What Wilcoxon does not tell you is that she has been incredibly helpful and has found out a great deal of information about our family -including a descendant of Benjamin's brother William. Some of the family still live in Wrexham.
Thank you very much.
In Birmingham St Phillip’s 1790 -Nancy Walton married William Cooper (It is possible that he was the son of Joseph and Anne Cooper , baptised in St Martin’s on 9th February 1754, but there are other baptisms in the 1760s that may be him).
The couple baptised four children - -Nancy 1791, Mary Ann 1792, Mary 1793, William 1794 and finally Benjamin Walton in 1797. (Family search mistranscribes the name as Worton.)
Benjamin married Elizabeth Willis again at St Martin's in 1818.
Her birth record gives her surname as Wills, the daughter of William and Eleanor Wills, she was born in 1797, but, unusually not baptised until 1804, again at St Martin’s, Birmingham.
(All the above from Familysearch)
The couple had a son; William Cooper who was born in Birmingham.
They then moved to York Street, Wrexham where Benjamin started a wine and sprits business, becoming bankrupt by 1825.
They had one other son -Benjamin born 1824.
There is a record of the death of Elizabeth Cooper in 1829, aged 33, resident in the Beast Market. I t seems highly likely, given the age, that she was the mother of William and Benjamin.
By 1841 Benjamin junior was recorded as being aged 15 living in the Beast market with the Bevan family and working as a hawker, while William was a plasterer aged 20 and lodging in Lambpit Street, in the town.
By this time Benjamin senior was no longer living in the town, since he does not appear on the census record. Nor do we have a death record for him -He may have remarried and moved elsewhere after his wife died, he may have died outside the town's boundary, he may even have gone back to Birmingham.
It seems conclusive that the Benjamin I am looking for is the Benjamin born in York St in 1824 -since both William and, more significantly, Walton are used as family names for his sons and grandsons.
Possibly he was uncertain of his birth year since his mother had died. His birth month -August , fits with his records.
There are still unanswered questions, of course. -
Why did the family move to Wrexham?
What happened to Benjamin Walton Cooper?
Why weren't the brothers living together in 1841?
Why did one brother learn a trade while his younger brother became a hawker?
But it wouldn't be family history if answers didn't throw up more questions!
It would be interesting to know what other rootschatters think.
Have we solved the problem of the missing birth record of Benjamin Cooper born Wrexham, or not?
And does anyone have any suggestions about why the family moved to Wrexham and what became of Benjamin Walton?
