Samuel Cowsill

Cowsill family monument, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC

On Dec 30, 1884, my gggrandfather Samuel Cowsill arrived at Baltimore, Maryland,  from Liverpool, England, aboard the ship Circassian, with his wife Catherine and daughters Emma, 15, and Ada, 14.

Samuel had been born in 1831 in Kearsley,  Lancashire, England.  At eleven, his father, also Samuel, was killed in a mine accident at Botany Bay Colliery, Clifton, Eccles Parish, Lancashire, leaving his mother Mary Ann a widow with seven children, ages two to fifteen.  Five years after his father's death, in 1847, his uncle James Cowsill and James' son William were killed on the same day in another mine accident at Spindle Point Colliery.  Prudently, Samuel took up bricklaying as a trade.   He married Catherine in 1854.

Two years before Samuel's arrival in America, his sons Nathan (1855), Edmund Turner (1857),  James (1860), and Arthur (1864) had immigrated from Farnworth, Bolton, England.  They first settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where my grandfather, James Arthur, son of Edmund and Margaret Oakes, was born in 1883.  A few years later, the family relocated to Washington, DC.

In America, the Cowsills became brick contractors.  Nathan and Margaret Evans had five children, Vincent, Evelyn, Nellie, Harold, and Alma.  Edmund and Margaret Oakes had Frederick, Lillian, and James.  Arthur and Matilda Rutherford had Catherine and Arthur Rutherford.  Tragically,  in 1916, 19-year-old Arthur Rutherford Cowsill and a friend drowned in the Potomac River (near the Aqueduct Bridge), when their canoe capsized.  James, who went to San Francisco about 1895, died there in January, 1896, age 35.  In 1906, my grandfather also relocated to San Francisco, in search of work after the great earthquake and fire. 

Some of Samuel's relatives spelled their name Coucill.  His uncle William, whose descendant Walter Jackson Coucill (1915-1982) became a well-known Canadian artist, took this spelling.

Several of Samuel's third cousins also immigrated to the U. S. and Canada at about the same time as he.  Together their descendants make up most of the Cowsills found today in the United States and Canada.