, Nellie Euphemia Coad

Academic and literary Coads

ORAL SUMNER COAD 1887-1976
Educator , academic and historian

Dr. Oral Sumner Coad was born in December 1887 in Des Moines Iowa., the only son of the farmer Laurel Coad and his wife Sadie Baldwin, and a great grandson of John Coad and Jennie Jeffrey of Ermington Devon. He was educated in Columbia University New York, and left a position there to teach at N.J.C. in 1923. In 1928, he became Chair of Douglass English.

A man of eclectic interests, Coad enjoyed building bookshelves, refinishing antique furniture, and studying European cathedrals. He was a very organized person, described as being "as neat as an asterisk on a foot note." In his academic pursuits, Coad was a prolific writer, publishing on William Dunlap, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman and American theater. He recruited talented English professors for N.J.C., who added scholarly distinction to the already popular Department.

Coad's curricular ideals for N.J.C. resembled educational trends across the nation. As the country experienced peace and wealth, patriotic courses in American Studies were introduced. In 1928, a course in "post-war American literature" was added. By autumn of 1929, N.J.C. was at its peak enrollment of 1,157 students, and despite the beginning of the Great Depression, "American Literature" and "Post-War Literature" remained among the most popular courses. With his expertise in theater, Coad brought Contemporary Drama, Play Producing, and Dramatic Composition into the curriculum, forming the basis for what would become an independent and renowned department at N.J.C. in Speech and Dramatic Arts.

In this context, Coad did his best to introduce popular innovations while maintaining the English Department's high standards. To encourage student engagement, Coad made Harper's Magazine, one of the best-respected journals of criticism and opinion at the time, the required text, using contemporary subject matter as class material for thinking and writing.

Coad was instrumental in building a successful English Department at N.J.C. By 1940 the English curriculum, which had initially offered a small handful of general classes, was similar to Rutgers College's and was taught by a comparably distinguished faculty. Coad would continue to lead the Department through the next decade, as World War II brought great changes to N.J.C., Rutgers, and higher education throughout the nation

Adapted from english.rutgers.edu/alumni/newsletter/spring_summer_05/historydouglass.html

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS
William Dunlap: A Study of His Life and Works and of His Place in Contemporary Culture (1917).
"The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," edited by Oral Sumner Coad. 1927 The American Stage (Pageant of America). Oral Sumner Coad and Edward Mms 1927
False shame and Thirty years, two plays by William Dunlap; edited by Oral Sumner Coad. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1940).
New Jersey in Travelers' Accounts, 1524-1971. A Bibliography. Scarecrow Press 1972.

========================================

DOROTHY COADE HEWETT 1923 -2002

Australian Poet, playwright and novelist

“Dorothy is a rebel in word and deed. The latter usually tones with time”.
School report, used in the autobiographical play Chapel Perilous.

Dorothy Coade Hewett, poet, playwright and novelist, is one of Australia's best known authors and a romantic feminist icon. She was born in a remote township called Wickepin in the Western Australian wheat belt in May 1923. Her mother Rene Coade was the local postmistress and the only grandchild of Thomas Coade (miner of Crowan Cornwall) and his cousin Blanche Nicholls. Her father Tom Hewett was a carpenter, one of the few to survive both Gallipoli and Verdun, and twice decorated for bravery.

She was brought up on an isolated sheep and wheat farm, educated by correspondence on the farm till age 12 and later at Perth College and the University of Western Australia, and began writing poetry from the age of 6. She won a national radio prize for poetry at the age of 17. She rejected the lifestyle and aspirations of her wealthy parents and joined the Communist Party. She worked as a journalist on the Perth Daily News and the Communist Party newspaper The Workers' Star.

On the rebound from a failed wartime relationship and attempted suicide, she married the party lawyer Lloyd Davies. However she fell in love several years later with boilermaker Les Flood and eloped with him to Sydney, where they lived in poverty. In 1952 they went on a trade union delagation to Russia and China and were among the first westerners to visit the new People’s Republic of China.

She worked for one year as a mill hand in a spinning mill in 1952, which gave her the material for her first novel Bobbin Up in 1958 and for her first play, and for two years as an advertising copywriter for Waltons Sears catalogues. Unfortunately Les suffered from untreated recurring schitozophrenia and in 1958, she was forced to flee back to her parents in WA with three small boys. Much of this is detailed in her biography Wild Card. Both these works have been published in many languages and countries, and Bobbin Up is regarded as one of the most significant novels of its time and genre.

In South Perth her parents built a home for her on the old tennis court at the back of their property. She trained in a teachers' college but was removed when they found she was divorced. She completed her degree and obtained a position as a university tutor in English which she held till 1972, and supported her family on this with some help from her parents. She arranged protests on behalf of dissident authors following several trips to Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, and left the Party following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

From this time on she concentrated on campus cultural affairs and began a career as a playwright in 1967. She encouraged and constructively criticised the work of young poets and her house became a meeting-place for many struggling poets and writers, united by a common interest in poetry. She had many friends of different political persuasions.

In 1972 following the performance of her tour-de-force play Chapel Perilous, which is still taught in schools and staged, she received the first of many grants from the new Australia Literature Board, and she lived largely on these grants plus a bequest form her father for the rest of her life. In Sydney, she bought a rambling house in Woollahra with the proceeds of her mother's estate and devoted herself entirely to literature and the arts. From that time she reverted to the style of her earlier lyrical romantic work, though with an increasingly heavy touch of irony and self-criticism. Much of her work was autobiographical and intensely personal, and several works were set in her childhood dreamscape of wheat belt Western Australia.

Younger poets including most of Australia's top young writers were now her friends. In collaboration with poets associated with the "Generation of '68" and New Poetry magazine, particularly John Tranter and Robert Adamson (with whom she maintained a close lifetime friendship), her work became more sparse and directed and the romantic element more controlled.

Since taking her first grant she published thirteen plays, nine poetry collections, an autobiography and a further two novels, and she has been regarded as one of the success stories of the Australia Council system of government grants to literature. She was awarded an AM for services to Australian literature, a D.Litt. from the University of Western Australia, and a lifetime Emeritus Grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council. She has a "star" on the pavement in Circular Quay, Sydney. In 1990 a painting of Dorothy Hewett by friend and artist Geoffrey Proud won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most famous portrait prize.

In public Dorothy was a great entertainer and a charismatic personality who was always surrounded by a circle of admirers and friends. In private she was rather shy but also immensely entertaining. Due to a series of illnesses she spent a good deal of time after 1961 in her bed. She had extremely vivid dreams and the family would troop in to hear them recounted. Friends, journalists and others would also be received by Dorothy in her marvellous collection of nightdresses.

She would move from near-inertness to creative bursts of highly directed writing activity - she wrote her first novel in eight weeks and re-constructed many of her plays on-the-fly in the theatre, in collaboration with well-known directors and the actors.

Dorothy's relationship with feminism was somewhat vexed. On the one hand she put forward vigorous positive images of women as actors in central stage, living life by their own rules. But because she came from a long line of powerful women who had always uncannily arranged their environments and their men to suit themselves, she was in the class of women who rarely perceive any problem with the women's role. Joy Hooton writes, "the final effect is not so much feminism as a recalcitrant female individualism"

A colleague writes "Dorothy was her own woman, someone who cannot be fitted into any neat category or label. He life and relationships were rambunctious and always pushed the outer limits, part of the unforgettable impacts she made on those around her. I will remember particularly her generosity of spirit and enthusiasm in helping and inspiring a new generation of young writers".

She spent her last years at the foot of the Blue Mountains outside Sydney with her husband, the writer Merv Lilley; and succumbed to recurring breast cancer in August 2002.

