CowgillCousins.org
Cow
Gill Cote on Malham Moor
near Bordley in West Yorkshire
Welcome!
Welcome
to the Cowgill Cousins home page. This site is free of
charge and has no advertising. Please provide a proper citation to the
Cowgill Cousins and this website for any use of the data posted hereon.
We expressly and emphatically prohibit the sale of this data whether
for profit or not. If membership or fees are required to access your
data, do not add research from this site to your files. Thank you.
The
Cowgill Cousins is an organization founded to promote the research,
preservation, and free
exchange of information on our Cowgill heritage, as well as to provide
opportunities for members and interested others to meet and greet
people in the extended Cowgill family. We also sponsor an active DNA
program. The organization was established
in 1982 at a reunion in Kansas City held to mark the 300th anniversary
of the arrival of Cowgill's in America. Meetings are held biannually in
odd numbered years at varying locations (next meeting in June 2011 -
see below). Members dues support selected organization
activities, and include a subscription to the Cowgill Cousins
Newsletter published periodically to inform members of news or events
of special interest.
While the membership to date has been almost exclusively from America,
we welcome and encourage our "cousins" from elsewhere to join us. (See Join
Cowgill Cousins).
The
primary goals of this site are to assist those researching their
Cowgill roots by providing pertinent information already gathered,
coordinate ongoing research to preclude duplication of effort, and
assistance in any new research required (to post or view a query see Queries).
A long term goal is to build a complete, worldwide family tree
(a
Cowgill "one-name
study") from the
earliest known individuals through the early 1900s
(limited by privacy concerns), in a searchable data base available
free. We are registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies for the surname Cowgill and its variants. Most of the research included herein was sponsored by the Cowgill
Cousins as a cooperative effort. If you are a Cowgill family researcher
or just someone with information to contribute, please contact
us.
The
next Cowgill Cousins Reunion is scheduled for 20 - 23 June 2019 in Columbus, OH.The
venue: Embassy Suites Columbus Airport, 2886 Airport Drive. To RSVP
call 614-536-0206 (booking link is group.embassysuites.com/CowgillFamilyReunion). Ask for Cowgill Family Reunion room block
or group code "CFR" to get the discounted rate. |
What's inside this site:
- Primary sources and some important links (at Research)
- Family
Trees
What's on this page:
- A Welcome to the Cowgill Cousins
- A short history of our surname
- Some important
events in early Cowgill History
- Links (above) to more information about Cowgills
on this site
- A general search
box
- What's new
(latest updates throughout this site)
Surname History
Whence
Cowgill? There are a number of ancient places, all in West Yorkshire,
named Cowgill or Cow Gill. The most likely source of the Cowgill
surname appears to be the Cowgill House and Cow Gill Cote (a cote was a
smaller dwelling than a house) located near Bordley in Burnsall
parish, West Yorkshire. The photo above is of Cow Gill Cote,
which still exists and is now used to house animals; Cowgill House is
not precisely located, but may be at Lee Gate Farm which is located
across Cow Gill from the cote. These place names appear as early as the
mid-1400s in records of Fountains Abbey, which held Cow Gill Cote as a
grange or sheep station
in the Middle Ages as a source of income. The Cowgill settlements are
likely to be much older than the records suggest, and evidence from the
surname indicates that they are likely to have been established well
before 1350. They both owed their name to a stream which runs below
Cow Gill Cote which is still named
Cow Gill (a gill is a small ravine) on UK Ordnance Survey maps. Field
names have
ancient history. Near the gill in Bordley is a field named Cowgill.
The
earliest
known references to Cowgill individuals were several families in the
general area of Bordley and one in nearby Ilkley parish listed as “de
Colgyll”
on a tax list of 1379, and as Colgill by 1458. From 1522 the name
regularly appears near there as Cowgill. By 1600 there appeared to be
two distinct Cowgill family groups, one centered near Thornton in
Craven and the other near Ilkley (see sketchmap below).
The family remained
largely in West Yorkshire and neighboring Lancashire through the 1700s,
with the major exception of one family that left for America in 1682.
Cowgills were in Jamaica by the late 1700s, appeared early (by 1810) in
Australia, and were in Canada by the mid to late 1800s.
(Excerpted from
information on the origin and distribution of the
Cowgill surname prepared by Dr George Redmonds, and reprinted with his
permission, as Tour Itinerary Notes especially for a Cowgill Cousins
group tour of West Yorkshire in 2006.)
