Eliza Tayler was born 12 April 1823, the third daughter of John and Sarah Tayler. In 1851 she was living in Grinstead Road, Colchester, with her sister Emma. They are listed as the ‘daughters of Mrs Tayler, absent’ (their mother was visiting at Elmstead the night of the census).

Eliza married a widower, William Cater (born 1818), on Boxing Day 1859, at the Clerkenwell parish church of St James’s (a church that would see several weddings in the Simson and Tayler familes). A witness at the wedding was Eliza’s eldest brother, Rowland Tayler. They married at Clerkenwell as Eliza was lodging with her sister, Emma Stokes, of 40 Exmouth Street.

William was a master butcher in Colchester, like his father, in 1871 employing four men and one boy at his Magdalen Street shop. ‘Uncle Cater’ is referred to fondly in letters home from Emma Isabella Simson, their niece, who lived in Clerkenwell and Marylebone in 1870, perhaps after a London visit by her uncle.

Eliza Cater died in 1889, at Colchester, and William was a widower once more.

Their children were George William (born at Colchester in 1853 and thus from William’s first marriage, who appears to have carried on the butchery business at Magdalen Street well into the twentieth century), William junior (born 1854) and Eliza Mason (Lizzie, born 1862).

In 1891 their daughter Lizzie married her second cousin, Edward Wilson Simson, who was Sarah Simson’s grandson.