Several of Dorothy’s children area also award-winning authors – Tom Flood (1955) who won the Vogel Award and the Miles Franklin Award for his first novel Oceana Fine, and Katherine Susanna Lilley (1960) who has won several poetry awards.

http://www.vulgar.com.au/auhewett.html ; http://www.trinity.wa.edu.au/plduffyrc/subjects/english/aust/hewett.htm
http://www.wordconstructions.com/hewett.htm

NELLIE EUPHEMIA COAD 1883 - 1974

New Zealand Teacher, community leader, writer

Nellie Euphemia Coad, daughter of Annie Venters McLauchlan, a school-teacher, and her husband, James Hook Coad, a brewer and son of Ephraim Coad, was born at New Plymouth, New Zealand, on 15 October 1883. After attending a primary school in Victoria, Australia, Nellie was a pupil of Wellington Girls' High School. In 1903 she became a pupil-teacher at Thorndon School and over the following 13 years taught in a number of Wellington primary schools. She also attended Victoria College, graduating MA with honours in mental philosophy in 1914.

In 1917 Nellie Coad joined the staff of Wellington Girls' College (formerly Wellington Girls' High School), where she was to teach for the next 21 years, becoming head of the department of history, civics and geography. A firm disciplinarian who, according to one of her pupils, gave 'good strong signposts through the confused paths of history', Coad believed in the value of dictating notes. Her authority was such that no one smiled at her frequent instructions to 'leave a line in your best handwriting'.

Nellie Coad directed her considerable reserves of energy and intelligence towards a number of interests. She was on the executive of the New Zealand Educational Institute, a member of the University Entrance Board and vice president of the New Zealand Secondary Schools' Association. She served as a vice president of the National Council of Women of New Zealand in 1921--22 and as president of the Wellington branch in 1922--23. The author of a number of textbooks, a novel and a volume of short stories, she continued her literary interests in her membership of PEN and of the New Zealand Women Writers' and Artists' Society, of which she was the founding president from 1932 to 1934. Her New Zealand from Tasman to Massey , published in 1934, was widely used in schools.

Throughout her teaching career Nellie Coad was concerned about educational opportunities for women, a concern shown in her long involvement in the New Zealand Women Teachers' Association. As a young teacher she had given evidence before the 1912 Education Commission, and had argued cogently for better salaries for women primary-school teachers. She was secretary of the Wellington branch of the NZWTA from 1914 to 1916 and national president from 1920 to 1924. She also represented women teachers on the General Council of Education, set up in 1915. At the third conference of the NZWTA in 1916, she opposed the council's report recommending that all secondary school girls be taught home science. Showing a more feminist spirit than any other member of the conference, Coad argued that girls as well as boys should receive a good general education, since early specialisation would restrict their vocational choices.

Nellie Coad's concern that girls and women should not suffer disadvantages because of their gender was also evident in her criticism of the small space allocated for playing fields in girls' schools. She believed, none the less, that girls were on the whole better served at all-girls' secondary schools than at co-educational schools, where the needs of boys were considered more important.

On her retirement from the presidency of the NZWTA it was said that Coad was 'one of the foremost workers in the interests of the girls and women in our schools', and that 'a great measure of the success of the NZWTA is due to her'.

Nellie Coad spent 1937 travelling in Europe, during which time she attended a PEN conference in Paris. She retired from teaching at the end of 1938 and went to live in England. In 1939 she went to a writers' conference in New York where she met Thomas Mann and lunched with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. During the Second World War she was an air-raid warden in London and was hospitalised for several weeks because of injuries sustained while on duty. In 1944 and 1945 she lectured to members of the Royal Air Force on the history and geography of the Pacific region.

On a return visit to New Zealand in 1947 she expressed disappointment at the lack of concern shown by people in Britain towards the empire. 'Britain today is more European than Empire-minded,' she complained. During the same visit she said how she hoped women would be a stronger force in post-war political life. Nellie Coad died, aged 90, at Runwell near Wickford, Essex, on 6 September 1974. She had never married.

Source http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/

Searching the web Aug 07

2007-08-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

As yet I have not gone formally through the US census and reconstructed the families, as has been done in Cornwall and Australia. It is not so easy without BMD. So every time I try to trace someone I get a few surprises

First while looking for famous Coads I found Oral Coad who was a distinguished professor of Literature in New York in th 1930s. Working back I found he was brought up on a farm and was a great great grandson of John Coad/Jennie Jeffrey of Ermington which was a surprise.

Today after receiving some wills from the family of Nicholas Coad/Jane Cuttance of St Keverne, who have Australian descendants, I tried to trace the American branch foward and made some progress. In the middle of this I found several other US families, including much to my surprise Joseph the son of Benjamin Coad of Perranarworthal; listed as Code. He was a stonemason who married Mary Jolly in 1866.

As usual the dates in different census are contradictory, but it appears the couple emigrated in 1869 after the birth of two boys. They had two more children in Illinois, then Joseph died. The second child John was not listed with his parents in 1870 and 1880, so it was not till I came to the 1910 census that I was aware of his existence. This missing son was the only one to have any offspring, a single son George, a farmer in Nebraska who married in 1929.

23 August
COAD is a short name with a number of alternatives. On the one hand it is very easy for transcribers of handwriting to confuse it with other names. On the other hand families have tended to change their name to and from COAD or COOD.

Today on a whim I decided to look for CORDs in Cornwall. CORD is a variant of CAUDE, a French or Channel Island name which is known to have been converted to CODD elsewhere, and thence to COAD. Buffalo Bill Cody was descended directly from Jersey Lecaudes.

I immediately found the answers to two annoying problems. The first was Charles Coad jr of St Neot 1698, youngest son of Charles and Nicholl Burrows. We know he existed from a land title of his father, and from his offspring, but until now we have had no baptism record. It's there in the IGI under Charles Cord.

A more recent stray is James Coad, tailor of Devonport, who married Susan Marshall in 1845 and had Coad descendants in Kent and Essex. He first appears in the 1861 Census, as born in Stratton Cornwall 1823; but Coads have never been that far north and there has been no trace of him there. Now he turns up in the IGI as the son of Charles Cord and Mary – though the family cannot be reconstructed further.

Three more missing baptisms and two marriages have turned up under CORD. It's reasonable to assume any CORD born in Cornwall is a mis-spelled COAD.

JOHN COAD AND THE MONMOUTH REBELLION

2007-08-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

The establishment of the Anglican Church in Britain and the repudiation of papal authority by Henry the Eighth in 1533-34 was followed by almost two hundred years of sectarian unrest in England. Most of the Royal Houses of Europe were Catholic, including James II of England, and the last pitched battles on English soil were fought over the Stuart succession. One of the most ill-fated and poorly executed uprisings in English history was Monmouth’s Rebellion against the accession of the Catholic James II in 1685. The Coades of Axmouth and Lyme Regis were Puritans and nonconformists, and one of them, John Coad, was the principal witness to the bloody aftermath of the rebellion.

MONMOUTHS REBELLION

James Scott, first Duke of Monmouth, was a Protestant and an illegitimate son of Charles II. He was brought up and educated in France, but came to England with his father at the Restoration in 1660. He married Anne Scott, countess of Buccleuch, whose name he adopted, and was created a duke in 1663. He served for a time in the navy and later in the army in Continental wars. He was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Army by his father in 1672 and Captain-General in 1678, enjoying some successes in the Netherlands in the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Monmouth's military reputation, and his Protestantism, made him a popular figure in England.

Charles II had no legitimate heirs apart from his brother, James Stuart, Duke of York, who had converted to Catholicism in 1668-9. An attempt was made in 1681 to pass an Act of Parliament to exclude James from the succession and substitute Monmouth, but Charles outmanoeuvered his opponents and dissolved Parliament for the final time. After the Rye House Plot to assassinate both Charles and James, Monmouth exiled himself to Holland at the court of his cousin Mary (James' protestant daughter) and her husband Prince William of Orange, and gathered supporters.

So long as Charles II remained on the throne, Monmouth was content to live a life of pleasure in Holland, while still hoping to accede peaceably to the throne. A successful tour through parts of Somerset and other Western counties in 1680 convinced him of popular support for an eventual attempt to become the Protestant King when Charles II, now aging and ill, eventually died. However, the accession of James II in early 1685 put an end to these hopes. Prince William of Orange, although also a Protestant, was bound to James by treaties and would not accommodate a rival claimant.

