James Wilson

James Wilson stands at the head of this line — a Hull man, baptised at Holy Trinity on the 10th of February 1761, and the first of the family in metal. His trade was a whitesmith's: the finer, cold end of the ironworker's world — tin and finished ironwork, filed and fitted and polished bright, as against the blacksmith's forge and hammer. It was a trade he handed down and up-graded: his son Peter would be a blacksmith at a Sculcoates foundry, his grandson and great-grandson iron moulders, and a great-great-grandson a shipwright — a hundred and fifty years of the family worked in iron, and it begins with James at his bench.

On the 19th of January 1783 he married Elinor Shaw, at Holy Trinity where he had been christened, and over the next twenty years they raised a large Hull family. Peter came first, in 1784 — the son through whom this line runs — and after him Eleanor, John, William, and a run of daughters, several of them named Ann; the register keeps the sorrows too, a first Eleanor dead within a year, an Ann buried in 1796. They lived and worked in the old town by the Holy Trinity parish, in the years when Hull was turning from a plain trading haven into a dock town.

For as long as the tree has stood, James was its top. Mum had reached his father — her page names John Willson, read from this same baptism — but the name sat there alone, unsourced and unbuilt, with nothing above it. It is now confirmed and built out: the entry survives in two independent hands, the Holy Trinity register and its Bishop's Transcript at York, both setting down the same father, John Willson (the surname written the old way, with the double L, which is why a search for 'Wilson' had passed clean over it). What Mum could not find lies a step higher still — John's own wife and people — and that is the wall now. James's own death is the one date still missing from him: he was alive for the birth of his last child in 1801, and after that the record, for now, goes quiet.