My village appears to be a ghost town. How do I get my people back?

So I have been building up a village, hoping that the 3-4 block high wall would protect it from nasty predators, but apparently I was wrong. I find it kind of weird that the smaller, wall-less village managed to maintain a population for so long, but my expanded and walled village is now apparently a ghost town. Does anyone know why this may be? (If so I'm opening another thread for this question, as I think this is an entirely different line of questioning involving how hostile mobs spawn).

I'm wondering if there is some way I can repopulate the village, hopefully without having to transplant villagers (as villages appear to be extremely rare). Is there anyway of doing this? Building more houses doesn't appear to work.

Solution 1:

I'm afraid there is no way to cause more villagers to spawn without going into creative mode and/or cheating in spawn eggs.

If you do attempt to move them, note that you only need 2, as they will breed.

To prevent this from happening again, you can cause iron golems to spawn to protect your villagers by having at least 21 houses and 10 villagers.

To get ten villagers, you need to build 29 houses, but then you can cut them back down 21 if you want.

Iron golems spawn every 10 villagers and 21 houses, so you could spawn several.

Solution 2:

Occasionally zombies will spawn as villager zombies (5% of the time) , these can be cured and returned to regular villagers. This is achieved by using a splash potion of weakness on them before feeding them a golden apple. Once given the apple they will begin to shake however it will take considerable time (minutes) before they are cured, they remain vulnerable to sunlight during this time.

Once you have cured 2 these can breed to repopulate your village

This is a considerable undertaking and requires several nights out "in the dark", it is best to avoid having to do this.