The newly crowned King James II ordered Monmouth's immediate arrest. Monmouth's choices were to remain in exile in Europe, dodging assassination attempts by James II's agents, or to return to England, place himself at the head of a popular rebellion as the great Protestant hero and reclaim his rightful throne from the Catholic usurper. Monmouth, at the urging of his fellow exiles, moved to take the Crown of England by force.

So Monmouth duly set sail for South West England, a strongly Protestant region, with three small ships, four light field guns and 1500 muskets - short of money, guns and supplies. He landed with 82 supporters and around 300 men, at Lyme Regis in Dorset on 11 June. Monmouth had been promised a large army and universal support by his supporters in the Hague, and believed that on landing he would be able to march unopposed to London. Recruits came in in hundreds from the countryside, and soon Monmouth had an army of about a thousand foot and 150 horse.

The prompt action of the Mayor of Lyme in riding off to Exeter to give warning of the landing set in motion the whole scheme of local defence which had existed for centuries. The County Militia, locally trained volunteers, were called from their work and formed into a defence force, while a letter was immediately sent to the King by a messenger on horseback. Two customs officers from Lynne arrived in London on 13 June having ridden some 200 miles post haste. The King received news of the rising and at once sent a cavalry force under Lord Churchill to check the rebels until the slower-moving infantry and guns could get into action.

On June 15th Monmouth decided to move out of Lyme; and five days later vessels of the Royal Navy arrived and occupied the little port and town, thus cutting off for Monmouth any hope of escape or of reinforcements by that route. Monmouth marched to Axminster, where the Somerset militia sent to oppose him broke up in disorder and fled, leaving him free to march on Taunton where he arrived on June 18th. Here on June 20th he was proclaimed King.

Monmouths execution

Instead of marching on London, Monmouth marched north into Somerset, hoping to capture the city of Bristol, then England’s second city. He picked up a disorganised group of around 6,000 mostly nonconformist artisans and farmer workers armed with farm tools: one famous supporter was a young Daniel Defoe. The shortage of regular weapons of all kinds led him to order 500 bills improvised by riveting scythe blades onto 8 ft poles. These scythemen were better armed than those who had to make do with hatchets, pitchforks or even clubs.

A companion rebellion in Scotland faied miserably, and expected rebellions in Cheshire and East Anglia also failed to materialise. The morale of Monmouth's forces started to collapse after news of the setback in Scotland arrived while the makeshift army was resting in Frome on 28 June. The fine weather, which had so far helped the rebels greatly, now turned to rain, adding considerably to their difficulties as they marched across the moors.

The Kings Army was closing in and almost all chances of success had now vanished. Monmouth's men, at dead of night in rain and darkness, moved hastily towards Bath which was defended and refused them entry. The makeshift army retreated via Shepton Mallet, and was finally defeated on 6 July at the Battle of Sedgemoor. Monmouth had risked a brilliant night attack with a local youth as guide, but surprise was lost when his troops were unable to cross the sedge marsh channels and a sentry gave warning. His untrained supporters were quickly defeated by professionals soldiers, and hundreds were cut down by cannon- and musket-fire.

Monmouth fled from the battlefield in the company of Lord Grey hoping to get to the coast at Poole, and a ship to the continent. On reaching the Inn at Woodyates they decided to split up, leaving their horses they proceeded across country singly and in disguise. Monmouth dressed in the clothes of a shepherd was soon discovered shivering in a ditch, under a hedge at Horton. He might have got away with it except that in his pocket he was carrying the badge of the Order of the Garter. He was promptly taken to London and executed for treason on Tower Hill, on 15 July. It is said that it took eight blows of the axe from Jack Ketch (a butcher and part-time headsman) to sever his head, finishing off the job with his butcher's knife

Map of Monmouths Progress

THE BLOODY ASSIZES

The subsequent Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys were among the most brutal and corrupt in English history. In previous uprisings, usually a few leaders were executed while the common people were regarded as their dupes. In Jeffrey’s hearings the reverse happened – a number of the leaders were able to buy themselves off with crippling bribes while the common people were brutally treated. The trials were largely used as a means of extracting the property of prominent Whigs and potential political opponents of the King who frequently had nothing to do with the Rebellion. These unfortunate noblemen only escaped with their lives by paying huge ransoms or surrendering all their property. This was done with the enthusiastic support of the King, the Queen and a number of the new Catholic courtiers enjoying their rise to prominence. It was effectively an act of revenge for James' banishment.

George Jeffreys 1645 -1689, 1st Baron Jeffreys of Wem, presided over the trials. He was a jurist who had found favour in Court with James, then the brother of the King. He was knighted in 1677, was made a baronet in 1681, and in 1683 he was Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and a member of Privy Council. James made him a peer when he acceded to the throne.

Descriptions show the mock trials under Jeffreys to be a gross abuse of rights as enjoyed at the time. Jeffreys seems to have been drunk much of the time, refused to hear any evidence and taunted the prisoners. The common people were cruelly executed or (effectively) sold off as slaves. About 320 people were hanged and over 800 sentenced to be transported to the West Indies. In Somerset, “two hundred and thirty-three prisoners were in a few days hanged, drawn, and quartered ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror”.

In many West Country villages, neighbour had fought neighbour, causing much resentment for years after. In the small West Dorset village of Corscombe, where 13 men were hanged, their bodies dismembered, then boiled in pitch and publicly exhibited. However, George Penne who owned Weston Manor and Oak Farm was given 100 prisoners as part payment for helping to put down the rebellion. He sold most of them to planters in America and the West Indies.

For his diligence on behalf of the Crown, Jeffreys was made Lord Chancellor at age of only 40, 'for the many eminent and faithful services to the Crown'’ – and he was now extraordinarily wealthy after using his office to enrich himself.

James II further took advantage of the suppression of the rebellion to consolidate his power. He asked Parliament to repeal the Test Act and the Habeas Corpus Act, used his dispensing power to appoint Catholics to senior posts, and raised the strength of the standing army. Parliament opposed many of these moves, and on 20 November 1685 James dismissed it. In 1688, when the birth of an heir heralded a Catholic succession, James II was overthrown in a coup d'état by William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution at the invitation of the disaffected Protestant Establishment. The memory of the Bloody Assizes no doubt contributed to the ease with which James was now dispatched.

One of the first acts of the new establishment was to send Jeffreys to the Tower, and he died in prison in 1689 from kidney failure.

JOHN COAD AND THE WEST INDIES TRANSPORTATION

The Axmouth Coades were protestants and dissenters, and two of them participated in the rebellion. The first was the recently married George Coade 1655 who managed to survive the bloodbath and subsequently had a large family at Axmouth.

The second was John Coad, an “honest god-fearing carpenter”, the author of the most gripping account of aftermath of the Rebellion. It appears he was from the Lyme branch of the family and may possibly have been a great uncle of Eleanor Coade, inventor of Coade Stone.
John Coad had been called out with the Somerset Militia immediately after Monmouth’s landing. He left his home near Lyme secretly determined to assist the Duke to the utmost of hi» power, looking upon him as the only hope for Protestantism und liberty. His puritan soul was offended by the "hellish oaths and ribaldry" of many of his companions in arms, and he deserted at the first opportunity on 16 June, "wading through a river [Axe] to escape the watches, and come to Axminster, and tendered myself and arms to the Duke, and was kindly accepted”, pleased to hear Major Fox give a charge to the troops against swearing, thieving, and plundering. Coad was in the fight at Keynsham,and again in the more serious affair at Philip's-Norton on 27 June, where he was dreadfully wounded at the barricade, receiving a shot through his left-hand wrist, and also under his left breast, "at which instant falling to the ground, bleeding excessively, he lay under foot during the fight, being cut down but not cut off, cast down but not forsaken; for, the fight being over, he was taken up alive, but almost without sense of seeing or feeling" Some means were used to stop the blood, but "my wounds being judged mortal, and wondering I was not dead, the chirurgeons refused to dress my wounds ; but the same evening, notwithstanding the great rain which fell, our camp moving eastward, I was cast on a waggon with few clothes about me : the shaking of the waggon made my wounds bleed afresh, yet my senses being something restored, despairing of life, I desired death, but could not obtain” Finally after four days "one Mr Hardy, an apothecary from Lyme, cutting off my body clothes, ketched and stuck fast to my body, in searching found the bullet lodged in the loins of my back, cut it out”

So in the end , after a long,untended spell, he came with his wife to Long Sutton, near Langport, where the village midwife charitably tended him. There the soldiers apprehended him and brought him before the local Lord, who got a surgeon to tend his wounds and sent him by horse litter to Ilchester gaol. In 10 or 11 weeks there his wound partly healed and he regained some of his strength.

