Codemasters may have found the man they were looking for. . .

Turning Point : Fall of Liberty publisher, Codemasters, earlier this month that it had started a hunt for descendants of the man who inspired the events depicted in the alternate World War II action game.

Turning Point : Fall of Liberty is based around the idea that the incident in which a car struck Winston Churchill in New York on December 13th 1931 actually proved fatal – and that without his inspirational speeches to galvanise the Allies, the course of the Second World War took a very different route, with the Axis Powers even invading America.

Mario Contasino was a young unemployed mechanic who, on December 1931, hit the then-statesman with his car. Even though the accident was not Mr Constasino’s fault, the mechanic contacted Churchill daily during the course of his recovery from the accident and this resulted in a fast friendship between the two.

Codemasters wanted to honour Mario Contasino’s descendents, for providing the inspirational “Turning Point” for the forthcoming videogame but there was one small problem ; they couldn’t find hide nor hair of anyone who might be a relation to Mario.

The firm recruited the help of Oxford historian, David McCarthy, who set out to track down descendants of Mario Contasino.

It seemed like McCarthy wasn’t having much luck and the website documenting his progress included a plea for any information which might be useful in his search.

There really is nothing like a wee challenge to get the bloggers of the internet going. Researchers from The Genealogue website blog took it upon themselves to track Contasino down and accessed records held in New York’s Westchester Library.

Using Mario Contasino’s residential address as reported during the time of the accident, the librarians dug out a listing for an Edward F. Castasano. Using that address, the genealogists were then able to find an entry in a 1910 census for an Edward M. Contasano (which we’re told is a more common usage of the name Castasano) who, like the ‘Mario Contasino’ that Codemasters is looking for, had two sisters and was born to an Italian immigrant father.

Unfortunately, Contasano passed away in 1989 but it could turn out that the man who almost killed Winston Churchill wasn’t lost in the folds of time after all. Watch this space, we’ll keep you posted.