Who were Daniel Cooper Sr's parents? The search for the origin of the Long Hill Coopers

Daniel Cooper Sr founded the family at Long Hill, Morris County, and lived to be a hundred: his stone at Basking Ridge says he "died May 2.d 1795 aged 100 years & 2 days" [G.27]. He had a sister, Anne, who married Elias Van Court. Nobody has yet documented who their parents were.

There is also a twist. When one of Daniel's male-line descendants took a Y-chromosome test, which follows the line from father to son, he matched no other Coopers. He matched the Coryell family of New Jersey, who descend from the Curiels, a Sephardic family of Amsterdam and Hamburg [J.154] [I.155]. So two of the theories below propose a Coriell father, not a Cooper one. The section on the DNA explains why the result is not yet conclusive.

What the family remembered

The oldest account is a notebook kept by his great-grandson, Dr. John Cooper Sr. It says Daniel's father was "born in England … went to Holland and married a Low-Dutch woman", moved "about 1700 to … New York or near it on the North river and died there", and had a brother "Immanuel" who settled in West Jersey [I.24]. It never gives the father's name.

Later family histories filled the gap. The House of Cooper (1946) calls him "John Cooper, born Holland", who came to New York about 1700, died there, and left the family "quite poor" when the house burned [I.36]. The same author elsewhere writes that the family came "from England by way of Holland about the year 1660" and that Daniel was born on Manhattan on 1 May 1695 [I.163]. Littell's genealogy of 1851 has him "born at sea" [I.4], and later books repeat it [I.164]; one adds that "his father died on the voyage" [I.130]. A history of 1879 says the great-grandfather "came to America about 1690, and settled on the Hudson River" [I.181].

These are not independent witnesses. Most descend from Littell or from the same family papers, and the name "John" appears only in the later tables. They agree on one thing, a passage by way of Holland, and disagree on the rest: born at sea, in Holland, or on Manhattan; a father who died in New York, or on the voyage.

Where we have looked

Church registers. Daniel is not in the Dutch Reformed registers of Bergen [M.1], Hackensack [M.2], Tappan [F.70] or New York City [F.72], nor on Staten Island [F.183], nor in New York's French church [M.25]. New York City's only Anglican parish, Trinity Church, lost its registers to fires in 1750 and 1776. His first children were baptized in the Dutch Reformed church because his wife was a member: Grace joined at Harlingen in 1728 as "Lucresia Runyon, wife of Daniel Cooper" [M.15]. His own church was the Presbyterian church at Basking Ridge, where he held a pew as "Daniel Cooper, Esq." [F.34], so those baptisms say nothing about where he came from.

Wills and estates. The New York County wills index holds no John Cooper of the right period [A.20], and the earliest will libers hold no Cooper at all [A.21]. The published abstracts of New York wills were searched as well [A.72]. Arrivals and citizenship. He is not on New York's naturalization list of 1715 [M.22], and the Bergen County land records contain no Daniel Cooper [K.28].

The candidates

Ruled out

• Colonel John Cooper of Newark. His will of 16 November 1732 names a brother, four stepsons and his sisters' children, and no son at all [A.24].
• The Coopers of Southampton, Long Island. The published family genealogy lists no Daniel in any branch [I.148].
• The Dutch Kuyper families of Bergen and Rockland. Their baptisms and land records, searched across five registers, contain no Daniel [M.1] [M.2] [F.70] [F.72] [K.28].
• The Quaker Coopers of Camden. One tree made Daniel a son of Daniel and Sarah (Spicer) Cooper, but the 1768 will of that family's Daniel names sons William, James and Joshua [A.58].
• An elder Daniel Cooper of the New Brunswick ferry. Nineteenth-century histories name a Daniel Cooper as a first settler at the ferry. On examination he is Daniel Sr himself, told twice [K.45] [I.153].

Unproven

• The family tradition of a "John Cooper of Holland". As above: the passage by way of Holland is old, but the name is a later addition, and no record of such a man has been found [I.36] [A.20].
• Samuel Cooper of Newark, who died without a will in 1737. His estate file holds the grant of administration, a bond and an inventory, but no distribution and no children named, so it cannot decide the question either way [A.84].
• Caleb Cooper of New York, who died in 1704 or 1705 leaving a widow, Helena. No children are named, and Daniel would have been about ten when Caleb died, old enough to remember his father's name. Baptism searches for the household were null [A.72].
• The Cuijper and Couper families of Amsterdam. A professional search of the Amsterdam city archives found a Daniel, son of Hendrick Jansen Cuijper, baptized in 1684 [F.411], and a seaman, Daniel Couper "van belfast", who married there in 1683 [F.412]. Nothing in either record points to New Jersey.
• John Moses Cooper of Codicote, England, given as Daniel's father on FamilySearch's shared tree. The profile rests on a single 1694 baptism at Codicote of "Anne, daughter of John ------- Cooper" [F.373], and every other fact on it is unsourced.

Possible

• John Cooper of Middletown, Monmouth County, who died without a will in 1733. His administration went to Roelof Schenck, a brewer, and his small inventory mentions a "Tavern Book" [A.25]. He fits in time and place, but the tradition has Daniel's father die in New York, and nothing yet found names his heirs.
• A Coriell father. See the next section.

What the DNA says

In 2026 a male-line descendant of Daniel Sr, through his son Daniel Jr, took a full Y-chromosome test. The result, E-BY145801, falls on the same branch as the Coryell family of New Jersey [J.154], descended from Jacob Curiel of Hamburg, a Sephardic Jew born at Coimbra in 1587 [I.155].

The two families were close. They lived side by side: Elias Coriell farmed on the same Berkeley Tract at Long Hill as Daniel, and married Sarah Runyon, a granddaughter of Daniel's sister Anne [I.44]; a newspaper of 1793 places a Long Hill farm "next plantation to Elias Coryell" [J.104]. They did business together, not always smoothly: in 1753 Sarah and John Corriel sued Daniel in two actions, for £100 and £40 [K.48]. And for half a century they trusted each other with their families. Anne stood sponsor at the baptism of Abraham Coryell's son in 1743 [F.67]. Daniel was an overseer of Emanuel Coryell's will in 1745 [A.18]. Anne's son Elias Van Court was an executor of Samuel Coryell's will in 1760, which calls him "cousin" [A.19]. And Elias Coriell was one of the executors of Daniel's own will [A.8].

That suggested a reconstruction: Daniel and Anne were the children of a Coriell man who died about 1700, and their widowed mother married a Cooper, whose name they took. It might also explain why the family remembered "Holland": the Curiels had found refuge in Amsterdam. But no Coriell record names Daniel or Anne, and no document of the period calls them kin.

Then a second result complicated it. A male-line descendant of Aaron Cooper Sr, a man thought to descend from Daniel Sr through his son Benjamin, reported a different Y-chromosome altogether, R1b, which is not Coryell [J.230]. The report is second-hand, and Aaron's descent from Benjamin is itself unproven. But if both lines really do descend from Daniel Sr, one of them has a break in paternity somewhere, and the Coryell result may belong to a later generation of one branch rather than to Daniel Sr himself.