William Thomas

William Thomas was baptised at Brixham on the 2nd of June 1811 — the only child his parents would have: his father, a mariner also named William, was dead within a few years of the christening, and his mother Jane, née Soper, remarried in 1815. The sea that orphaned him became his trade, and he rose in it: by the time his son's marriage certificate recorded his rank, long after his death, the family remembered him as a master mariner.

On Valentine's Day 1836, at All Saints, Lower Brixham, he married Eleanor Clarke Peters, the cooper's daughter — both signed their names, and her kin stood witness. Three children followed on King Street: William in 1837, George Henry in 1840, Sarah Clarke in 1843. The 1841 census caught the household as this family's censuses nearly always would — mother and children at home, the master away at sea.

He died about 1847, in his mid-thirties, possibly at sea — no burial has yet been found. His widow married the mariner next door the following spring, and it was the stepfather, John Vivians, who a decade later took William's children north with the Brixham fleet to the Humber. His son George skippered Hull smacks into his seventies; his granddaughter Jenny carried the line to Edinburgh Street. Three generations of this family's men — grandfather, father, son each named William or working William's trade — went to sea young and, twice out of three, did not grow old.