Tim Sunter's family history

A web log of my family history research

Charles Sunter: Mystery solved?

For ninety one years the mystery of the disappearance of Charles Sunter, Lofty’s father, has puzzled the family. Where could he have gone to? How could someone abandon a wife and four small children? Who could ever allow their relatives to ensure the shame, humiliation and stigma of having to throw themselves on the mercy of the Stockton Poor Union? Now it turns out that the mystery may have been the result of missing naval document, the common inability of people to get the “Sunter” name right and the sad death of a sailor in Scotland. 

Over the last two weeks I have searched right through the Sunter and Snowball pages of the Deaths Index and Ancestry.co.uk. These contain all the deaths listed for England and Wales. A have also searched the records of the Royal Navy but can find no trace of Charles Sunter, Charles Snowball, Charles Hall etc.

There has been a growing suspicion that maybe Charles was never even in the navy. Perhaps he had spun a tale to his family.

Yet still, on Lofty’s birth certificate it states that his father was a stoker in the Royal Navy based on HMS Mars.

An internet search on HMS Mars shows that in 1917 this was stationed in Invergordon, Scotland. So a search of the Scottish Death records (a different system to England Wales) might deliver a result.

The Scottish People website allows a “Soundex” search – i.e. a search for names that sound like Sunter as well as the Sunter name itself.

This is what the search came up with:


After a false start it seemed the only Charles in the right age range was person no 5. His record was really revealing. To read the document click the link below.

Charles Sunter death Scotland

Charles Saunders, A.B British Navy, Unknown whether married, Died 26th July 1918 at 9.06pm. Parents not known – place of death the navel base hospital.

A Google Earth Search showed the proximity of Invergordon (the last known location of Charles, derived from Lofty’s birth certificate) and Fodderty:


This would be the hospital for the naval base where Charles was posted.

The question is could there be another Charles Saunders in the navy. I have done a further search of the navy database and can only find a few people who it might have been BUT their navy records show that it could not have been the casualty at Fodderty.

My hypothesis – and I think it is a strong one is this:

  • Charles Saunders is actually Charles Sunter. Whoever registered him at the hospital wrote down the name they thought it was.
  • That the hospital couldn’t find the record for Charles. This was either because they were looking for Charles Saunders (who didn’t exist) or the record had been lost, misfiled, incorrectly filled in.
  • If they had have found the record then it would clearly have stated next of kin (all military records ask this up front for obvious reasons).
  • Because they had no next of kin then Emma could not be notified of his death.
  • Even if Emma searched the navy would have not been able to locate a record for Charles Sunter or they would not have known that he had died.
  • So from Emma’s perspective the family story is true. Lofty’s father went away to sea and simply disappeared.

The repercussions for the family must have been appalling. It would have lost its main bread winner and, with no welfare state as we know it, the home would have been put at risk.

There would have been no explanation as to what had happened to Charles and no doubt tongues would have wagged. Even contact with the navy would have produced no information on his whereabouts at the best. At worst it could have been suggested that there was no record of Charles ever having been in the navy.

We know that Emma ended up in a workhouse – in a system still designed to punish poverty and act as a deterrent – and was institutionalised for the rest of her life. We know that her children were put in children’s homes, and certainly Lofty had a very hard time of it.

If this hypothesis is correct it has taken 91 years to reveal what became of Charles. A man who started life uncertain of who his father was, who lived for at least nine years using “Snowball” as his surname and whose children never knew what became of him.

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