An extraordinary coincidence?

Somewhere in the house, I have an odd coin/medal. The obverse side features a bust of Samuel Plimsoll (he of the Plimsoll Line) and the inscription 'House of Commons 22 July 1875 London S Plimsoll' whilst the reverse shows a ship in distress with the legend "Coffin Ship". The coin/medal apparently commemorates the passing of the Merchant Shipping Act in 1875 following Plimsoll's campaign to draw attention to the number of seafarers losing their lives on overloaded and unsafe ships ('coffin ships'). I found the coin/medal in the gutter many years ago and it has lived in a box ever since.

For some reason, the memory of this coin popped into my head tonight and I decided to look if anyone was selling a similar coin on eBay. I found one (vastly inferior in terms of condition) that had recently been sold for £3.99 (hold the retirement party - that's not the fortune I was hoping for). However, that prompted a further thought: the Dead Man's Penny.

The Dead Man's Penny (DMP for the sake of my typing fingers - both of them) was a circular brass plaque, around 12cm in diameter that was issued presented to the family of a soldier who fell in the Great War (1914 - 18). The front depicts a lion and Britannia holding a laurel wreath. A simple oblong space contains the name of the deceased and no rank is indicated in order to demonstrate the equality of the sacrifice made.

My mother has two of these at home that came from the house of my late aunt and uncle. I can still remember the two DMPs standing propped up on the sill of the landing window in their house. As a child I was fascinated by them and the link to relatives long dead in a conflict concluded 40 years before I was born.

Again, I idly looked to see if anyone was selling a DMP on eBay and again, there was one example for sale: four bids and currently just over £46. The name on the plaque was 'Frederick Copeland' and in the description, the seller admitted he knew nothing about the soldier the plaque commemorated. On a whim I typed "Frederick Copeland+fell in WW1" into Google and the top result returned was a page from a site listing all war memorials that include the names of fallen members of the Yorkshire Regiment. Apparently, on the War Memorial at Billingham, a Private Frederick Copeland is listed, a member of the 7th Batallion, the Yorkshire Regiment, who died at Ypres in 1915. The date on which he died was 19th September - my birthday!

Now I realise that, statistically, in any list of dates, there will always be one that has particular significance for the reader. There's a perfectly good explanation involving a mathematical proof etc etc. But from a random chain of enquiries to arrive at the name of a soldier who died on 19th September? That feels spooky....