Research in Progress. Basement

Disputed Family Tradition

The Plantagenet Royal Descent Claim

A traditional descent claim, disputed at the colonial splice

This descent was previously presented on this site as documented. Audit work in 2026 could not source the splice between Stukely Westcott and his alleged Stukley/Plantagenet ancestors. Ten independent sources spanning 1886 to 2026, including the WikiTree Edward III Gateway Ancestors Project, have concluded the splice is not documented. The chain is preserved here as family tradition with full citations to the dispute, not as documented descent.

As family tradition, the claimed descent enters through the Westcott of Warwick line, specifically through the unproven claim that Stukely Westcott’s mother or grandmother was a Stukley of Devon, and runs upward through the Plantagenet kings of England, the Norman dukes, and the Capetian and Carolingian lines of France. Above the kings it fans into two branches: one through Empress Matilda to William the Conqueror ↗ and Rollo of Normandy, the other through Eleanor of Aquitaine to Hugh Capet and Charlemagne ↗. The documented gateway chain from the living generation down to Stukely Westcott (1592) carries each ancestor’s own confidence tier from the 2026 FamilySearch verification; only the pre-1592 English ancestry above him, the contested splice and everything beyond it, is tiered Traditional, Disputed.

The Summary Spine

The top-tier anchors of the chain, with FamilySearch PID, lifespan, attached source count, and generational depth from John, Perry, and Patrick Long. The full generation-by-generation descent follows below.

The Full Chain

The complete descent, every generation named, split into the documented gateway chain from the living generation down to the immigrant founder Stukely Westcott (1592), and the disputed pre-1592 English ancestry above him. No generation is collapsed or abstracted.

Documented Descent: Westport to Stukely Westcott (1592)

The verified gateway chain from the living generation to the immigrant founder. Each ancestor below carries its own confidence tier from the 2026 FamilySearch verification (audit/02-fs-verification.json); Carol Perry and the living generation are abstracted under the archive’s living-persons protocol.

Disputed Family Tradition: Pre-1592 English Ancestry

Stukely’s alleged Stukley/Plantagenet ancestors, running up through the Plantagenet kings and on to Charlemagne. Not documented in scholarly compilations; preserved here as Traditional, Disputed family tradition, with the named Devon and Carolingian links still marked Research-in-Progress where individual records were never captured.

Devon to the Plantagenet Court

Stukely’s mother carried the royal descent. The line runs through the Stukley, Arscote, and Monck families of Devon to Lady Frances Plantagenet, granddaughter of King Edward IV.

The Plantagenet Kings of England

Lady Frances Plantagenet’s father, Arthur, was the acknowledged biological son of King Edward IV, recorded on FamilySearch explicitly as the “Illegitimate son of King Edward IV of England.” Blood descent is unaffected by inheritance legitimacy: every ancestor of Edward IV is an ancestor of this family. The royal line runs back through the kings of the House of York and Plantagenet to Henry II, who founded the dynasty.

The Norman Dukes

Above Henry II the line forks. His father, Geoffrey V of Anjou, gave the dynasty its “Plantagenet” name and leads to the counts of Anjou. The descent to the Norman dukes, and to Rollo, runs instead through Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror.

The Capetians and Carolingians

The path to Charlemagne runs through King John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her ducal Aquitaine ancestry, into the Capetian kings of France and the Carolingian dynasty before them. The Aquitaine ducal generations between Eleanor and Hugh Capet are documented in the FamilySearch ancestry walk but are not individually enumerated here (see Acknowledgments); the named anchors below carry the chain to Charlemagne.

From a king crowned at Aachen in 800 to a banished dissenter’s farm at Warwick to a family at Westport Point, a traditional descent of some thirty-eight generations, disputed at the colonial splice and preserved here as family tradition.

The Cousin Web This Descent Creates

Because the descent passes through Edward IV, it makes John, Perry, and Patrick Long documented cousins of the Tudor and Stuart royal lines that descend from Edward IV’s legitimate children. The closest, by the FamilySearch walk, are King Henry VIII ↗ (1st cousin, 16 times removed) and Mary, Queen of Scots ↗ (3rd cousin, 14 times removed), along with Margaret Tudor (Queen of Scotland), King Edward VI, and Lord Darnley.

The same line continues to every subsequent British monarch through Margaret Tudor → James V → Mary, Queen of Scots → James VI/I and onward, making the brothers approximately 14th-to-16th cousins, one to three times removed, of Elizabeth II ↗, Charles III ↗, and Princes William and Harry. Those distances are beyond the depth of the direct FamilySearch walk and rest on Burke’s Peerage cross-reference; they are stated here as approximate.

