I cannot believe the response to my initial enquiry has brought so much unexpected, but very much appreciated information. At last the ball is rolling after 5 futile years of searching-all thanks to Rootschat!!
I do not think the Margaret Hopwood you refer to is my father's 3rd wife as I have a copy of the marriage certificate which gives her age as 32 on the 5th March 1954. This would give her DoB as about 1921/22. It is possible that she is still alive so I placed an appeal for information about her in a Preston newspaper BUT as usual I have not had a response. It could be, as suggested, that she left the UK with my father and she is still alive and about 88/89 years of age now.
I tried to find a form to request a copy of the death certificate of Ivor Hopwood but so far I haven't accessed one. I'll persevere and eventually get round how these sites work! I believe the New Zealand death certificates contain quite a lot of information - much more than the ones issued in the UK so that if it is my father who is buried in Waitakere cemetery I should be able to find out the date of when he arrived in NZ etc. and start getting a 'picture' of him - which is how my initial search started out _ I have not got a photo of my father as an adult though I have obtained a school photo of the twins but don't know which one is my father. I have had a look at Waitakere cemetery on Google street map- it is huge and looks quite bleek. We were actually a few miles from the cemetery in2001 when we visited NZ-if only I'd known then-IF!
We are visiting Australia for 6 weeks from 26th October and had planned to seek out information on my father then. We can now concentrate on having a good sight seeing holiday instead if the info. about his death in NZ is correct. My husband is suggesting that if it is my father's grave in NZ that we only spend 4 weeks in Australia and fly over to NZ for 2 weeks to look up the grave and posssibly find out where he lived over there etc.
Going back to his twin Eric - I have not had any progress in tracing information about him via the internet. It was Carole's father who told me first of all that Eric lived in Guernsey, in 1973(the year my brother, also called Ivor, was killed in a motor accident) - I believe he said that Eric and his wife had a nursing home over there, and again in 2004 when I started the search for my father. My mother died that year and the subject of my father was taboo whilst she was alive ( she suffered from chronic depression for the rest of her life and I have attributed it to the nature of her relationship to my father)- he had been abusive to her and she got her divorce from him on the grounds of 'cruelty'-as the term was in the 1940's. I traced my father's only living sibling 5 years ago but she and another cousin refused to have anything to do with me(I can only think they thought I was after money to have such a nasty response) but I did extract from her step-daughter in law that Eric had died in Guernsey and that Eileen, my father's sister had flown out there reluctantly, to arrange the funeral. It will be interesting to see what turns up about him. I do believe there is a 'criminal' record involved with him relating to his time in De Havillands Aircraft Factory and it involved spare parts supplied to Jersey Airline in the 1940's!! Though having said that about Eric someone suggested it was Ivor who had 'fiddled' the books' at De Havillands - but if it was Ivor who had committed the offence would he been allowed to emigrate to either Australia or New Zealand. There remains that search to complete. I made a visit to the National Archives in London 2 weeks ago but they couldn't help me without having the name of the actual court the offence was tried at. De Havilland's is now British Aerospace and I live 5 miles from the factory but they have failed to find out any information about the actual offence BUT I do know that the records exist -it only needs someone willing to find them for me in the factory archives. I shall persist.
This is turning out to make good reading for a book don't you think?
