Descended from Braveheart?

Looking into the Wallace genealogy I took a break from the more specific ones I was researching, namely a Dr. William Wallace of Washington DC, born sometime before or after 1926 (I was trying to figure out which), to find out about a few legends in the family. It is said that all Wallaces want to claim direct lineage from Braveheart, a William Wallace of about 1290 who fought fiercely against the English. Why then should we be any exception?

Well you don't get very far before you learn that the Braveheart William Wallace had no sons, and claims that he had a daughter somewhere are pretty thin, and even his brother's descendants seem to have died out, so the best one could claim would be to be related to him. But nevertheless many people have claimed to be directly descended from him, and one even claimed to have his kilt, while historians point out that kilts didn't show up until about 1500.

The Braveheart William Wallace was a large man, and fierce. But he was from Ayreshire, and his mother was a Crawford, and that rung a bell. The man at the top of our genealogy was a William Wallace, in the 1700's, and was from Ayreshire. When one of our early (1700s) Wallaces married a Crawford, others kept the name as long as possible, to the point that in the modern day we are dealing with John Crawford Wallace IV and V - they want to keep the name Crawford if only to make a point. And what would be the point? Well, the Crawford clan is a little more thorough about tracking its descendants, and it's more likely to go back to Braveheart's mother than to Braveheart himself. In other words, it's possible we could track our ancestors back to relatives of Braveheart, but more likely through the Crawfords than the Wallaces.

There are about 28 generations between today and Braveheart, someone said, and this directly contradicts those who said things like "Braveheart was my great great great great grandfather" - no, he lived in about 1290. Records are thin. Scholars are all over him, and they're still thin.

But I can say this. Finding a William Wallace today is like finding a needle in a haystack. I need a middle name, and a birth year, and in this case I don't have either, and I'm not sure what I'll do though I haven't exhausted the options. Scottish settlers filled up the Americas and scattered widely, not hanging around in enclaves of other Scottish settlers as, say, the Italians and others tended to do. Some, like my Uncle Bones, only male carrying the Wallace name, ended up out in the desert or someplace surrounded more by snakes and desert rabbits than other people let alone other Scots. But they didn't forget Scotland and that's why they'd name their kids William Wallace and carry on like they could trace everything right back. There's no tracing it right back, it seems. You get back to Ayreshire, and it gets muddy pretty quickly.