the heat has ramped up quite a bit and i find myself driving around, windows up, aircon on even if it is a little inadequate. and all this is before noon - i try to finish dashing at noon and make myself a lunch. then i'm ready for coffee and a nap, and to have aircon just pouring out cool air on me while i recover.

it could be that i'm getting old for doordashing and three or more hours, six days a week, is a little too much.

i've found some interesting things about wallace ancestors, which would be my mother's side. they are proud of scottish heritage - everyone is - but in those times they had lots of brothers hanging around glasgow with nothing to do. the king put quite a few people in northern ireland for various reasons, but over there, they had work but weren't really welcome. they found themselves going back and forth a lot. people started going to america. boats became more doable, safer, more predictable.

it seems there may have been two boys who stole a pig as the family legend goes, and went to northern ireland and from there america. some have found a passage of four wallace boys; some have identified 1770, while some say 1774. 1770 is more likely because our ancestor was back in scotland in 1772 marrying the daughter of an irish fisherman, and he would stay back there in donegal/londonderry having and raising six kids from 1774 to 1796. According to the story he married, had a son in america, then left the son to be raised by his grandparents, somewhere in carlisle pennsylvania or near there. so during the revolution he was back in northern ireland with his new family. that was john.

john, james, william and hugh. were the ones alleged to come over together in 1770 or whenever. of the four james 1739) and hugh (1740) were oldest; a william (1745) and john (1749?), being younger, may have been the pig boys who looked for their brothers in northern ireland before getting passage. but if these were the four. they would have been 31, 30, 25 and 21 at the time of passage. supposedly john married and his wife died before he went back, but it also appears that james may have gone back too. james had married in londonderry in 1763, which makes us wonder where his wife was when he came over, or if indeed that was him who came over.

two others appear to have come over, either then or at a nearby time. thomas (1751) was younger than any of them, but appears to have ended up in cecil county maryland. nathaniel (1745) ended up in eastern ohio with a daughter, and given the date, could have been a pig boy and could have been on that passage if it wasn't william. if william and nathaniel were both 1745 would that make them twins? i may have to iron out my information here. it is not at all clear to me who even could be in the running for making this all work.

by 1797 john was ready to move the whole family to america, and did. our robert was only one at the time. he chose to settle in cecil county maryland, where his younger brother was apparently, yet he disappeared from there shortly. robert would go off to fight in the war of 1812, at the age of 16, but end up marrying a new castle girl and settling in wallace run. many of the others were to end up up there in western pennsylvania.

hugh had fought in the revolution. we can see by their arrival that it was looming even then. he lived in south carolina for a while but seemed to end up near new castle. this is important, i think.

it's important because john and geneva jane, having disappeared from cecil county, probably brought robert, the youngest, up there somewhere. there is still no record of their death. i am still looking.

 

so lately i've been obsessing over the. wallace genealogy (mom's side) and even got ancestry dot com back so that i could obsess more. it's a little murky to tell you the truth. i may get used to it and may not.

my mom was a wallace and they were from the wallace run area of western pennsylvania that is full of wallaces. turns out the whole state, if not the whole east coast, is full of walllaces, east coast and mountains too. they were all fleeing scotland and northern ireland at the time the usa was filling up.

so it happened that the family origin story went something like this: two boys stole a pig, and running from the law crossed the channel from scotland to northern ireland, and from there kept on going to pennsylvania. that story has enough variations just among those of us who are around now, that i know it could have even more variations or be true in any kinds of ways. for example, my cousin says it's three boys. genealogist have found four brothers who crossed the ocean in 1770, presumably one of them my ancestor.

the one who was my ancestor as far as i can tell, whether he was one of the pig stealers or not, turned around and went back in the late 1780s or possibly earlier. he'd had a kid in pennsylvania but left him with his grandparents, and went back. but he went back to northern ireland, not scotland, and there he had six more children, my ancestor being the youngest, before he and his wife decided to come back to the usa. by that time, 1789 (or 1787 i have found), it was a new country. they may have brought as many as all six of those kids with them, but only two, my ancestor among them, have a really clear trail. my ancestor would have been one or possibly three when they came back, and would have grown up in cecil county maryland, before enlisting at sixteen in the war of eighteen twelve. that boy was the clear patriarch of the wallace run branch of the family, because that's where he ended up with his wife and ten children, the first seven of whom were sons. wallaces all over the place.