Coad was called before Jeffreys in a group hearing, and writes " When I stood before that bloody Nero, Geo. Jefferies, I found such inward support and comfort that I could not say I feared any evil ; but when above six hundred condemned men fell on their knees, and most dolorously cried for mercy, I could not bow a knee or speak a word for mercy ; but had such workings of spirit, and something did as it were speak within me, that, if it were a thing possible to be done, I would not exchange conditions with the judge on the bench”

Afterwards a vivid scene occurs in Wells cloisters while the prisoners, a throng of frantic relatives around them, were picked for their respective fates. Coad, as both a deserter and ringleader, was due for death, but his sister found that an officer was calling out the names of 200 men allocated for Jamaica. Coad offered the man a bribe to include him among the transportees. The officer declined, but kindly advised him to step forward when he called a name and its owner failed to answer. At first Coad missed his chance, while about thirty of his comrades so saved themselves by exchanging certain death for exile and servitude. At length the list of 200 was made up, but a poor woman, seeing a man of her acquaintance who longed to be kept back from the plantations, seized Coad, put him in the mans place, and quietly told him that his name must now be John Haker. So Coad set forth to distant servitude.

The eight hundred prisoners were distributed into gangs and bestowed on persons who enjoyed favour at court. The conditions of the gift were that the convicts should be carried beyond sea as slaves, that they should not be emancipated for ten years, and that the place of their banishment should be some West Indian island (since that was regarded as the most unpleasant destination). Nearly all the rebels went to Barbados, Jamaica or Nevis. The transactions and the shipments were carefully invoiced, with copies of the documents sent out to the Caribbean and returned with accounts of what had happened to the prisoners on the voyage and on arrival.

It was estimated by Jeffreys that, on an average, each of them, after all charges were paid, would be worth from ten to fifteen pounds. There was therefore much angry competition for grants. Some Tories in the West conceived that they had, by their exertions and sufferings during the insurrection, earned a right to share in the profits which had been eagerly snatched up by the sycophants of Whitehall. The courtiers, however, were victorious.

The conditions on shipboard were as bad or worse than the treatment meted to African slaves.
"More than one fifth of those who were shipped were flung to the sharks before the end of the voyage. The human cargoes were stowed close in the holds of small vessels. So little space was allowed that the wretches, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on one another. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunderbusses. In the dungeon below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death. Of ninety-nine convicts who were carried out in one vessel, twenty-two died before they reached Jamaica, although the voyage was performed with unusual speed. The survivors when they arrived at their house of bondage were mere skeletons. During some weeks coarse biscuit and fetid water had been doled out to them in such scanty measure that any one of them could easily have consumed the ration which was assigned to five. They were, therefore, in such a state that the merchant to whom they had been consigned found it expedient to fatten them before selling them."

Coad survived his stay in Jamaica and on his return wrote a remarkable treatise describing his experiences “A memorandum of the wonderful providences of God to a poor unworthy creature during the time of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion and to the revolution in 1688” . This was passed around in hand-written form for 150 years until it fell into the hands of the noted historian Thomas Babington McCauley, who wrote .

“The best account of the sufferings of those rebels who were sentenced to transportation is to be found in a very curious narrative written by John Coad, an honest, Godfearing carpenter who joined Monmouth, was badly wounded at Philip's Norton, was tried by Jeffreys, and was sent to Jamaica. The original manuscript was kindly lent to me by Mr. Phippard, to whom it belongs. “

After this recommendation, the manuscript was published. A contemporary review reads:

“The Puritans, down to the close of the seventeenth century, were great writers of autobiographies… Coad may be said to deserve the qualified praise given to him by Mr. Macaulay, that he has left the best account we possess of the sufferings of those rebels who were sentenced to transportation after the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion. Such a notice by so celebrated an author could not but lead to the publication of the manuscript… Throughout, the passages properly historical are in a low ratio to the expressions of religious sentiment, which may however be perused with interest of a different kind, as exhibiting the sincere and in-wrought piety of the men of the class to which Coad belonged”

REFERENCES

Little, B D G (1956). The Monmouth Episode. London, W. Laurie.

Thomas Babington McCauley. The History of England from the accession of James II. (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates) http://www.strecorsoc.org/macaulay/m05f.html

Wigfield, W.M. The Monmouth Rebels, 1685. Geo Coade Axmouth.

http://www.wargames.co.uk/Pending/Archive/Aug03/fearnothingbutgod.htm

Watson, J.N.P. 1979. Notes on John Coad. Captain General & Rebel Chief.

Review of Coad’s book, Gentlemans Magazine 1850. Sylvanus Urban, gent MDCCCL Jan to June.Inclusive

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TIMETABLE OF THE MONMOUTH REBELLION

1685.02.16 Death of King Charles II, accession of his brother James II
1685.05.03 Coronation of James II
1685.05.12 Earl of Argyle left Holland to invade Scotland
1685.05.19 Titus Oates convicted of perjury
1685.06.21 Duke of Monmouth left Holland to invade England
1685.06.21 Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis
1685.06.28 Parliament passed act of attainder of Monmouth; Duke of Argyle captured in Scotland
1685.06.30 Monmouth proclaimed himself king at Taunton
1685.07.10 Duke of Argyle executed at Edinburgh
1685.07.12 James II prorogued Parliament
1685.07.16 Monmouth defeated at battle of Sedgemoor
1685.07.18 Monmouth captured
1685.07.25 Monmouth beheaded at Tower Hill

1685.7.27 James II created Court of High Commission headed by Jeffreys
1685.09 Bloody Assizes convened in western England
1685.10.10 Jeffreys promoted to Lord High Chancellor

Source: http://www.somerset.gov.uk/archives/ASH/Monmouthreb.htm

KIDNAPPED HEIRESSES

2007-08-12T02:56:00.001-07:00

“The Colepepper family became one of the largest landowning families in Kent and Sussex, reputedly through a policy of kidnapping heiresses and marrying them“
www.english-heritage.org.uk/upload/pdf/old_soar_manor.pdf

A number of cultures have kidnapped brides as a matter of course [1] – Icelandic DNA, for example, shows male descent from Vikings and female from the Irish; islands of Bass Strait near Tasmania are occupied by descendants of whalers and aboriginal women. As society became more structured and women became associated with property through their dowries, the reasons for abduction became more complex:

Historical romances, from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to current “rape fantasy” novels for women, abound with tales of heiresses abducted and forced to marry for the sake of their property. There is a reasonable basis in fact for this preoccupation.

The stereotype is that reckless and impoverished noblemen would seek to improve their fortunes by abducting an heiress and marrying her, whereupon they would take possession of her fortune. Usually at dead of night, sometimes with the ladies consent and sometimes without it, they would kidnap an heiress and carry her off to be married that very night by some disreputable clergyman who had been sobered-up sufficiently for the ceremony. So great a nuisance did this become that an Act of Parliament had to be passed to provide that marriages were only valid if the ceremony took place in daylight hours [this has been only recently repealed].

Medieval English lawmakers considered abduction a serious problem. No fewer than eight statutes on the subject can be found on the books between 1275 and 1487 – mostly aimed at assuring consent on the part of the victim. However the statute of 6 Richard II (1382) gave a woman’s next of kin the right to prosecute her abductor even if she consented to the abduction, and debarred an abductor from inheriting property by marrying his victim.

