I’ve been absent for 3 months.¬† (I left off with West New Jersey in 1687.)

Perhaps one reason I stopped blogging is the work it takes to write about a whole year in one post. My daughter-in-law (who has a new blog about gardening that I highly recommend) suggested breaking things down into smaller posts. That’s what I thought I was doing when I decided to take one year at a time. But it turns out that so much happened in these years, one year has become too big a unit of measurement.

So, in the spirit of breaking things down, at least a little, I want to say something about Dr. Daniel Coxe. I have written about how he became governor of West New Jersey here. Later on I came across some curious things that make the man more complex and intriguing than I thought he was.

Item No. One: I came across an article that mentioned a Dr. Coxe who was serving in the Parliamentary army during the Puritan Revolution in England. The army‚Äôs general asked that Coxe be made a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1643. The author of the article, one William J. Birken, went on to write that Coxe was later to prove his medical ability to the college and became one of its most active fellows, and eventually its president in 1682 [from Wm. J. Birken, ‚ÄúThe Royal College of Physicians of London and Its Support of the Parliamentary Cause” in The Journal of British Studies, vol. 23 no. 1 (1983) pp. 51-52].

This sounds like our Dr. Daniel Coxe except for one small problem. Our Dr. Coxe was born around 1640 (he died an old man in 1730). So this must have been someone else. The Dr. Coxe who governed West New Jersey is said to have been the son of Daniel Coxe of Stoke Newington, Gent., who was buried there in 1686. Could this other Dr. Coxe have been the father of the Governor?  Birken’s source was the “Dictionary of National Biography.” Someday I’ll get over to the Library of Congress to look it up.

Another Dr. Coxe tidbit tomorrow, or sometime soon.