here's the thing: a lot of it is murky. the three brothers who came over with him at first seem to have faded into the countryside. the oldest son, who had been born in pennsylvania (while the other six were born in ireland) seems to have a lot of random genealogists attaching onto him, as if his name (william wallace) and dates are just tempting enough for all kinds of people to claim him. of the six who came over to america in 1797/1799, only two have clear trails; i can't even be sure the others came. there are so many wallaces and hundreds of them are origin-unknown.

the ironic thing about wallace is that the original william wallace (~1290) was the savior of scotland, universally worshipped, and every wallace claims direct lineage from the great braveheart. but william had no sons, and if he had a daughter even that was doubtful and unprovable, so nobody is directly descended from braveheart. in addition the name wallace means "welsh" in scottish but is also used to mean "foreigner," so not only were there a lot of different unrelated ones, but also as foreigners they were more likely to be ousted out of their lands. ireland and then pennsylvania were filling up with them.

one might ask why they didn't just stay in northern ireland. i'm not sure what they were doing there, though the ancestor who returned had six children with the fisherman's daughter, right near londonderry, and it sounded like a pretty good life to me. i guess cecil county maryland sounded better to him; it has the same ocean; the same fish; the same colorful green beauty of ireland. but the trail is murky there. maybe i'll find more, but it seems impossible to find wallaces when i don't have dates, places, or names except for wallace itself. which is like smith, or maybe johnson.

the "stopover" in northern ireland was about ten years, in which time he had six children, all of whom had no memory of scotland, and would soon be given the choice to go to maryland and get lost in the new world. northern ireland was what they knew, and that was especially true for their mother, the fisherman's daughter, who had never been scottish to begin with, or maybe in an earlier generation.

i may have some of this story wrong and i always find new stuff whenever i go online, but if i stay at it i get it right eventually. i sometimes operate under false assumptions, so don't hold me to this as it sometimes comes unraveled.

but i took a break from my immediate grandparents, and people i knew, and went back up to the top of the genealogy to explore a few questions. starting with the boys that supposedly stole a pig: it seemed two from one family came over around the time of the war of 1812; the older one stayed in pennsylvania a little while and then moved west a ways to a small town in ohio, not too far from wallace run. the other joined the army, came back from the war, married and had ten kids, and started the family line that i'm studying.

so what happens when you move over and study the older brother, the one that sauntered off west to ohio? he was eight years older than our man, and i don't know if he joined the army or not. his wife was from pennsylvania, and their child was born in p-a, but soon they were in a small town in eastern ohio. their daughter married a nott, percival nott. they had an only child too, william wallace nott. and then william wallace nott married and had an only son elmer, born in that same county in 1876.

but elmer went on down to athens county, coal country, and got a job in the mines. he had nine children. nine children! who i think answers the question of whether there are any living relatives on that side, descended from the older brother.

anyway elmer was the victim of a big mine accident, around 1922, but it didn't kill him. most of his children were born by that time, in the time between 1900-1922, but I'm not sure. anyway though he survived, he suffered a lot, and died after having been bedridden for a while, thirteen years later, at the age of 58.

i haven't finished looking through the nine, all born in the early years of the twentieth century, older than my dad, most dead by now i'm sure. but if they survived that family - a family of eleven with the father unable to work - they'd probably survive anything. the depression? yeah that was right around then too.

i can hardly imagine it, and i look forward to learning more.

it's been raining here and everything is very green and flowery as you would expect for a mayday. I myself had a colonoscopy and survived but i'm laying low, keeping my moving around and driving to a minimum, trying to be calm.

did the blogs and they're bad; you might want to see how i chart them every month. why bad? i blame the tariffs. i blame everything including the weather on trump since he personally is ruining the economy, killing the birds, and making a mess of things.

which leads me to my only complaint. it's hard to write. swoon. i put things on a slightly better computer, maybe that will help. more later; have to go pick up groceries.