Abductions fall into three classes. Firstly there are “abductions” that are disguised elopement. Couples in love but without parental approval were prepared to take the drastic step of an “abduction”. According to Julia Pope [2] about two thirds of the total were of this sort.

Secondly there were a significant number of abductions in which kidnapper and kidnapped soon established a relationship and married. Young women who were otherwise faced with the prospect of arranged marriages for property to lacklustre suitors might well come to be impressed with the daring and passion of their abductor while redeeming their honour through marriage. In 1271 Walter Clifford’s widowed daughter and heiress Matilda was kidnapped from her home by the young John Giffard of Brimpsfield. In terror she managed to get a letter to the king telling of her abduction and rape. Henry III took to the field for the honour of the baroness of Clifford. However before he had proceeded far he received another letter from Matilda saying everything was alright now and she had married her abductor!

Within the family tree of the Codes of Morval, there have been several abductions. The abduction and rape of Alice, daughter of Roger de Moeles, seems to have been consensual (some have said it was Roger’s wife Alice that was abducted). Alice was heiress to the manors of Gidleigh and Lustleigh bordering Dartmoor, from her grandfather the crusader knight William le Pruz. An inquiry was held around 1317 into the abduction of Alice at Lustleigh; and another in 1318 concerning Roger’s complaint that his wife (?) had been raped by John Daumarle and others, who carried her away with his goods. John Daumerle was the first High Sheriff of Devon, and the Daumerles (Damerell, D’Albermarle) are one of the noble families of Devon, with descendants including Walter Raleigh and George Washington. The rights to the manor of Gidleigh then passed down through four generations of female heirs in succession to Alice Durnford, who married Rev. Richard Code of MaryTavy in 1415.

The final class of abduction is more serious, and there is a particularly poignant case in the Coode family tree , involving the abduction of a married woman by her neighbour for purposes of gain. The case has all the elements of melodrama – conniving clerics acting for a rapacious neighbour to declare the marriage of an heiress void, stealing her and marrying her off to a cloddish relative. (Most of the story is adapted from [3])

Elizabeth Fitzwilliam was heir to considerable estates including Boconnoc in Cornwall. About 1330, she married Sir Reynold de Mohun, younger son of Sir John de Mohun of Dunster III. There is a story of that Sir Reynold, coming into Fowey harbour with soldiers bound for Ireland, let fly a hawk at some game which came down in the garden at Hall, and that he thus first met the daughter of the owner, Elizabeth Fitzwilliam, whom he afterwards made his wife

Sir John Daunay, a powerful neighbour, had designs upon Elizabeth’s property. In July 1333, apparently under Daunay’s influence the Bishop of the diocese of Exeter directed Master Richard of Wideslade, Treasurer of Exeter, and Master John of Stoke, Canon of Glasney, to proceed with a suit, partly heard, for a divorce between Dame Elizabeth "of Bodenneke" and Sir Reynold de Mohun ; but Reynold interceded with a royal writ.

The following year, Henry Bloyou, Canon of Exeter, and Bartholomew de Castro, rector of St. lves – also Daunay associates - pronounced a decree of divorce, on the canonical ground that the lady had been previously contracted to Thomas de Mohun, a brother of Reynold (it was for similar reasons that Henry VIII obtained his divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon). Although the husband vigorously appealed, the divorce was re-affirmed in the ecclesiastical courts.

Before Feb 1336, Elizabeth had fallen into the hands of Daunay, who married her to one Henry Deneys. In May 1337, several manors were settled on the couple by a “fine” in the Kings Court for the term of her life, after which her estate would revert to Daunay.

It appears Mohun made a successful appeal to the Pope, for, in February 1346, he and Elizabeth his wife, now re-united to him, brought a suit against Daunay, Deneys and others, to recover lands of her inheritance of which they had been deprived. At the trial, Deneys, although living, did not put in an appearance, but the proceedings were stopped by the death of the principal defendant. The Mohuns had therefore to bring a fresh suit against Lady Daunay and others. Eventually they recovered enormous damages from two clerics who had been the accomplices or tools of Sir John Daunay. Half a century later, Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, as grandson and heir of Sir John Daunay, made an attempt to wrest from the Mohun family the property of which the reversion had been settled on him by the fine of 1337.

John Mohun (~1475) was a direct descendant of the couple, and heir to what remained of the Fitzwilliam estate – not including Boconnoc which was now held by the Courtenays. About 1499 he married Anne or Amicia, daughter of Richard Coode of Morval. They both died of the “sweating sickness” in September 1508 (malaria was common in Europe at that time). In the church of Lanteglos in Cornwall there is a brass showing the effigies of John Mohun in armour, Anne his wife, their five sons and their four daughters. It bears the following inscription:

Hic jacent tumulata corpora Johannis Mohun armigeri et Anne
uroris ejus filie Ricardi Code armigeri et qui quidem Johannes fuit filius et heres Willelmi Mohun armigeri ac Florencie uroris ejus unius sororum Edwardi Courtney Comitis Devonie et qui quidem Johannes et Anna obierunt mense Septembris infra viginti quatuor horas er infirmitate vocata Sudore, anno Domini mdviij, quorum animabus propitietur Deus.

The Mohun’s fourth and surviving son Reynold was an “esquire of the body” to Edward the Sixth and was Sheriff of Cornwall in 1552 and 1559. In 1566, he bought Boconnoc, which became the principal residence of the family Mohun. Later generations of Mohuns were sheriffs of Cornwall, baronets, and members of the House of Commons for East Looe and Lostwithiel.

REFERENCES

[1] Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3, Kidnapping and Elopement as Alternative Systems of Marriage
[2} Pope, Julia Abduction: An Alternative Form of Courtship?
gen.culpepper.com/historical/abduction.htm
[3] History of Dunster and of the Families of Mohun & Luttrell, Part II.by Sir H.C. Maxwell Lyte, K.C.B., Deputy Keeper of the Records.London, The St. Catherine Press Ltd., 1909. http://patp.us/genealogy/bio/mohun_cornwall.aspx

COADE STONE

2007-08-07T23:17:00.000-07:00

ELEANOR COADE (1733-1821)
Britain’s most successful businesswoman/inventor/artist

The Coade family of Axmouth, Tiverton and Lyme Regis go back to the 1500s. The family joined the flourishing wool trade as clothiers and wool merchants at a time when Lyme was a larger port than Liverpool. Four male members of the family were mayors of Lyme Regis 1659-1780, not without controversy.

When the woollen trade declined, the prosperous wool merchant George Coade moved with his wife and daughters to London. He went bankrupt and died in 1769. His daughter Eleanor had already established a drapery business, and in the same year she bought into one of several unsuccessful “artificial stone” plants in King’s Arms Stairs, Narrow Wall, Lambeth, . almost opposite the Houses of Parliament on the site now occupied by County Hall. Eleanor sacked the former owner and took the business over completely in 1771. She improved the formula substantially, creating a molded ceramic product more durable than stone itself and which has held its fine detail in the polluted atmosphere of London for 180 years.

Mrs Coade and the Coade Stone Manufactory found a much more congenial collaborator in the eminent sculptor John Bacon RA, a carver in natural stone. He was also a Dissenter and like Eleanor a fervent believer. To Coade Stone he introduced a quality of design which no other manufacturers could approach, making Coade Stone unsurpassable. When modelling in clay, it was the custom for craftsmen to spit on the clay, and when modelling a head of the King, Bacon felt that this would be unseemly, and had a little silver syringe made for the purpose. This elegant behaviour captivated the King, who thereafter gave many commissions to the pair, including the spectacular Coade Stone screen in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and much Coade Stone work at Buckingham Palace.

