Welcome to the Coe Family Tree and Photo Album

Welcome to my family tree website and photo album, comprising not only the Coes and Vaughans of Essex and Kent but also my father's ancestors - the Glasscocks and Newsteads of Essex, Norfolk and the East End of London. Feel free to explore the generations - you may well discover a forbear or two!

We have traced our branch of the Coe family back to 13 January 1772, when our 4xgreatgrandfather Jonathan Coe married Mary Shaw at Great Wakering parish church in south-east Essex.

Our story begins in the autumn of 2002 when an old family tree came to light. Written by James Clarence Charles Coe (JCCC) who was born in Woolwich in 1875, it traced the family back through several generations of Royal Arsenal wheelwrights to a Jonathan Coe whose parentage was ascribed to John Coe, a prosperous Maldon merchant who died in 1779. But the link with the merchant Coes of Maldon or further back still with the 14th century mercenary, John Coo, who won his lands in north Essex through his adventures in Italy, cannot be authenticated, so anyone wishing to research Coos and Coes pre 1772 should visit the Staley History website.

Since the beginning of 2003 three second cousins (Selina Jackson, Joan Shaw and myself) have been hard at work putting flesh on the bones of JCCC's tree, authenticating births, marriages and deaths with the help of certificates, censuses, wills, photographs and the memories of elder relatives. Through our pooled efforts we found that our forbears came to life in a very enjoyable and intriguing way. But despite the prevailing family tradition that our roots lie in Maldon, all the evidence points otherwise.

Our Jonathan Coe of the mid 1700s is much more likely to have been connected with those other Coe families who eked out a living on the land or dredged for oysters in the marshes behind Southend on Sea. If you can shed any light on Jonathan's origins or you think you may be related, please email me at .

Check out the names in Page Per Person, starting with John Coe, our shared greatgrandfather, and click to move through the generations, or view the Coe, Vaughan, Glasscock and Newstead families via the Tree Diagrams. These are descendancy charts reading from left to right. And take a look at the Photo Album - you never know, you may recognise a great-aunt or so!

This bulk of this website consists of the 'Page Per Person' pages and these have been generated from our database. Although we have found no authenticated link between Jonathan Coe of Foulness and the John Coe of Maldon, we have database entries for both and also for the earlier Coes and Coos, so there are actually 'Page Per Person' pages for all of these. But you cannot access the earlier ones by clicking through the later ones because Jonathan's entry shows no father to click on. The earlier ones can be accessed either through the Index of Names pages, ( A-C, D-H, J-N, O-V, W-Z ) or you could go from here directly to John Coe or John Coo or John Olmius or Henry Mildmay.

When we began making sense of the old hand-written family tree and decided to put our findings onto a website so that we could share the information with other family members, it seemed a perfectly harmless activity. However we are aware that people may well have different views - they may not want their family details to be published in this way. (See Privacy below). They may be offended to find their close relatives misrepresented, with incorrect information or even the wrong photograph. We may upset people by accidentally assigning a death to someone who is very much alive. If therefore we have inadvertently trodden on anyone's toes, please contact us and we will do all we can to put it right.

In the interests of privacy and with the disturbing increase in identity theft, the names and details of all living persons are omitted. Persons are deemed to be alive if their birth date is less than 110 years ago and no date of death is known. Also another difficulty is the recent death of children and young people. It would be wrong to publicise all their details when the rest of the family is simply shown as "Unnamed" (stealing the identity of recently deceased persons accounts for ten per cent of identity theft). These are therefore also shown as Unnamed.

Some effort has been made to make this website compliant with current standards for accessibility. If you have any comments on the accessibility of the site please contact us.

All the genealogical information we've gathered is held in a database called Ancestry Family Tree which used to be given away free on the ancestry.com website. Regrettably this largesse has been withdrawn and the free program is no longer available. A similar program which at the time writing (September 2006) is still free, is Personal Ancestral File available from the Latter Day Saints' website. The album pages have been automatically generated by an excellent piece of software called gedtree. If you click on the gedtree links at the foot of the 'Page per Person' pages, you may get the impression that I (Mike Swan) have written this software, but regrettably this is not the case. While it may appear that you have taken a short step to another page on this website, you have in fact been transported far away to the Otway family tree website, and it is Mark Otway who has written the program.

When updating the site so that it looks as I want it to, I have to make around a hundred search and replace operations to over 1100 files. The best software I have found for doing this is Textpipe Lite which I can thoroughly recommend.

* GOOGLE-SEARCH CAVEAT - Why have two search engines on a website, the simple search at the top and the Google search ? Well this Google search does an intelligent, fuzzy-matching, multiple-item google-style search, BUT at the time of writing (Dec 09) it only knows about 976 out of the total 1286 pages. And it comes with adverts. This is clearly not a scrap of use, but I am leaving the Google search in place for a trial period in case the Google spiders decide to delve a bit deeper into the site.

The simple search can only search for any single word or any fixed phrase. The javascript (jsind.exe) for the search engine was written by a Romanian called Iuliu, but this does not seem to be available any more.

The tree diagrams were produced using KSTableau (now Genealogica Grafica) written by Tom de Neef at http://home.versatel.nl/genealogicagrafica/. The code for the navigation at the top of the pages is provided by Accessible Website Menu by Brothercake. These are in my view not only the best menus out there, but they are the Holy Grail of accessible menus and very generously are made available freely for non-commercial websites.

You may be interested in producing your own family tree and photo album. I can thoroughly recommend this software for producing it. Email me if you have any problems with any of it. If you would like a site like this produced for you, again please get in touch at