Catherine Anne (or Kate) was born at Brightlingsea, Essex in 1839 and was baptised along with her sister Ellen:

All Saints Brightlingsea, born August 1839, baptised 11 May 1840, Catherine Ann dau of Lazarus and Mary ROBERTS, Brightlingsea, Lieutenant Royal Navy.

She married Robert William Stephens (born in Ireland in 1846) at Plymouth in the autumn of 1871. Robert was yet another naval man, promoted in July that year to the rank of navigating lieutenant. In 1881 the family was close to Kate’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Edward Smyth, at 30 Hill Park Crescent, Plymouth. Ten years on Robert William had retired to 6 Oakleigh Terrace, in suburban Compton Gifford, where he died in 1899.

Kate died in 1910.

Kate and Robert Stephens had four children, all born in Plymouth. They were the last of my great grandfather’s cousins. It would seem they had no descendants who lived beyond the 1950s.

Robert Savage Stephens

In January 1892 the eldest son, Robert Savage Stephens, born at Plymouth in 1872, matriculated from Cheveley Hall in the affluent Plymouth suburb of Mannamead. By the 1901 census he was a school master at St  John’s College, in Frome, Somerset. 

Robert Stephens was registered with the Teachers’ Registration Council in 1921 and that year was living in Harrogate, Yorkshire as an assistant master at Clifton House private school.

He died four years later at Harrogate, aged just fifty-two and unmarried.

Frances Isabel Stephens

Frances Isabel Stephens was born on 18 February 1876. In 1901 she was living at Swanage, Dorset, working as a governess for Frederick Burt, a stone merchant, and his three young daughters, Dorothy, Margaret and Kathleen. Ten years later she was back in Plymouth. When her aunt Ellen Roberts died in 1916, Frances, still unmarried, was her executrix. As Ellen was the primary beneficiary of Lazarus’s will back in 1873, Frances must have inherited what remained, if anything, forty-three years later.

Frances died a spinster on 1 May 1957, when, as reported in the London Gazette, her address was 1 Fernbank, West Alvington, Kingsbridge, Devon: this was possibly her brother Frederick McKenzie’s household: they were living together in Caerphilly in 1939. The personal representative (executor) was her cousin Maud’s husband, Guy Baker Hall (1902–76). Frances was one of the last of Lazarus’s grandchildren. Did she still own Lazarus’s bibles when she died? And if so did Guy Baker Hall inherit them? With her death so this line of the Roberts family (the Stephenses) came to an end.

Edward Arthur Stephens

Edward Arthur Stephens, born 1876, was a dockyard clerk in 1901. He married Ellen (Nellie) Laura Sarah Roissetter (1882–1974) in 1911. Edward Arthur died in 1932, at number 3 Fernbank, West Alvington, Kingsbridge, Devon: presumably next door to where his younger brother and sister would die in the 1950s. He seems to have been the only one of this family to have married and left his widow just £137. 

They had a son, William Edward Stephens, born in Plymouth in 1912, although he was killed in North Africa on 6 May 1943, the unmarried ‘son of Edward Arthur and Nellie Stephens, of West Alvington, Devon’. 

Frederick McKenzie Stephens

Frederick McKenzie (not Mackenzie) Stephens was born on 1 August 1879. In 1901 Frederick was a twenty-two-year-old chemist’s assistant in Plymouth (an occupation not unlike that of his uncle, William ‘W.P.’ Roberts), although by 1911 he had taken up the post of assistant to a chemist and druggist named John Prebble, of Chislehurst, Kent. 

The following year, Prebble went into partnership with Alfred Bone. ‘Mr. Prebble and Mr. Bone’s establishment was lofty and looked down at you, and their mysterious bottles with occult labels were stored in high, glass-doored cupboards’ (Alan Watts, In My Own Way).

I don’t know how long Frederick worked in Chislehurst, but by 1923 he was a chemist at Taff’s Well, Cardiff and in 1939 was engaged in the same occupation in Caerphilly, where he lived as a bachelor, at 6 Cardiff Road, with his sister Frances Isabel.

He died unmarried in 1954 at the same address in Kingsbridge as his brother Edward and sister Frances, leaving the healthy sum of £7193 13s 4d.