The building boom in London, at this time, led to a high demand for ornate features to decorate and adorn brick-built Georgian houses. Coade’s reputation grew, and she made everything in Coade Stone which could be carved in natural stone – Coade Stone capitals and all architectural features, Coade Stone statues, tombs and garden ornaments. Besides commissions all over the country she had orders for Coade Stone from as far afield as Rio de Janeiro and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in Russia. Most of her commissions were in a classical style, but she had a Gothic commission for Dalmeny House in Scotland with Tudor chimneys and friezes. Changes at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the 1780s necessitated a new screen which so accurately copies the fan vaulting of the aisles that almost no visitors realise that they are looking at a Coade Stone structure. After Nelson’s death where a pediment , at the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich,was filled in 1813 with a vast composition in Coade Stone showing the body of Nelson being given to Britannia while England, Ireland and Scotland mourn the irreparable loss.

After John Bacon died in 1799, Mrs. Coade took her cousin John Sealy of Tiverton, into partnership. They established a Coade Stone Exhibition Gallery about where the Coade Stone Lion now stands on Westminster Bridge, and produced a learned Coade Stone catalogue for it.

Red Lion Brewery icon, Westminster Bridge

The showrooms provided a huge array of 'off the shelf' solutions for builders and architects, ranging from small keystones for over front doors to corner and window features and almost entire façades. She worked for many eminent Georgian architects, Robert Adam and John Nash among them, and exhibited her own models at the Society of Artists. John Sealy died in October 1813 and an elderly Mrs Coade engaged Mr William Croggon from Grampound in Cornwall. He managed the factory from 1813 to 1821 when Mrs Coade died in her 89th Year. Croggon then bought the firm.

It was not just due to a superior material,but because of Eleanor’s artistic, technical and entrepreneurial skills that the product was a success when other similar peoducts failed, and after her death the business did not last long. One story is that Croggon went bankrupt in 1833 because of the failure of the Duke of York to pay his debts, and he died in 1835. More likely is William Croggon was succeeded by his son Thomas John Croggon in 1836, who was not interested in the business, sold the moulds and gave up the factory, thereby apparently losing the secret of Coade Stone for ever. From 1840, Coade stone was replaced by the much cheaper Portland cement – Eleanor herself built the first cement factory in Lyme Regis. It was widely rumoured that the lion topping the nearby Goding's Lion Brewery building contained the formula for Coade Stone, but in 1951 the building was demolished but no formula was found!

Belmont, Lyme Regis

Because the material imitates stone so exactly, in the 1950’s only four Coade Stone sites were known – Captain Bligh’s Coade Stone tomb at St Mary’s, Lambeth, the Coade Stone Lion at Westminster Bridge, the houses in Bedford Square near the British Museum, and Mrs Coades own lavishly decorated house “Belmont” in Lyme Regis, occupied till 2006 by the author and historian John Fowles. Alison Kelly, in the research for her book, identified almost 100 examples of Coade Stone. As well, she had a piece of the material from “Belmont” tested. at the British Museum Research Laboratory Researchers there established that Coade Stone was a stoneware (between eathenware and porcelain) which resisted all the elements through a long firing and a careful selection of ingredients. The contents were identified - the secret being the inclusion of crushed prefired ceramic in the mix, and works have subsequently been produced.

ELEANOR’S WILL
Eleanor died unmarried and very wealthy, in 1821. Although her father George was one of a family of 13, he appears to have been the only one with issue. Consequently Eleanor was the last of the Axmouth and Lyme Coades. Much of her estate passed to friends and to cousins on her mother’s side. She was a deeply religious lady and the bulk of her estate was passed to Baptist charities and for general poor relief in Lyme and Lambeth.

Her will begins in the manner of the day:
I ELEANOR COADE of Great Surrey Street, Blackfriars Road in the parish of Christchurch in the County of Surrey, Spinster, in the fear of God who has blessed my labours amidst many afflictions to the accumulating some property which I now consider as a talent to be rendered back to Him whenever he shall see fit to remove me to that better inheritance which through the aboundings of his Grace in Christ he has enabled me as a chief sinner to hope for, pressed down with favours innumerable it is my desire to glorify him in the following distribution. But first I entreat those of my relatives who will share less than others not to impute the difference to want of affection but to their own different situations and other existing circumstances which give some of them a claim to more special notice and as none of them do rank with the absolutely poor of the land. The Lord's poor and the spread of his Gospel will be allowed by those who know the worth of it so have a powerful demand on the heart of a ransomed sinner.

REFERENCES

Roberts (1834). History of Lyme Regis and Clement.

'Coade's Artificial Stone Works', Survey of London: volume 23: Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall (1951), pp. 58-61.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=47044 .

Alison Kelly (1990). Mrs Coades Stone. London, self published

Hans von Lemmen (2006). Coade Stone. (London: Shire Books)

http://www.thedorsetpage.com/locations/Place/L230.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/peter.fairweather/docs/Coade_Stone.htm
http://www.churchmousewebsite.co.uk/Coade_Stone.htm
http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/EM/ExeterPeople.html#Coade

NOTABLE COADS

2007-08-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

EPHRAIM COAD 1818-1860, Brewer of New Plymouth, New Zealand

Ephraim was born in Ermington 16/04/1818, youngest son of the yeoman farmer James Hooke Coade. His brother John Foote Coade was a medical practitioner who emigrated to Canada in 1864. Ephraim arrived in New Plymouth, Taranaki NZ in 1843 and married Teresa Keet in 1854, having three children.

His son James Hook Coad received a war medal on his behalf on 6 Apr 1889. The application reads: He "joined the Taranati Indiaturs in 1859 was present at the battle of Tairitea (mentioned as having conspicuously distinguished himself) subsequently joined the Mounted Forces and was present at several engagements until he met his death the following year in service, being that by an ambuscade of the enemy near the town of New Plymouth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taranaki_War describes how the Maori "out-thought, out-planned and then out-fought the British" despite being outnumbered and faced with heavy artillery.

RICHARD COAD 1825-1900, Cornish architect.

Born in Liskeard, Cornwall, he was articled to Henry Rice of Liskeard in the firm later known as Rice Coad Samsun Rice had previously worked for Richard Coad’s father, Robert Coad the surveyor. Subsequently Richard worked as assistant to Sir George Gilbert Scott, the noted designer of workhouses and churches, from 1847 to 1864. He was clerk of works on the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park London, and worked under Scott's supervision on improvements to Lanhydrock House near Bodmin in 1857. He returned to Liskeard in 1864 to open his own independent practice, and opened a London office in 1868.

When Lanhydrock House was severely damaged by fire in 1881, Coad returned to the site to rebuild the house to accommodate the 2nd Baron Robartes's large family (later the 6th Viscount Clifden). In 1953, the house and approximately 400 acres (1.6 km²) of parkland were given to the National Trust by the 7th Viscount Clifden.

From 1884 to 1887, Coad worked in association with James Marjoribanks MacLaren, who had been his assistant for some years. The pair worked on an extension to Ledbury Park in Herefordshire, an important work in the development of the Arts and Crafts architectural style in England. Henry Rice retired from the Liskeard practice in 1874 and Richard Coad appears to have controlled this practice until it was taken over by John Sansom in 1884.

Some of his buildings and projects are:-Tywardreath Church and Boconnoc House. He died in Battersea, London in 1900, and was buried in West Norwood Cemetery.

SAPPER JOHN COADE 1878-1918. MM. No.2442., Coal Miner from Korumburra, Killed in Action, France. 9th April 1918

Sappers WWI

It is believed that John was born Isaac David Coade, 1878 Malmsbury Vic. His grandfather was William Coade, miner of Crowan and Wendron, who emigrated to South Australia in 1849. His father John was a gold mIner in Timor Vic, and it is believed Isaac went to New Zealand around 1900 for a putative gold rush, where he married Rachel Reynish at Akaroa, an historic French and British settlement in the heart of an ancient volcano. He moved to Jumbunna in Victoria by 1911

By 1916 the Australian government relaxed age limits for enlistees to fight in the Great War, and John Coade immediately made an application to enlist at Korumburra on 26th January 1916, Australia Day. He is described as 5'6" in height, 10st. in weight, dark hair and complexion, with a scar on his left arm. He was allocated to the 2nd Reinforcement of the Mining Corp., later to be absorbed into the 2nd Australian Tunnelling Coy. The allied forces in France would have been desperate for skilled miners at this time, and John embarked in Sydney only six days after his enlistment.

