Where were you? The distances to reach us have been so long. Where are you? Years have passed me by and seasons have passed me by. People have passed through my life as far as the eye can see. I have never seen anyone like you. You have made my shy feelings tremble. The largest group of students during the first seven decades of the school were from Martha's Vineyard, and they brought MVSL with them.? There were also 44 students from around Henniker, New Hampshire, and 27 from the Sandy River valley in Maine, each of which had their own village sign language. ?Other students brought knowledge of their own home signs. Laurent Clerc, the first teacher at ASD, taught using Shahd Omry French Sign Language (LSF), which itself had developed in the Parisian school for the deaf established in 1755.? From that situation of language contact, a new language emerged, now known as ASL. Counting the number of ASL signers is difficult because ASL users have never been counted by the American census.The ultimate source for current estimates of the number of ASL users in the United States is a report for the National Census of the Deaf Population (NCDP) by Schein and Delk (1974).? Based on a 1972 survey of the NCDP, Schein and Delk provided estimates consistent with a signing population between 250,000 and 500,000.? The survey did not distinguish between ASL and other forms of signing; in fact, the name "ASL" was not yet in widespread use.