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he did.
    Morton spotted a tourist pointing at his
front doors.  It was a daily occurrence, particularly at the height of summer,
when flocks of visitors would descend on Rye to spot Mermaid Street’s quirky
house names.  He pushed open the latticed window and breathed in air laden
with the outpourings of various nearby tearooms, and re-focussed his mind back
on the Mercer Case.   If Mary had indeed run away to her sister’s
house in Bristol, there would be few records to corroborate this; the 1911
census was the most recent to be made publicly available and electoral registers
did not extend to include women until 1918, and even then only if they were
aged over thirty and owned property.  Mary would be much more likely to
appear among unofficial sources, family folklore and faded photo albums than in
official records: Morton needed to find out if Caroline and William had any
living descendants through their daughter, Rebecca.
    Returning to his laptop, he opened up a
search page on Ancestry for the birth of Rebecca Ransom with the mother’s
maiden name, Mercer.  One result.
    ‘December quarter of 1911.  Rebecca
Victoria Ransom, mother’s maiden name, Mercer.  District of Bristol. 
Volume 6a.  Page 103.’
    Morton smiled.  His next step was to
ensure that Rebecca actually made it into adulthood, although from what Ray
Mercer had said about this side of the family’s not being very helpful, he
guessed that she had lived a full life.  On previous cases, Morton’s
exhilaration at this same point had been dashed when he had discovered that the
child had died soon after birth.  He typed Rebecca’s name into the
1916-2007 marriage index and found that she had married a Victor Reginald Catt
in 1935.  Putting her name into the death search index 1916 to 2007 gave
one result.
     
    Name:   Rebecca Victoria Catt
    Birth
date: 1 st November 1911
    Date
of Registration: June
1993
    Age
at death: 81
    Registration
District: Bristol
    Inferred
County: Gloucestershire
    Register
Number: 13c
    District
and Subdistrict: 3011I
    Entry
number: 124
     
    Morton
was pleased to see that Rebecca had married and lived a full life.  Now he
needed Rebecca to have left the standard paper trail of children and
grandchildren.  Switching back to the birth index, Morton found that
Victor and Rebecca had produced three children together: two boys and a girl,
all born in the Bristol area.  To save time, Morton prioritised his
searches with the two boys, Reginald and Douglas.
    In the time that it took for Morton to
finish the final splashes of his coffee, he had undertaken searches into the
genealogical backgrounds of Reginald and Douglas Catt.  He had confirmed
that both men were still alive, both had their own wives and children and,
using an electoral roll website, he had an address and phone number for each
man.  He considered cold-calling them but only liked to do this in the
most urgent circumstances.  Before typing out a letter to each man, he
carried out a quick Google search of their names.
    ‘Bingo,’ Morton said, as he clicked his
cursor onto the website of ‘V. R. Catt and Sons, Ironmongers.’  According
to their website, Victor Reginald Catt had set up an ironmonger’s store in
Bristol in 1948, his two sons gradually taking over the business in the
1980s.  Morton saved a black and white photograph of Victor outside his
shop in 1950 and a colour image of him and his sons outside the shop celebrating
their fortieth anniversary in 1988.
    Navigating back to their home page, Morton
clicked on the ‘Contact us’ tab and then set about typing a message into the
contact form.  ‘ Dear Douglas and Reginald, I hope you don’t mind my
emailing you out of the blue like this; I am a forensic genealogist who is
researching the Mercer family tree, to which I believe you belong.  In
particular, I am concentrating on trying to discover what became of Mary
Mercer, the sister of your grandmother, Caroline Ransom (née Mercer),