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.