Charles Arthur Samuel Cooper

[Anstey Nomad]

It was not until 2020 (34 years after I started researching and 27 years after my father's death) that I discovered he and my uncle had had, technically at least, a step brother. Whether they knew this or not, I have no way of knowing, but certainly I was always told that his step mother had no children of her own.

Mary Ann Hayward and Samuel Martin Cooper were married in Leicester in the June Quarter of 1902 and Charles Alfred Samuel Cooper was born, also in Leicester, in the December Quarter of that year.

I found out about him because he was his mother's residual legatee and in her Will made at the end of the 1940s, not long before her death in December 1949, his address is given as 38 Exeter Street, Lyttleton, New Zealand.

I now have:

(1) The 1911 Census, where he is with his mother in his grandparents' house at Birstall, Leicestershire.

(2) a medal card for him from WW1, which is going some considering he was only just 16 when it finished. It would appear he was a merchant seaman, but I can't find anything else.

(3) His marriage in 1924, somewhere in New Zealand, to Elizabeth Muir McNaughtan, who was born in the Gorbals in September 1903 and emigrated to New Zealand between 1911 and 1915.

(4) The 1928 electoral roll which has him at 500 Madras Street, Christchurch North. He is described as 'seaman'.

(4) 1942 ballot list, which has him at 38a Winchester Street, Lyttleton and again described as seaman.

(5) A grave in Canterbury Memorial Gardens, which says he died on 11 April 1993.

Trawling through trees on Ancestry it looks as though he and Bessie had two sons. Charles William Cooper was born in 1925 and sadly died in 1927, but his brother Victor Martin Cooper, born in 1926, lived on until 2003.

Trees on Ancestry are sketchy, but it looks as though Victor and his late wife Denise, who married in 1953, may well have children and grandchildren, but it looks as though information online about BMDs is pretty much limited to the deceased, so I seem to have reached a dead end.

Unless of course, you have a better idea.