The American cousins documented elsewhere in the archive descend by independent New England lines, not through this royal chain: Benjamin Franklin (1st cousin, 10 times removed, via Peter Folger), Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold V (4th cousin, 7 times removed, via Stukely Westcott’s daughter Damaris), and Lucretia Coffin Mott.

Each of these connections is indexed, with its relationship and a link to its proof, in the Notable Ancestors and Cousins directory.

Honest Acknowledgments

The peerage gold-standard. Cokayne’s Complete Peeragehas not been consulted. The splice between Westcott and Stukley is the load-bearing edge any future verification would need to address first. Ten independent sources spanning 1886 to 2026 have concluded the splice is not documented. The upper royal segments (Arthur Plantagenet and above) are themselves well documented in the FamilySearch Family Tree, a collaborative wiki tree, the Dictionary of National Biography, Alison Weir’s Elizabeth of York(2013), and Muriel St Clare Byrne’s The Lisle Letters (1981), but they connect to this family only through the disputed colonial splice.

Two intermediate segments not individually enumerated. Two stretches of the chain are documented in the FamilySearch ancestry walk but are not rendered generation-by-generation on this page, because per-generation PIDs were not captured in the Phase-7 research: (1) the Devon links Margaret Arscote and Mary Anne Monck, between Mary Stukley and Lady Frances Plantagenet; and (2) the Aquitaine ducal generations between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hugh Capet, and the Robertian- Carolingian junction between Count Robert II of Wormsgau and Charlemagne. These are named where known and marked Research-in-Progress; the flanking anchors on either side appear in the FamilySearch Family Tree, a collaborative wiki tree. No identifiers have been invented to fill the gaps.

Generational depth.The headline figures. Charlemagne at the 36th-great-grandfather remove, ~38 generations total, follow the Phase-7 walk count. Some intermediate depths are given as approximate (“~”) where the walk’s generation count carries minor ambiguity across the two royal branches. The named anchors, PIDs, and source counts are exact.

Sources

1. FamilySearch Family Tree, a collaborative wiki tree, per-ancestor records and source descriptions for every PID rendered above. Highest single counts: Charlemagne (LZ62-TSV, 116), William the Conqueror (9H17-VTZ, 65), Richard I of Normandy (9HTX-2CD, 60), Richard, Duke of York (973N-LD4, 48), Robert I of Normandy (LZL3-CTY, 45).
2. Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families (2nd ed., 2011), standard reference for the medieval royal and noble descents of colonial American immigrants.
3. Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Arthur Plantagenet, 1st Viscount Lisle. Edward IV’s acknowledged biological son, the Plantagenet entry point of the Westcott line.
4. The Peerage of the United Kingdom and Ireland, Volumes I-IV, the Lisle viscountcy and the Plantagenet-Monck-Arscote descent.
5. Alison Weir, Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (Ballantine, 2013). Edward IV’s family, including the natural son Arthur Plantagenet.
6. Muriel St Clare Byrne, The Lisle Letters (University of Chicago Press, 1981), over 3,000 letters of Arthur Plantagenet from his years as Lord Deputy of Calais.
7. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage (Lisle viscountcy entry, vol. 8), noted as the gold-standard external cross-reference; not consulted in full (see Acknowledgments).
8. Phase-7 research record, plantagenet-line-phase7-2026-05-24.md , the FamilySearch ancestry and descendancy walks (Edward IV up to Charlemagne and Rollo; Edward IV down to the Tudor monarchs) from which every PID, lifespan, source count, and generational depth on this page is drawn.

Disputed Family Tradition

The Coffin Norman Knight Claim

The archive long held that the Coffin family descends from Sir Richard Coffin, a companion of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings ↗ (1066), granted the Manor of Alwington (Portledge, Devon) at the Conquest: “a thousand years” and “fourteen generations at one estate.” The 2026 Coffin medieval audit (audit/05-coffin-medieval-audit.md) could not document the link between the Conquest-era knight and the family’s documented medieval Devon pedigree. The standard published source, Vivian’s Visitations of Devon, carries the Coffin of Porthledge line back only to a Richard Coffin in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), with no Hastings companion. The documented Devon line is kept on the outward pages and cited to Vivian; the 1066 origin is preserved here as labeled family tradition, not documented descent.

The traditional Norman framing around the name and the family’s French holdings is kept here as well, relocated from the Portledge line page in the 2026 cleanup. The surname is variously derived from the Norman French (with later spellings Coffyn, Colvin, Corvin, Cophen), and alternatively from a Welsh hilltop-boundary word, the Old French for basket, or “coffer”; the Coffin name appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 among inhabitants of England. Family tradition also places a Coffin estate in Normandy at Courtition, near Falaise, said to have remained in Coffin hands until 1796. None of this is established in Vivian’s documented Devon pedigree, which begins under Henry II; it is kept as labeled tradition.