A much wider picture than I'd imagined has come as a result of the Veach/Moore tree, which made several claims documented in the previous post. It is possible that William Wallace married twice, and had as many as the seventeen or so children that come from adding up what this tree and the others have provided John Sr. also could have married twice, and Geneva Jane could be the first, and not the mother of some of our key players. And finally John Jr. could also have married twice, and done some things before ending up in Ohio farming.

Some things lead me to believe that John Jr., our own great=great-great uncle, was not the father of all those Wallace children in Washington County. In fact I found a John Wallace whose ancestors were from Antrim (in Northern Ireland, but nowhere near Londonderry), and he had a birthdate of 1750, and a death date of 1808 in Butler PA; these were borrowed by followers of our John until many people had assumed, and written in, a birthdate of 1750 and a death date of 1808 Butler PA.

But on reflection I concluded that we know way too little about our John, who doesn't even have a middle name; for his birthdate the best we could come up with is ~1750, and I for one would not take away a ~ squiggly if it implied I knew something which I don't. The John we know did seem to occupy a house with a wife and six children in 1800; many have said he had an older child (1773/4) William who would not be in that house probably, but who nevertheless has disappeared much like John and Geneva Jane did. I've found death dates for all of them that are widely various; one claimed that Geneva Jane lived to be 100. But there is no clear trail, in Cecil County or anywhere else, that would lead me to believe she lived out fifty or sixty more years there. If anything, they more likely both went back, or went up into Pennsylvania somewhere, where they both seemed to have relatives.

The place was crawling with Wallaces and many of them were entirely unrelated. Two Wallaces married in Pennsylvania and one, being the Antrim John Joseph, was probably totally unrelated to the other, and this seemed to be somewhat common. Marrying cousins was not out of the question either. But the general pattern was, once married, they would have a child every year or almost every year, almost indefinitely. That's why all the people filled in by the Veach/Moore tree had possibility. If you could see how they had a kid every year instead of having six or seven-year gaps, you'd believe they were like everyone else, and doing what pioneers do when it's cold out and there's no more deer to hunt. They were filling up the state with Wallaces.

A huge number of them were simply unaccounted for, and that's probably going to be the bottom line for John and Geneva Jane. I won't be the first one to say I have no idea what happened to them after they bailed on Cecil County. In fact I'm not even sure it was them down there in Cecil County. Who said they had their children in Northern Ireland, then moved to Cecil County in 1797? I'm not sure who said it first or whether it came from our family, but it was repeated often enough that I'd come to internalize it and believe it. I was shocked by a Veach/Moore tree that put it entirely a different way. But I also realized that I didn't have the facts to argue. I could see how people were probably adding wrong things to their tree left and right, but I also couldn't back up what I felt was more likely, and realized that almost everything we know has just been said and repeated often enough that we're lulled into believing it's probably true.

Back to the drawing board, as they say.