M.C. Mercer : Short Biography

M.C. Mercer (1886-1944) was a niece of one of my ancestors (Benn Mercer b.1849).  She was born Catherine Mercer 4 Jan 1886 in Derryware Townland to Thomas Mercer, a farmer, and Margaret (Maggie) Clarke.  She may have been named for an older sister (also named Catherine) who died in 1885 at less than two years old.  M.C.’s birth registration shows that her name was changed on 14 Jun 1886 to Catherine Margaret Clarke Mercer, likely in memory of her mother, who had died in April 1886.

At age 15, she was listed in the 1901 Census of Ireland as “Meta C. Mercer” in Tirgoland Townland, in a family consisting of her uncle, John Clarke (likely her mother’s brother), and her cousin Henry K. Clarke.  Meta and Henry were both Scholars, while their uncle John was a farmer.

M.C. had a career as a nurse, and appears to have never married. Her obituary provides some information about her career, and was published in the Londonderry Sentinel on April 29, 1944 [viewed online at FindMyPast.com]: 

“There will be sincere regret in Dungiven and district at the news of the sudden death in Egypt of Nurse M.C. Mercer, daughter of the late Mr. Thomas Mercer, B.E., Derryware, who until five years before his death in 1916 was Petty Sessions Clerk for Dungiven.

The news of her death came by cable to her brother, Mr. John W. Mercer, Straw, Bovevagh.

Deceased began her nursing career in a private nursing home in Belfast, and later transferred to the Hardwicke Hospital in Dublin. Subsequently she was employed at the Peamount Sanatorium, Dublin, where she remained until 1913, when she took over a similar appointment in Leicestershire, in England.  In 1919 Miss Mercer went out to Egypt, and in a short time was appointed to an important position in the Coptic Hospital, Kasr-el-Aini, Cairo, where she was at the time of her death.”