Talk:John Coggeshall

Coggeshall's title and wife
An unnamed editor has given Coggeshall the title of "Sir" in this article, and has also given his wife the maiden name of Gould. I have reverted these edits back to where they were originally, with the following reasoning. There is no history of Rhode Island that I've seen (for example those written by Peterson, Arnold, and Bicknell) that give Coggeshall, or any other Rhode Island magistrate, the title of Sir. This title might be offered to someone who was knighted in England, but in my reading I've seen no evidence that Coggeshall was ever knighted before coming to New England. While the title of Sir might be appropriate to some of the governors of Massachusetts, who were royal appointees, this title is really not appropriate to any of the Rhode Island magistrates, except for Sir Edmond Andros, who was the only governor of Rhode Island ever appointed by the crown.

As to the maiden name of Coggeshall's wife, Mary, there is no evidence that the name was Gould, even though that might be stated in some obscure text somewhere. Several excellent and thorough genealogists have commented on this, viz: Austin did not give a maiden name for her in his 1887 Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island; Moriarity, in commenting on Coggeshall in The American Genealogist in the 1940s does not offer a maiden name for her; and as recently as 1999, Anderson and his editors in commencing the Great Migration Project reviewed the evidence, and concluded that her maiden name remains unknown. It is far better, in the name of scholarly research, to leave the maiden name as unknown. Back in 1932 when Roscoe Whitman published his genealogy of the descendants of Stukeley Westcott, he gave Stukeley the wrong wife, and had to go back and write an entire new book, primarily to correct his faux pas. It is best to leave it blank.Sarnold17 (talk) 18:29, 17 September 2011 (UTC)