Cole

Cole family page

Gertrude Amelia Cole, nee Orviss (1876-1944), wife of John Benjamin Francis Cole

Record Search

Direct links to lists of baptisms, marriages and burials for the Cole family can be found under Family Records opposite. If you want to search for records for a spelling variant of Cole, or for any other family name, just click below on the first letter of the
family name you are interested in. This will open a new tab in your browser giving you a list of family names beginning with that letter,
for which there are baptism records in our database of half a million church and public registry records.

You can also select marriages or burials. Select the name you want
and when the list of records is displayed you can easily refine the search, choosing a single parish, given name(s) and/or start and end dates.

The records are displayed 30 to a page, but by selecting the yellow Wiki Table option at the top left of the page you can open a full, scrollable list. This list will either be displayed in a new tab or a pop-up window. You may have to edit the settings of your browser to allow pop-up windows for www.jerripediabmd.net. For the small number of family names for which a search generates more than 1,500 records you will have to refine your search (perhaps using start or end dates) to reduce the number of records found.

New records

From August 2020 we have started adding records from non-Anglican churches, and this process will continue as more records, held by Jersey Archive, are digitised and indexed. Our database now includes buttons enabling a search within registers of Roman Catholic, Methodist and other non-conformist churches. These records will automatically appear within the results of any search made from this page.

A--B--C--D--E--F--G--H--I--J--K--L--M--N--O--P--Q--R--S--T--U--V--W--X--Y--Z

If you can help with information about the Cole family, please contact editorial@jerripedia.org, using Jerripedia as the subject of your email. We are particularly interested in information which will help create further family trees, family histories and photographs

A blue link anywhere in the text will lead you to another page with more information on this family

Origins of surname

This English surname was originally a personal name. It is generally accepted as deriving from the personal name Nicholas, but it may have derived from the Olde English Cola, meaning black. This presumably denoted one of dark or swarthy appearance and may possibly have described a Dane or Anglo-Sazon. Cola and Cole as personal names are recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.

Early records

The name first appears in Jersey baptism registers as early as 1684, with the baptism of Lorans, of unknown parentage, in St Peter, but no descendants have been found for him. It reappears in the 1790s with the baptism of the children of John and Margaret Smart in St Helier.

Variants

• Cole
• Coles

Family records

Family trees

• Descendants of William Cole

Church records

Tips for using these links

• Cole baptisms in Jersey
• Cole marriages in Jersey (groom)
• Cole marriages in Jersey (bride)
• Cole burials in Jersey

Great War service

Sons of Eli and Bella Coles

• Charles Coles (1883-1918) (St H) Private, Hampshire Regiment, died from effects of heat in Iraq
• John William Coles (1889- ) Rifleman, Royal Irish Rifles, PoW

• George John Cole (1864- ) (St H) son of Richard and Mary, husband of Constance Matilda Paull, Private, RASC
• Richard William Cole (1872- ) son of Richard and Mary Journeaux, Mercantile Marine
• William Cole (St H) 2nd Lieutenant, RAF
• Edwin Morier Sutton Coles (1865- ) Mercantile Marine

Notes on our list, abbreviations used etc

Occupation records

• Cole Occupation identity cards

World War 2 casualties

• Richard Hopkiss Cole

Family wills

• Cole family wills from 1663 to 1980 held by Jersey Archive

• Cole burial records 1820-1978

Family businesses

• George Cole, pharmacist at 4 King Street from 1885 to 1920s
• Picot and Cole and Cole and Coleman, shipbuilders at Gorey

Cole Radio

The baby in this family photograph, William Horace Cole, was born in Surrey in 1898, the son of George William Munden Cole and Rose Annie Pyett, who married in Esher in 1897. They came to Jersey the following year, where George took up a job as a piano tuner with Donaldsons. William would grow up with an interest in radio and founded the business at 61 Halkett Place from which many Jersey families bought their first television.

William's business started in the Market in 1921, after he returned from service with the Royal Flying Corps from 1915 to 1919. He moved to Halkett Place in 1924 and remained in business there until his retirement in 1969.

During World War Two he worked for the Ministry of Aviation in London.

The owner of the photograph is Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, daughter of William's younger sister, Alice Rosa Cole, who was born after the family moved to Jersey.

Annie told us:

"My mother was famous in the island as church organist for Vauxhall Baptist, singer and pianist. She married my father, Percy Charles Brickell Curtis, who was English. (See wedding photograph below. He was in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and came to Jersey to visit his old wartime buddy Walter Le Quesne (father of Dr Walter (Wally) le Quesne). Walter's wife Florrie was my mother's friend, and that's how they met.

