Hi All,
Many thanks for your interest, and all the helpful suggestions.
The Luxton name and variations seem to have originated in the Devon area, as this is where the majority are found.
The 1992 IGI for Surrey shows Luxons/Luxtons in Surrey from 1546, but only three from our branch - two births and a marriage of John Luxton's children in Kingston from 1840 onwards.
For Devon, the list of Luxton's extends from page 25,443 to 25,468 - with an average of 60 names per page and, of course, it's notoriously incomplete. The Devon pages also have at least 120 John Coles, with 27 or so born between 1800 and 1806. I did buy printouts of all these from Bromley library in the early 1990's, but have been able to confirm only the three Kingston entries. The Cornwall pages have so many Coles entries that I didn't know where to start.
Brian Luxton, the secretary of the Luxton FHS, has compiled numerous trees but has not been able to find any earlier connections to John Luxton/Ursula James. In the 1800's there were several families in Kingston and further into London; these have forenames not usually found in those we are researching.
On the Devon page of GENUKI is a very good article on how the Poor Law worked,
http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/DEV/DevonMisc/Settlement.htmlgiving some very good reasons why John and Ursula may have had to leave Devon or Cornwall and change their surname, so Jane's suggestion of where to check next seems promising - where could we find these records?
Michael J.
