"Death of Levi H. Cooper" — Stafford County Republican (Stafford, Kansas), Thu 23 Dec 1909, p. 8. Death notice giving his birth as Warren County, N.J., 11 January 1831, his burial in Stafford cemetery, and three relatives.

Transcription and notes

Data from the document [verbatim]

Death of Levi H. Cooper.

Levi H. Cooper, father of Mrs. John Field, died at her home Southeast of Stafford, last Monday about 5:30 p. m., following a third attack of paralysis. The funeral occured [sic] Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 and burial took place in the Stafford cemetery. Rev. A. J. Bond, minister of the local Friends church, preached the funeral sermon.

Mr. Cooper was born in Warren county, N. J., January 11th, 1831, and was nearly 79 years old at the time of his death. He came here from Brown county but a little over a year ago and has been making his home with his daughter since that time. He has always been an invalid since coming here and for that reason was only known to friends of the family. Ed Cooper, who died recently in this city, was a nephew and Mrs. J. K. Oliver was a neice [sic] of his.

This is what the westward trace was missing

[D.587] followed a Levi H. Cooper born in New Jersey from Warren Co. NJ → Stark Co. Illinois (1870) → Mitchell Co. Kansas (1880) → Cloud Co. Kansas (1900), and could get no further than probable, because no record named his father or his home county — every census said only "New Jersey".

This notice says WARREN COUNTY. That is [p.113] John Cooper of Independence Twp's county, and it converts a circumstantial migration argument into a placed one. With it:

• born Warren Co., N.J. — the family's county
• died December 1909 — [L.132] gives our Levi's death as 1909, from a tree, with no source
• "Levi H." — the exact form [L.132] uses
• in Kansas — matching the 1880 and 1900 censuses

It also resolves an anomaly [D.587] flagged. A "Levi H. Cooper, b. 1831, d. 1909" surfaces in a FamilySearch search at "Stafford Cemetery, Camden, Georgia" — which looked like a different man on geography. This notice puts the burial in the Stafford cemetery, Stafford, Kansas, and the birth year at 1831; the memorial is his, and his stone reads "LEVI H. COOPER / 1831 —— 1909" ([G.528], memorial 89793085, Block C Lot 45).

CORRECTED 2026-09-05 → [G.528]: the defect is FamilySearch's place STANDARDISATION, not the Find A Grave index. Find A Grave itself reads "Stafford Cemetery, Stafford, Stafford County, Kansas", and so does FamilySearch's own Event Place (Original) field; only the standardised Event Place it displays says Camden, Georgia. On any FamilySearch Find A Grave Index hit, read Event Place (Original).

The discrepancy that survives, and it is not small

The New Jersey records cluster at ~1836–37; the Kansas records cluster at ~1830–31. Five or six years apart, and this notice sits with the Kansas cluster.

Two things keep that from sinking the identification. First, the age drift runs one way — the man gets older faster than the calendar — which is the ordinary direction of census error. Second, this household's ages are already known to be bad: [D.470]'s own transcription flags that Roderick appears as 8 in Aug 1850 and 21 in Jun 1860, a thirteen-year jump in ten years. A family whose census ages are demonstrably that unreliable cannot then be used to refute a birth year on a five-year margin.

⇒ Recorded as probable, not certain. No document yet names Levi's father.

"Ed Cooper … was a nephew" — a lead into the OTHER untraced brothers

A nephew is a son of one of Levi's brothers. His brothers were James S. [p.1944] (b. 1827, untraced), Samuel [p.1609] (~1832–1888, untraced) and Roderick [p.621]. Roderick's sons are documented — Warren Edgar, Alfred, Albert Alvin — and none is an Ed.

⇒ ~~Ed Cooper … is a candidate son of James S. or Samuel~~ — superseded 2026-09-05. That reasoning assumed the three brothers this catalog happened to record were all of them. [D.589] supplies a fourth, [p.1946] Joseph Cooper, b. New Jersey ~1811, in whose Iowa household both the nephew and the niece are living in 1870.

Next

1. ~~Ed Cooper's death notice~~ — searched 2026-09-05 across Newspapers.com (three query shapes) and GenealogyBank and NOT FOUND; see [D.588]. But his father was found anyway, by another route: [D.589], the 1870 census of Doyle Twp, Clarke Co., Iowa, puts Ed and Athalia in the household of a Joseph Cooper, 59, born New Jersey — now [p.1946], and on this notice's own "nephew" a fourth son of [p.113] John Cooper of Independence. Graded possible; argued at [p.1946].
2. Mrs. John Field — his daughter; her own record would name her mother, which would identify which of his three wives she belongs to.
3. Find A Grave, Stafford cemetery — the memorial exists (mis-stated as Georgia in the index).
4. Brown Co., Kansas, c. 1900–1908 — where he lived between the 1900 Cloud Co. census and his move to Stafford; his sons may still be there.