John carried out his dangerous duties without mishap during the remainder of 1916 and in the early months of 1917, but it is recorded that he was gassed ['Wounded in Action'] on 28/29th May 1917, and again wounded ['Gassed, shell'] 2nd June 1917; as a result of which he spent three weeks in hospital and rest camp at Boulogne before being marched out to rejoin the 2nd Tunnelling Coy. near Rouelles.

The miners of the 2nd Australian Tunnelling Coy were specifically chosen in mid 1917 to excavate tunnels under German strong points in the coastal area of Belgium near the town of Nieuport. The purpose of the attack was to create a diversion and provide support for a planned major assault at Ypres. Although the Allied and German trenches were only 65 to 80 yards apart, the work had to commence at the reserve trenches for security purposes, and in one case angled to avoid the water logged coastal sand. In consequence, the tunnels were to be 160 yards and 230 yards in length; only a few inches above the water table, and with only 15 or 20 feet of head cover. It was work for highly skilled miners. On 10th July 1917 the Germans commenced to shell the British positions, using, for the first time, gas shells which 'smells like new mixed mustard'. The British Air Force was under instruction not to reveal its strength, and German planes established control over the areas about the bridges over the River Yser. The forces across the river were overrun, and the tunnels broken into and attacked with flamethrowers. A group of tunnellers broke out and fought their way to the river, where, due to the initiative and bravery of Spr. T.F. Burke, of Springdallah, Vic. and Spr. John Coade, of Korumburra, a number were able to cross the river. Burke and Coade had obtained a rope and organised a crossing by surviving tunnellers. Only about 80 soldiers of the two battalions of the 1st British Division and of the Australian tunnellers escaped death or capture, most of them in the party initiated by Burke and Coade.

As a result of John Coade's action at the River Yser, he was awarded the Military Medal, the Citation reading '--- to that gallant soldier for conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty'. John continued on active dut. He had two weeks of leave in early February 1918. Just two months later, on 9th April 1918, Spr. John Coade was killed in action. John's name was withheld from the Press copy of the casualty list, as Rachel was ill in hospital, and it was not until two months later, 10th June 1918 that the officer in charge of base records recorded that the next-of-kin had been advised.

At the Querrieu British War Cemetery, there are a surprising number of Australian graves, recognisable by the rising sun badge standing out from the mixture of regimental symbols of the British army. Row A, Grave 12, is that of Spr. John Coade MM, Rachel returned to New Zealand and it is not known what happened to the descendants.

Researched by Ray Walls, Korumburra.

THE OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS

2007-08-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

THE UNSOLVED QUESTIONS

A lot of progress has been made with various aspects of the origins of the Coads and Coodes over the past two years, but there are still a number of weak links or outstanding questions. Here are what I consider to be the most important outstanding questions or brickwalls for reconstructing the Coads. In keeping with the project which is primarily concerned with the origins of the Coads, most are in the 1600s, but there are a few later strays from the 1800s.

EARLY

Who is John Code 1530 of St Tudy and Bodmin?
Who is John Cood jr, thonger, who married Maria Ingromn, Menheniot 1602?

TRURO area
(Coodes) who were John and Robert Code, brothers who purchased property in Stithians around 1585? How did John Code of Menheniot 1569 come by his lands and wealth, given that his family seemed to have little in the way of arms in the 1548 Cornwall Muster?
(Truro line) Was Thomas ~1575, the father of Thomas CODE or HUMPHRY of Constantine, the son of Humphry and Aves Richard (the widow who later married Robert Code)?
(Lizard line) Who were the three brothers John, Thomas and Hugh Coad, b 1610-15, who arrived in St Keverne around 1640?
(Gwennap line)Who was the father Nicholas of John Coad 1674 Gwennap. Was it Nicholas 1643 of St Keverne?
(Crowan line) Who was Samuel Coad or Code or Cood, m Grace 1695 Crowan
(Perran line) Who was Walter Coad ~ 1772, the father of John, Walter and Benjamin Coad of Perranarworthal ~1805?
(Battrell) Was Henry Coad who married Ann Battrell 1786 Camborne, Henry 1753 St Columb?
(Robert the convict line) Who was Charles Coad m Susanna Gill 1787 Kea? Was it Charles of St Neot? Or was he a local boy.
Who was Robert Coad who married Jenefer Williams 1801 Kea. Was he Robert 1753 of Fowey?
(Collingwood) Who was John Coad who married Jennifer Jones 1810 Kenwyn and left six orphans in Gwennap?

ST STEPHENS/ST COLUMB
Who is Regnolds Coad of St Enoder ~1605. Is he a son of Rev Gilbert?
Who is Edward Coad who settled in St Stephens by 1660? Is he the son of Edward of St Winnow?
Who are Theophilus Coode and Anthony Coad ~1650 of St Stephens and exactly who are their children?
Who is Henry Coad who married Ann Plente 1663 St Enoder?
Who is Hyrum or Henry Coad who married Susanna Truscott 1702?
Who is Edward Coad ~ 1679 St Stephens, m Mary Key 1707?
Who is Nicholas Coad ~1685 Ladock, m Elizabeth Key 1714?
Is Anthony Coad who married Margaret Trewartha in Gwennap 1714 the same Anthony who married Diana Pollard or Petters in St Wenn 1716?
Who is Samuel Coad who had a family with Ann 1720 -1727 St Austell and Joseph Coad who had a family there 1712-1731? Are they descended from St Stephens?
Who was Samuel Coad who married Ann Honey, St Stephens 1777?
Who is Richard Coad ~1797 of St Enoder?

LOOE COADS
Is Edward Coode ~1550 of Lansallos the one who married Tamzin Lobbe in Bodmin?
Who was Edward Coad ~1587 of Lostwithiel and St Cleer? Was he a son of Edward Codde and Tamzin Lobbe of Bodmin? Was Peter Coade ~1634 St Cleer his son?
Who was Ralph Code ~1600 of Looe? Was he the father of Peter the Mayor of Looe ~1625?
Who was Nicholas Coad ~1624, Blacksmith? Was he a brother of Philip 1619 and/or Samuel ~1625?
Who were Caleb Coad and Henry Coad, who signed the Protestation with Ralph 1641?

NORTH HILL/ST IVE
Was Stephen Code ~1585, founder of the line, the son of John Code and Margaret Mayow of the “Elder Codes”?
Who are John Coad and William Coad having families ~1610 Stoke Climsland? Are they the sons of Charles Coad and Nichol of St Neot? Is James Coad of Climsland their brother?
Is William Coad who had a family in North Tamerton 1682-92 the son of Robert of Quethiock?
Was Stephen Code of Quethiock 1676, the Catholic who went to Boston 1714 to escape Jacobite persecution and married Mary Woodcock there? Was he the father of James Coad of St Marys Co Maryland?
Who is George Coad m Jane Mark 1743 Warleggan?
Who is George Coad m Mary Smith 1748 Saltash?
Who is John Coade, ag lab, who married Elizabeth Masters 1843, Bodmin RD, and lived in Liskeard and St Cleer? Is he a son of Richard Coad and Ann Clements?
Who are siblings John and Eliza Coad, abt 1810 of Millbrook (Rame)?

LAMERTON DEVON
Who is Sampson Coad m Elizabeth Fursman, Lamerton 1615? Is he a grandson of Rev Arthur Code 1547 of MaryTavy? Is John Coade m Margaret Rundle 1642 Lamerton his son?
Who was Isaac ~1675 of Lamerton? How was he related to Sampson and Richard Code of Tavistock?
Who is Henry Coad who married Susanna 1696 Tavistock?
Who is John Coad ~1810, mason of Liskeard and Stoke Damerel?

ERMINGTON/TIVERTON/AXMOUTH
Is Robert Coad who had a family with Aves in Ermington 1722-29, Robert Coad 1700 of Cornwood? Who is his father Robert 1670?
Are there any male line descendants of the Axmouth/Exeter/Lyme Regis/Tiverton Coods/Coades 1550-1735? (survived in Tiverton as CUDE)
Are there living male line descendants of the Clyst St George Coodes/Coades 1550-1650?

