Nearly a week had passed before Alys found time to meet up again with Julie. Once the road to Nortonstall had been cleared, and Moira had made it back to Northwaite, Alys had been able to head back over to the café, where the demands of the new business and trying to sort out her flat kept her fully occupied. But one evening in the first week of November, she and Julie settled down with a laptop, Alys feeling a mix of apprehension and excitement.
‘So, where do we start?’ asked Alys.
‘Here,’ said Julie, typing in an Internet address. ‘It’s a free site, and quick and easy to do some basic research.’ She showed Alys where to type in the information she had – Elisabeth’s name and surname, her mother’s maiden name and the area where her birth would have been registered.
As Alys pressed ‘Find’, she could hardly believe how excited she felt. She watched the wheel spin briefly as the search progressed, then the screen changed. Her heart leapt and she scanned the on-screen page. There was an Alice – but not an Elisabeth – Bancroft, born in the West Riding of Yorkshire. But the date was 1911 and the town was wrong.
‘Oh,’ Alys exhaled in disappointment. ‘It’s not her.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Julie, already busily typing. ‘I thought we’d try that site first because it’s free. But not all the records have been transcribed and uploaded yet. We’ll try another site – there’ll be a small charge, but you’ll be able to look at other details, censuses and the like.’
Half an hour later, even Julie’s optimism had faded and Alys was beginning to wonder whether her ancestors did, in fact, belong in some dream world and not in reality. They hadn’t been able to find any evidence of Elisabeth’s birth, or of Sarah’s family, in the census records of 1891, or of Sarah, Elisabeth and the children in the records of 1901.
Alys frowned. ‘There’s something odd here. It’s almost as though they didn’t want to be found.’
‘Maybe Alice never got around to registering Elisabeth’s birth?’ suggested Julie. ‘She died when Elisabeth was still very young? And although not wanting to be found wouldn’t have been so odd under the circumstances, remember we do have evidence of Sarah on the cottage’s title deeds, don’t we?’
She saw the disappointment on Alys’s face. She’d thought she was about to come one step closer to solving a family mystery but frustratingly it felt as though they had taken a couple of steps back instead.
‘Look, I met someone who is an experienced genealogy researcher when I was working on our family tree and she helped me out a few times when I was stuck. She’s always very busy but she’s also very curious, which is why she’s such a great researcher. She loves a challenge, so if we send her as many details as we can, I’m sure she’ll have a go at sorting it out. You’ll have to be patient, though.’
And so it proved. After a couple of weeks, Julie’s friend Tina asked for a few more details, including the names of any men who could possibly be Elisabeth’s father, but warned that, in cases where the man didn’t want to be named, this section could very easily be left blank on the birth certificate. Alys sent off all the details she had for Richard, which were very few. As an afterthought, she also included Albert. He was an unlikely candidate, but his wish to care for Elisabeth, Sarah and the family kept him in the picture.