i'm having fun deep in the heart of scotland, about 1700, but i'm having trouble getting out of it and doing anything productive. i'll give you a kind of loose overview of the problem i'm working on.

it's generally accepted that our ancestor was from scotland, came over with possibly three brothers/half-brothers in about 1770, went back to have a family in Northern Ireland, then brought that whole family over in 1797. by that time some of the brothers/half-brothers had settled. in fact about six total seem to have given up scotland/ireland to come over in that era, and i've spent considerable time tracking each down. there's no guarantee that they're all fundamentally related.

however the trail leads back into scotland where either their father was the grandson of the head of the clan of the cairnhill wallaces, or was some other william wallace who married some other mary, and there are several combinations of those. i'd actually like to find a more obscure william wallace because family lore says they were from ayrshire, which in some people's mind includes cairnhill but in mine doesn't.

the date given for that william wallace was 1711, but there were plenty of william wallace (1711)s in both ayrshire and glasgow and if i'm willing to accept divergent dates i can get even more to choose from. one seemed to have a grandfather. a lord high chancellor in fact, who seemed to move to pennsylvania, with his wife, a noblewoman, way back in the early 1700s or even earlier. he would have been great grandfather of the six boys who came over. but he seems to have disappeared entirely in pennsylvania, as did his wife, with scanty or divergent accounts of the kids they had on the way and where they might have ended up. One that they left behind (or seemed to) would have been father of william (1711) and grandfather of our six. but in trying to say they went to pennsylvania because that's where their ancestor was i'd have to modify that to had been or give up the theory altogether; he just seems to have disappeared.

a lot of these accounts are clearly wrong and not backed up by ancestry.com's substantial database of birth and marriage records. i like that database because it clears up contradictions (shows who was careless) and gives us more to work with.

i might be able to find the william (1711?) that is our ancestor, either from the heart of the cairnhill wallaces, or from glasgow and the ayr countryside, who knows? that's what i'd like, to feel better knowing who some of my ancestors were if not their reasons for coming over. the reasons are probably common to every scottish immigrant of the era, and are not that surprising. there are patterns too. they go where their family has gone. they settle by finding a place very carefully that will sustain them. the part that's geography is probably most interesting to me.