STRAYS
Who is Manners Benson Cood of Surrey 1776?
Who is James Coade m Elizabeth Holliday Dover Kent 1810?
Who is Richard Coad of Tonbridge Kent, m Elizabeth Katt 1835?
Who is John Cood abt 1814 of London, a tailor, m Rebecca Williamson Salford 1845?
Who is John Coad, supposedly 1823 Stratton, a tailor in Plymouth and London, m Susan Johnson Plymouth?
Who is James Coad, Naval Engineer of Lambeth, married Martha Wood
Who is William Coode m Jane Billing Plymouth 1858?
Who is Philip Coad of St Austell, tailor, m Emma Jane Pengelly 1874 Devonport?

WOMEN
Who is Mary Ann Coad of Truro living with Richard Pinkum in Liskeard 1841?

I anticipate that these will be added to as new questions arise – and, hopefully, removed as they are solved

Current activities

2007-08-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

I am in contact with quite a number of Coad and Coode descendants around the world. Here are my current correspondents.

- North Hill Coads. Eddie is a crackerjack family researcher who has researched the North Hill Coads in South Australia in detail, and has helped me reconstruct all the other South Australian Coad families. He's just been to hospital for a heart operation and is whiling away the time helping me look at the history of the earliest Coads in Cornwall. Maureen Edwards who is researching the Goldfinch family has also contacted me over this family, easily the largest group of Coads in Australia with over 400 descendants

- St Stephens in Brannel. Despite their large numbers in Cornwall, very few Brannel descendants are researching family history. Mike Coad is trying to help me crack the great black hole in St Stephens 1660-90 and work out where all the Coads there came from. Robyn Macintosh who is researching the JANE family has contacted us and between us we have discovered three cousin marriages JANE/COAD

- Coades of Melbourne and Queensland. I decided to locate my Crowan Coade cousins a couple of weeks ago and sent out a letter to everyone of that variant in Vic and Qld (about 23 of them). Because I asked very specific questions, I got over 50% response - compared with about 5% last time I tried this. It turns out there are two familes of COADEs (plus some Irish Coades) The Bendigo Coades will be coming back to me with a family tree. About six of my own relatives (the only ones to use this spelling consistently since 1750). I went to the house of Mrs Linda Coade aged 93, who lives not far from me, to see her amazing collection of Coadabilia, including clippings, family histories and many photographs. I was particularly touched to see a 1971 letter from my mother, who died almost exactly five years ago. Her son Russell has copied some of this for me and he has agreed to take a DNA test, so at last we will know the origins of the family.

- Truro Coads Ive been in contact with descendants of Robert Coad the convict (1813 Truro) for quite some time now, and two of them have taken the DNA test. As a result of my bulk COADE mailing, two sisters who are descendants of John Coad/Mary Jane Nankervis of Daylesford are in contact and they are collecting family BMD for me. Hopefully we can eventually prove they are related to Robert the convict (and to me)

- Rev Col John Coode, Governor of Maryland. A group of us including Ed Allen and the professional Linda Reno tracked down his living Coode descendants in Nashville. We are hoping to get a DNA sample; and the Coodes of St Austell are willing to run a comparison - which over 13 generations on each side, is quite a test. Linda has also established there is a second, Catholic, line of Coads in Maryland beginning 1714 and related to Ed Allen, which we believe is of North Hill origin .

- Gwennap Coads Ed Man has sent me a number of key pages of the out-of-print work, Families of Stithians. The genalogies in this book have enabled me partially to disentagle the spaghetti genealogies of the Truro Coads. Ed has also given me detailed genalogies of five generations of Gwennap miners called Francis Coad and their descendants in Lancs, Yorkshire and Philadelphia.

- Wicklow Codds. Descendants of the Irish Codds are very active researchers, and we have been investigating their origins. Because they are a unique, instantly recognizable DNA group we have hived them off into a separate CODD DNA project, though maintaining contact. Good luck Zoe, Sarah, Annette, Dave and Antoinette.

- Janet Wason has contacted me re William Coad/Catherine Blithe of Lezant.

My silly name collection

2007-08-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

In the course of researching the Coads I have come across many silly names in Cornwall and elsewhere. Here are some of my favourites.

Abel Bastard
Admonition Bastard
Bartholomew Incledon
Beaten Basten
Beetha Tredinnick
Christian Bastard
Elizeus Crymis
Emblem Stamper
Fleetwood Cod
Gentle Godolphin
Green Jane
Greinviell Purefoye
Han Corke (winemaker?)
Hanniball Bogans
Hepzibah Wagg
Hezekiah Courts
Mary Hell (imagine raising her)
Nandie Mellhuish
Olliffo Smaly
Owdre Deamand
Pentecost Jankin
Thomas Cobbledick M Martha Lemans
Trothe Cod
Woolson Lapthorne
Ure Lightwing
Antipas Congdon
Esau Kevil
Constantine House
Temperance Dumble
Pascow Pomery
Benatt Herrl
Arnal Gic
Dewanc Manallack
Sebella Sugger
Charity Bunce
Flower Hoare
Robert Botters m Eliz. Troute
Barzillai Beckerleg
Lavinia Mango
Kezekiah Joseph Purssey
Oreng Coyte
Honor Riddle
Charity Tooker. (That can happen).
Budget Ezechiel
Thurza Pressyjohn

The Tribes of Coad

2007-08-06T01:07:00.000-07:00

COAD is a surname originating in Devon and Cornwall. Because it is short, has no meaning and is pronounced as it appears, families with similar names have converted their spelling over the centuries. The main families are

"Elder" Codes of Morval and Gidleigh. This rich family lived on the Cornwall-Devon border from about 1350 to 1700. It is commonly believed to be extinct - but several Coad families seem likely to be descended. These are: - North Hill Coads - Liskeard/St Ive Coads - Lamerton/MaryTavy Coads. There are several branches of these families in Britain and the USA and a large North Hill branch in Australia
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=morvalcodes
Looe Coads. This small clan lived very close to Morval from about 1600. Many of the men were blacksmiths. There are descendants in Cornwall, USA and NZ
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=eecoad
"Younger" Coodes of Sithney and St Austell. The Coodes have been one of the wealthiest and most eminent families in Cornwall, producing eminent bankers and attorneys, five knights and half a dozen military officers of high rank
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=coode
Coads of St Stephens Brannel. Some eighteen Coads were born in this central parish between 1660 and 1690, but because the parish records have been lost their origins are unknown. Nearly half the Coads of Cornwall are descended from these individuals. It is not known whether they are a single family or several. There are four separate families of descendants.
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=brannelcoads
Coads of Lizard. All Coads of the remote Lizard Peninsula are descended from Thomas Coad who arrived in St Keverne about 1630. One large group of Gwennap miners is also believed to be from Lizard. The clan has descendants in Cornwall, Australia and the USA.
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=lizardcoads
Coads of Truro. This family consists largely of miners who are descendants of Thomas "Coad or Humphrey" of Constantine 1604. There are large families of descendants in Victoria and others in Devon, Yorkshire, and the USA. It is likely this family derived from the Coodes or relatives. The Crowan Coads, descendants of Samuel Code 1666 in Australia and Durham, are also likely related.
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=crowancoads
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=trurocoads
Coads of Ermington Devon. This family has significant numbers of descendants in the USA, and possibly there are survivors in Devon. Other Coad families around Axmouth, Tiverton and Exeter are likely extinct - but the original Coades near Exeter may survive as the Codds of Torquay.
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=devoncoads

There are also at least 20 families of Coads or Coods who are not from the West Country and who adopted the name in the 1800s. Most of these are descendants of CODDs from Ireland, Wales, Suffolk, Kent and Lincoln.
http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=straycoads

Further details and some key links to trees can be found at the Guild Profile

www.one-name.org/profiles/coad.html

and at our DNA project