Cotgrove Family History.
Norman HOLDING
You
may ask why this Website is compiled by Norman Holding and not by a Cotgrove. The answer is simple, my Great
Grand mother was a Cotgrove.
Eliza
Cotgrove, born 1831, who married my great grand father Golden Thompson was the
daughter of Henry Cotgrove and his wife Sarah Robinson. She
had married Golden Thompson of Leigh, who was the son of Golden T. who is said
to have jumped ship during the Nore Naval Mutiny of 1798 off Southend. In fact
that was improvement on a good story by Golden, he was prest in 1806 and jumped
ship in September of that year.
About 44 years ago I started tracing my family
tree and after getting stuck in making any more progress with the Holdings, who
were chair makers and warehousemen in Bethnal Green who came from Hemel Hempstead, where they were
millers, and before that innkeepers in Hatfield, I
started on my mother's side of the family.
Although the Cotgroves have no noble blood nor were they great land
owners they have left behind them in the National Archives and in Local
Archives in Chelmsford and Southend vast amounts of
information. Over the last 15 years I
have collected this together and drawn up a tree which shows nearly all the
family from 1688 to 2004. It is over 35 feet wide and
has about 1000 names on it. Besides this I have many
binders of notes giving names of every Cotgrove who ever lived, even if I still
can't put a few of them in the correct place on the tree, as well as stacks of
newspaper cuttings, mainly pre 1900, and lists of Cotgrove boats.
My father was the result of a 'shotgun marriage'
after a meeting one dark night in Victoria Park between the chair makers son
and a servant girl living in at the French Hospital in
Victoria Park Rd.Bethnal Green. Brought up in a single
parent family my father served his time in Bow Works of the North London
Railway as a fitter. He then got a job as a
draughtsman for Thomas Tilling in Peckham and later moved to the Tillings
Stevens Bus factory in Maidstone
where he became Chief Draughtsman. He served in the
Great War as an Ambulance Fitter with the ASC in France and
returned home to marry the granddaughter of the Thompson/Cotgrove marriage. Her father had been another Southend area man whose
grandparent had owned the "Castle Inn" at Little Wakering for 40
years over two generations. He had left Essex when he joined the Pru. as a representative and had travelled around a great deal
before ending up in Maidstone
as Area Superintendent.
I was born in 1927 and soon afterwards the Slump
forced a move to Luton,
to Vauxhall, where my father became a Design Engineer for Bedford Trucks and I
followed on as an engineering apprentice in 1944. I
spent over 40 years there mainly as an Electronics Engineer in the Research
Dept. My work involved measurements of noise, vibrations and stress in prototype cars and trucks. With the closing down of the truck side of
the business in 1986 I opted for early retirement and the history of the Cotgroves
has kept me very busy ever since.
My wife died in 1994 but I have carried on with my
researches and although I’m not as involved as I was I still add details as
they are revealed. I also study German
and although I’m not very good at it I can now speak it well enough to hold a
social conversation. This helps we on my
travels, mainly to Zell am See in Austria but
also on several cruises along German
rivers. I
have also been on an ocean cruise on the MS Deutschland.
The photo below was taken on a cruise near the Baltic
Island of Rügen, just off the German coast near the Polish boarder.
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