Hello,
What a great website and community.
I am asking if any of the forum would care to suggest who the above might be. We have scoured the archives everywhere to try and identify this WWI soldier. We cannot find a link with a local Penallt / Trelleck / family and wonder if he was linked to a Forest of Dean family. We cannot find much in the way of Cope families in the FOD. Since many men in WWI worked at the Tinworks and thus life overlapped in Redbrook with Penallt we have wondered if there might be a link here/
There are a number of possibilities:
He could have been the fiancée of a girl in the village and his death meant they never married.
He could be the son of a woman who had remarried and thus was never known locally as a Cope.
He could be a relative of someone e.g brother, who once was Cope but had moved into the area and changed their name.

We have begun asking individuals locally to see if they might be able to help.
One small bit of information is that on the unveiling of the war memorial his name was listed by the Beacon as E.T. Cope, but that may have been a misprint!!

Censuses through 1891 to 1911 show no link.
Ancestry and Findmypast again have drawn blanks, exhaustive reading through the Beacon newspapers for the period has drawn a blank.
Everything suggests he was not a local but somehow connected to Penallt.
There was a Cope family in Whitebrook circa 1910, trout farmers, and they did have a nephew George Eric Cope but he was a Lieutenant not a private.
None of the Cope family in Monmouth could suggest anything and they were related to George Eric anyway.
Gwent Record Office again no links found there.
National Archives no links.

The Commonwealth War Graves site does not help as this man may have died after 1920 in which case he was not among the officially classified War Dead.
CWGC lists a number of Copes but none with a link to Penallt.
Neither does Soldiers Died in The Great War.
The basis of our research we gave to Mr Kimber for his book "Penallt Revisited", and despite the book being distributed across the parishes no one has come forward to suggest anything.
It is possible that they came in and out of the village between censuses but no trace can be found on the electoral roll for the area through 1912 to 1923.

Any help or ideas welcome here!!
Peter and Linda