I have never been to Brighton!  Sad, but true, and something that will have to be rectified fairly soon if I am to add to this family history and write about our Brighton connections with any degree of authority.

As a child, and even in to my adult years, I was never aware of any family ‘chatter’ about Brighton.  I think that it was only after the death of my grandfather, Charles Leonard Cowley, that I became aware that he had been born in Brighton and, indeed, that he had a brother and a sister who were also born there.

When I started to look seriously at the family history and to try and verify and build on the work that Roy Cowley had done, I quickly discovered that the male Cowley line was easily traceable back through some three generations, possibly four, in the Brighton area.

Charles Leonard Cowley (my paternal grandfather) was one of three children from the third marriage of his father, Francis Cowley, and the second marriage of his mother, Charlotte Louisa Woolley.  Francis was first married to Mary Anne Tugwell with whom he had two children, he then married Mary Ann Hart with whom he had a further two children, and finally he married Charlotte.  Charlotte was first married to William Naylor with whom she had three children.  So my grandfather had one brother and one sister plus five step brothers and two step sisters!  From my research all were born in the Brighton area.

My great grandfather, Francis Cowley (b abt 1837) came from a family of six, possibly eight - again all born in the Brighton area.  The uncertainty about numbers comes from the 1851 and 1861 censuses.  In 1851 there is a Thomas Cowley, age 20, living at 9, Prince Albert Street, Brighton, and listed as the son of the head of household, Francis Cowley (b abt 1806).  However, on the 1861 census Thomas is listed as ‘nephew’ and there is also an entry for Sarah A. Cowley, listed as ‘niece’.  At the time of writing I have not been able to positively establish which line Thomas and Sarah A. belong to, but the research continues.  For the time being I have omitted Thomas and Sarah from the family trees on this web site.

I had assumed that it was Francis Cowley (b abt 1806) who founded the Cowley bakery business in Brighton, but a recent find on the Brighton & Hove Museums website and some information from the Brighton History Centre suggests that the business was established in the 1790s, before Francis was born.  Read about this by clicking on the link to “Ye Olde Bunn Shoppe”.

The Brighton connection is quite clear but sadly we come to a grinding halt in the mid to late-1700s!  There is some evidence, albeit a little shaky, to suggest that the parents of Francis Cowley (b abt 1806)  were Thomas Cowley or Coley (b abt 1772) and Susannah Scrase (b abt 1761).  Unfortunately parish records for this period are of little use to us and by the time of the first census in 1841 many of the people born in the mid-1700s had either died or were just not documented.  There are other avenues for research but these will take some time to find, understand and document.