John Willson
John Willson is the oldest name on this line, and the newest to be built into it — the father of James Wilson the whitesmith. Mum had already found him: her page on James names John Willson, read from the 1761 baptism. What was missing was the proof you could see and the person behind the name, and both are now in hand. He was a Hull man of the middle years of the eighteenth century, of the Holy Trinity parish in the old town, and it is there — in the Holy Trinity register and its bishop's copy alike — that the father of the James baptised on the 10th of February 1761 is set down. The family wrote the surname the older way, Willson with two Ls, and it was that spelling, hiding him from a plain search, that had kept the confirmation waiting so long.
Beyond his fatherhood little is yet certain. He married at Holy Trinity in 1759 or 1760 — the register offers three brides of his name across those two years, a Mary the likeliest of them — and James was among his children. His trade is not recorded, and his own beginnings, somewhere about the 1730s, are unknown: behind John the line goes dark, and his baptism is the wall now.
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Our research
John Willson — the new wall
Research · Holy Trinity, Hull
John is the father Mum had named, now confirmed and given a page of his own: two independent records — the Holy Trinity baptism register (East Riding Archives, PE158/4) and its Bishop's Transcript (Borthwick Institute) — set him down as the father of James Wilson (1761), the whitesmith at the head of the line. What Mum never reached, and what is the true wall now, lies above him — his wife, and his own people.
His wife — probably Mary
James's 1761 baptism names only the father, so John's wife comes from his marriage, at Holy Trinity in the two years before James was born. The index there gives three of the name — Mary (1760), Jane (1759), Elizabeth (1759) — and Mary is the closest fit on timing. But three John Willson weddings in two years suggest more than one man of the name in the parish, so no wife is asserted here yet. To do: family-reconstitute John's children in the register, or read the marriage bond, to settle which bride is James's mother.
His origin
John's own baptism — about the 1730s, presumably at Hull or nearby — is unfound, and is the line's new frontier. To do: John Willson baptisms c.1725–1740 at Holy Trinity and the Hull-district parishes; a Hull apprenticeship or freedom record in the metal trades that might fix his people.