John Thomas

John Thomas stands at the top of the Thomas line, and he is a Cornishman: baptised on the 17th of March 1754 at Illogan, on the mining coast above Redruth, the son of John Thomas and Margaret Vivian. Mum connected the family to Mevagissey, the fishing port on the other coast of Cornwall — and the Vivian name his mother carried would return to the family three generations later, when his great-grandson's widowed mother married a Brixham Vivian.

How he came east the record doesn't say, but the Brixham register of 1781 catches him mid-journey: "John Thomas of the parish of Loggon in Cornwall, sojourner of this parish, and Priscilla Maddick, sojourner in this parish, were married in this church by banns this tenth day of December 1781." Two sojourners — neither of them Brixham people, both passing through the port, both making their marks: John and Priscilla could not write their names. Two generations on, every Thomas bride and groom in this story signs.

Probably a mariner, he raised his family on the move around the Devon ports: twin boys baptised at Brixham in 1784; William — this line's ancestor — born at Devonport in 1786 and baptised at the Princes Street Independent chapel; Nicholas and Ann baptised at another dissenting meeting at Plymouth Dock in 1789. Where and when John died is not known — the line's first honest wall. What is known is what came of him: five generations of seafarers that ran from the marks in a Brixham register to a Hull smack skipper, and then to Jenny.