There are a few alleged origins of the name Cobb. One of these is that Cobb was derived from the Old English word Cobba or Cobbe, meaning a particularly large or strong man. Another is that Cobb was based on the Viking name for a mound or hill. Ancient spelling inconsistencies meant that Cobb was also often spelt as Cobbe. The name was recorded in the Doomsday Book, which showed that the family held land. The early settlers in America in 1629 included a Henry Cobb and a few years later, a John Cobb.
Analysing census records from 1851 to 1901 provides a general overview of the geographical spread of the Cobb family in Great Britain during the 19th century. Suffolk and to a slightly lesser degree Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and southern Lincolnshire were the areas where the name was relatively common. Kent and parts of Yorkshire also had their fair share of Cobb’s. Two other small areas had quite high densities of Cobb’s; the Isle of Purbeck in east Dorset through to the New Forest and the Angus area of Scotland north of the Tay. The remainder of Scotland, northern England, central England, south west England and Wales contained comparatively few Cobb’s.
My ancestors, originating from Norfolk, but not far from the Suffolk border, would therefore seem to be an archetypal Cobb family. As a child I spent many happy hours looking at old post card photographs of soldiers with my Dad. The soldiers were my Dads brothers, their friends and their colleagues. Most of them had died or emigrated before I was born and the reality of it all did not register with me at such a young age. Many years later a request for information, and particularly for photographs, of anyone listed on the Gaywood war memorial prompted me to look at those pictures again. This in turn led me to investigate further as I realised that I knew almost nothing about my family history prior to the early twentieth century. In fact the little I did know was to prove incorrect. My Dad’s family, or at least the Cobb family, were not from generations of Kings Lynn fishermen as I had believed. This was the Hornigold family, my paternal Grandmothers family. [ I also discovered that my Mum’s biological father was not French after all, although he was quite possibly of French Huguenot descent!].