The
Cowgill surname now has
several variants. Since some earlier descendents were likely
illiterate, officials listing them on documents such as parish, tax,
military, and census records changed the spelling to what they heard or
were familiar with. Also, some lines may have deliberately changed the
spelling for their own reasons. In conducting research it is necessary
to check on variant spellings and mispellings, but also to check that
the individuals listed are in fact Cowgills and not another family
(even some listed with the spelling "Cowgill" are in fact other
families).
Following is a listing of the primary known variants, omitting the
occasional mispelling, who are truly Cowgills. Those marked with an
asterisk have migrated to a surname spelling that is known to belong to
a separate, unrelated family group; those marked with a double asterisk
are thought to be Cowgills but no definite tie-in has been proven to
date: Cowgell, Coguill, Cogil(l)*, Cougill*, Cogle*, Coggill, Coghill*,
Cowdill, Cowdell, Coughil, Choguill**, Cowguill**.
Q: What is the
proper pronunciation of Cowgill? A:
There
is none. The name arose in an area of Scandinavian settlement in the
10th century, and the early spellings seem likely to represent the old
NORSE personal name of KOLLI plus the old Norse word for GIL, i.e.,
Kollisgill. The L of Colgill was vocalised in both the placenames and
the surname in the tudor period, and this is a feature of the local
speech. The words 'old' and 'cold', for example are pronounced 'owd'
and 'cowd'. The name has, therefore, nothing to do with cows, except by
association, and the forms quoted show that the surname could not have
developed from other places now called Cowgill which are, in fact,
derived from the word 'cow'. Note that some current British families
use Cow-Gill, while the variant spellings mentioned above indicate
other pronunciations. Take your pick.
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The
following are some selected important early events in Cowgill history:
1379 Five Cowgills (as "de Colgyll") appear on a Poll Tax list in West
Yorkshire (first
documented appearance of the name in any form)
1522 Brian and John Cowgill listed in a
Loan Book (first
documented use of Cowgill spelling as surname)
1543 Robert Cowgill (as Cowgyll) appears
on Lay Subsidy Roll in Thornton in Craven
1567 Brian Cowgill's 1st appearance in
Thornton in Craven parish records
1572 John Cowgill (later as “John of
Lothersdale”), son of Bryan Cowgill, bapt 27 Sep at Thornton in Craven
1601 John Cowgill marries Margaret
Gardiner 3 May at Thornton in Craven
1602 Edmund Cowgill, son of John, bapt 7
Feb at Carleton in Craven
1631 Edmund Cowgill marries Jenet
Rideogh 30 Jun at Thornton in Craven
1634 Edmund Cowgill (Jr) bapt 23 Nov
1634, Thornton in Craven
1642 Edmund Cowgill bur 15 Dec at
Thornton in Craven
1642 - 1660 English Civil War and The Protectorate. Rev Turner (see Research) note:
"There is a gap in the records (of Thornton in Craven) from 1644 to
1683"; gaps also in Carleton in Craven records
1664 Jane Cowgill, dau of Edmund, bapt
21 Dec at Thornton in Craven
1672 Edmund Cowgill listed on Hearth Tax
for Carleton in Craven
1675 Edmund Cowgill bur 24 Apr at St
Andrew’s, Slaidburn
1682 The Settle Certificate signed on 7
Jun at Settle Monthly Meeting (transcript at Cowgills in America)
1682 The
Lamb of
Liverpool loaded 26 Jun - 17 Jul 1682 at Liverpool under John Tench (or
French), master
1682 Cowgills arrive in America
1770s at least five Cowgills (John, Daniel, and Ralph in VA; another
John in NJ; and Joseph in PA) fought in the Revolutionary War
1812 at least twelve Cowgills fought in
the War of 1812
1838 The Cowgill
Chapel (also as
St John's) built. The chapel's name
is derived from one of
several places named Cowgill in West Yorkshire that have no linkage to
the family.
1860s over 100 Cowgills fought in the Civil War, all but nine for the
Union (and including one UK resident who was in the US visiting his
daughter!)
Q: Did the Cowgills
have a family coat of arms or official family crest? A: No, none could
probably afford one. Those being sold by so-called heritage
organizations are bogus.
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Note:
each page on this site can be searched for a known date,
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What's New:
latest updates
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This
site is lovingly dedicated to the memory of
Beatrice
Eleanora Cowgill
(1906 - 2001),
co-founder of the Cowgill
Cousins organization and author
of the Cowgill History