Ships were lost during these dark voyages, and said to have had 'stowaways' on board, but in fact few if any survivors from the ship were found. The captains of the ships that conducted the transports to America would have told the truth if they were questioned. * * * It is not entirely clear how many children were lost at sea after arriving at America. The records for many of the arrivals in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are incomplete, and many of the children appear to have been orphans. How many were lost on these passages of death is difficult to know. # # LOST LANDS # Finding new routes to work William had been born in Yorkshire, in 1777, and, like John Woodhead, he was the son of a farmer. He became an apprentice carpenter in York, and then moved to Liverpool to take a master carpenter's job with Thomas Hardcastle's shipyard, which was building a fleet of ships for the East India Company. Hardcastle owned a ship which plied between Liverpool and Quebec, and there was a good deal of work, when the ships were in port, in the wharves, warehouses, and merchants' houses that lined the quaysides. In July 1802 he married Martha Wilson at the Liverpool Parish Church, then an active place of worship with 500 members. Their family would eventually grow to eight children, and William continued in the lucrative business of shipbuilding. He was a conscientious worker, and did not do anything badly. He later became the master of another shipyard, but he continued to spend the majority of his time at Hardcastle's, though, which was where his family would continue to spend most of their time for the next 35 years. At this time there was no compulsory schooling for children. In some families they would be tutored by the mother, while in others they would learn from their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. There was no government schooling and the only state intervention came when a charity, the Society for Promoting Religious and Moral Welfare, was set up in 1793 to monitor and record the conditions in which children and orphan children were raised. The following year this charitable body was given £4,200 from the national treasury to set up 50 schools in the urban areas of Great Britain. Although the national charity had been funded by voluntary contributions, the British state began to pay for its expenses. This was not unique to England. By 1798 Russia had similar welfare systems that paid for the maintenance of orphans. Although the charity could look after 200 orphans, it was not able to house all the children that it could find. In 1803 Thomas Hardy, an ex-army officer, moved to York to organize a school for 80 orphans. When he did so, he was not working alone. The Duke of Portland, the Earl of Strafford, the Earl of Lonsdale, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Scarbrough were among the group of wealthy men who were funding a series of 'out-of-school' schools for poor children in different parts of the country. These schools aimed to provide a moral education to counteract the problems of urban poverty. Some of them, like Thomas Hardy's, were run by religious groups. These institutions did not provide state schools, but provided free education in small groups, and helped support teachers who went into the homes of poor families to teach their children. These home-based schools were not all independent. The Duke of Portland's foundation in 1803 had a school building in the grounds of Fulbeck Hall in York. In 1805 the two men who designed this building, the York-based architects John and Charles Whately, also designed a small school in the grounds of Boultham Hall, in the county of Lancashire. The headmaster of this school was a young man called John Cassell. This school, at Boultham Hall, became the model for John Cassell's later school, the National Institute for the Blind. The new schools were meant to educate poor boys and girls, and William Wilson was a part of the movement. At this time there was no legislation that said that boys, and later girls, should be educated. Schools were established and funded through philanthropic donations and charitable grants, and, for some families, this was the only form of education that was available to them. Many wealthy landowners also had land which they wanted to develop. The wealthy landowners who were sponsoring William Wilson's new school at Linton, in Yorkshire, included the Lord of Linton, John Spencer, and the Baron of Darlington. Both of these landowners, Spencer and Darlington, had large estates. Spencer was the most influential and wealthiest landowner in the north-east of England, while John Darlington had inherited his title in 1788. The fortunes of both men were founded on their ownership of huge swathes of land and hundreds of thousands of acres of working farms and forests. * * * There was nothing special about this small settlement in North Yorkshire that made it an attractive place for a school for the poor, but it was close to the city of York, where there was the existing orphanage. The main town, then and now, is Wetherby, which has a population of around 7,000 people, and the area is an extension of the Vale of York, a green area that is almost 25 miles long. In order to find out what children were available for these schools, and what the needs of parents were, the educational charity would have made home visits in some of the smaller towns and villages. When they found out that children were available, the charity would look at the local economy to ensure that the charity did not pay for work that could be provided by a master carpenter in the shipyards or by a farmer who had been unable to find work. This was vital if the schools were to have any credibility with parents. Sensitive to their own finances, the educational charity would have insisted on visiting a family's property, often a farm, to make sure that children could attend school without the cost of food, clothing, and the expense of the maintenance of the house being taken into account. On the rare occasions when there was a family to care for the children, the charity would ask if the charity could remove a young girl from the family. Once a child was admitted to the school, or perhaps once a year, the organization would write a formal letter of thanks to the person who funded the school. The charity would have to be careful in its choice of schools in order to avoid embarrassing families that needed to make a good impression. The school buildings, therefore, would have to be on the move, as they were used as needed in different places. The schools which were used by the charity for the children of the poor had to be cheap. Most of these children had already lost a family member and would have known or feared that they could lose another. For these children, orphans were not an embarrassment. They were a sad fact of life, which meant that these were not schools for the rich. # # Emigration to New York William Wilson and his wife Martha Wilson were a good and religious family. They were part of the movement that helped to establish Sunday schools in the 18th century, and this was encouraged by a number of wealthy religious groups that were supported by the general belief in the need to create schools for the poor. The Wilson family belonged to the Independent (or Congregational) Church, which was part of a denomination that included the Baptists, the Quakers, and the Independents. The congregation that William and Martha Wilson belonged to was based in the village of Otley in the countryside to the east of Leeds. It was not a wealthy congregation. In 1805 its income was only £62 6s. 9d., but the congregation was prosperous, and the church had three rooms, two of which were used as Sunday schools, which were rented out for additional income. The congregation was led by a minister who was well connected to both the city and county. The Reverend Tulk was the preacher at the same chapel in which both John and Charles Whately were baptised in 1768. The minister, Tulk, was one of eight children, and was born in Clapham Common in London, in 1758. When Tulk was a child his family moved to Hull, where he continued to lead a Congregationalist Church. In 1798 Tulk was given the post of minister at the York Independent Church. In 1798 the parish of Linton was a group of houses in the hamlet of Linton, close to the great northern road which runs from the small town of York to Whitby. Linton is located on the road from York to Middlesbrough, and the town and hamlet were part of the parish of Barningham, which had a population of 3,365. In William Wilson's time the hamlet of Linton had a population of 1,400, and was owned by the Duke of Portland. In the 1801 census Tulk was listed as being from Hull, but his mother was said to be a widow from Whitby, in Cleveland. This was probably a lie, because William Wilson's father was John Wilson of Thorold, also in Cleveland, and their home in 1801 was close to the small town of Whitby, which was just five miles away from Linton. The Wilson family also had connections to Whitby. They lived in the home of David Wilson, a blacksmith, who lived in York in 1762, but his eldest son