"Before the evacuation they were living with my sister Sheila, aged about 11, at 24 Le Geyt Street, my grandfather's house. He was George William Munden Cole, a piano tuner at Donaldsons. My mother's brothers were William Cole, founder of Cole Radio, and Archie Cole, later President of Jersey Amateur Radio Club.

"Obviously, with my father having been in the Royal Flying Corps, they decided to go, leaving the house in the charge of a lady whose name unfortunately I forget. Two days before the Germans arrived they got on a coal boat for England, which was followed across the Channel by a German U Boat.

"They went to Bristol where they were given a house in Long Ashton, the Red Cross providing furniture. My father went to work at the aircraft factory, as his trade was an aircraft fitter, and in his spare time he worked on the telephone exchange.

"I was born in 1942, with the Red Cross providing my cot, baby clothes, etc. I'm told that my first word was 'bomb'.

German soldiers taking an interest in the business's delivery van

"In 1945 we returned to Jersey on the Antonia. German soldiers had been living at 24 Le Geyt Street. I'm told that everything was more or less intact. It was a tall, three-storey Georgian house, with furniture from the Georgian and Victorian era, large shelves of Victorian books, even a pianola in the big upstairs drawing room.

"We stayed with friends, Grace and Wilfred Ahier, at Havre des Pas, and went every day to Le Geyt street, cleaning it and burning the beds and anything German.

"My father went to work at Frederick Baker, my mother worked at the Food Office and my sister worked as a hairdresser, but I can't remember the name of the salon. Turner and Plumley?

"I started school at Helvetia the following year, 1946, when I was four. When Rouge Bouillon Grammar School opened in 1954 I was in the first intake. My parents would not allow me to do A-levels, despite pleas from my headmistress that I'd probably get a scholarship to university. I was a girl. Instead I began work as a secretary at Noel and Porter in the estate agency department.

"I achieved my ambition in 1993, aged 51, and entered Warwick University as a First Year student. My final year dissertation won the annual award from the Association of Art Historians of Great Britain for the best dissertation (BA or MA) to come out of a British university that year. I couldn't afford to stay at Warwick and went instead to the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University) who gave me a grant, where I got a Post Graduate Diploma with distinction, an MA with distinction, and finally a PhD.

"I worked part time then as a Researcher and Conference Lecturer for the Open University, which then funded a book. Oxford University (Ruskin College) gave me my book launch as they were going to teach from it. My book, The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem 1850 to 1925, is in over a thousand libraries worldwide. It has been a long journey from Noel and Porter's Estate Department."

Cole Radio's workshop

Family album

Curtis-Cole wedding in 1927: Left to right in top row are Edie Cole (Bill's wife), George Cole, Alice Cole (organist, pianist, singer), Percy Curtis (gentleman's outfitter, Frederick Baker and A Amy and Son), Bill Cole, and John Curtis.

Family gravestones

Click on any image to see a larger version. See the Jerripedia gravestone image collection page for more information about our gravestone photographs. Images of gravestones in other cemeteries will be added progressively

Tips

The church record links above will open in a new tab in your browser and generate the most up-to-date list of each set of records from our database. These lists replace earlier Family page baptism lists, which were not regularly updated. They have the added advantage that they produce a chronological listing for the family name in all parishes, so you do not have to search through A-Z indexes, parish by parish.

We have included some important spelling variants on some family pages, but it may be worth searching for records for a different spelling variant. Think of searching for variants with or without a prefix, such as Le or De. To search for further variants, or for any other family name, just click on the appropriate link below for the first letter of the family name, and a new tab will open, giving you the option to choose baptism, marriage or burial records. You will then see a list of available names for that type of record and you can select any name from that list. That will display all records of the chosen type for that family name, and you can narrow the search by adding a given name, selecting a parish or setting start and end dates in the form you will see above. You can also change the family name, or search for a partial name if you are not certain of the spelling

The records are displayed 30 to a page, but by selecting the yellow Wiki Table option at the top left of the page you can open a full, scrollable list. This list will either be displayed in a new tab or a pop-up window. You may have to edit the settings of your browser to allow pop-up windows for www.jerripediabmd.net. For the small number of family names for which a search generates more than 1,500 records you will have to refine your search (perhaps using start or end dates) to reduce the number of records found.

New records

Since August 2020 we have added several thousand new records from the registers of Roman Catholic, Methodist and other non-conformist churches. These will appear in date order within a general search of the records and are also individually searchable within the database search form