General report on John and Robert's family

I've spent a couple of days fishing around on people who are associated with John and Geneva Jane moving to Maryland, from Ireland, in 1797. Robert would have been one at the time. He had an older brother John Jr. who would have been nine; those two have the clearest trails, while nobody else does. I am struck by how the whole family, which seemed to be clearly a family of eight, in 1800, in Cecil, Maryland, drifted into total obscurity.

The death dates given for John and Geneva Jane seem to come right out of the air. There are no legitimate death dates, and no other record of their participating in civil society around Cecil, Maryland. This leads me to believe that possibly 1) they went back, or 2) they moved up to Wallace Run to be with her sister, and died in obscurity up there.

The collective Ancestry people name the seven kids of the family: William (1774-1839), Adeline? (1784-), Francis (1784-1865), John (1788-1856), Jane (1790-1879), Mary (1794), and Robert (1796-1883). My parents' genealogy, which I think was influenced by Mormon collecting, had William (1773/4), unk. d (1776), unk. s (1777), Jane (>1784), John (1778), unk. d. (>1790), and Robert (1796). Perhaps its dates were influenced by the census, but its early three were interesting to me because that's more like how families go; they start out with kids avery year or so until they get worn out and space the last ones out a little. In the ancestry listing I found right away that Francis belonged in another family. A different William (d. 1839) had been attributed to this family and that someone found his correct family, which is not to say that ours wasn't born in 1773 or 4 also.

While looking for ours I found the story of Michael, whose house burned down in Sinking Valley, PA, and his brother died trying to save his things. The brother sounded a lot like William while Michael could have been the unk. s of 1777. Michael Wallace was identified as "from Maryland," and I'm not sure what tipped me off that the dead brother was William or was born in 1773/4. That William seemed to be visiting his brother when he died (the fire was in 1807; both would be in their thirties), but we don't know where he was visiting from, and I found no burial information. Michael went on to have kids and a life in running manufacturing things (and at one point I thought I found another brother Thomas), but I could not attach him to our family definitively except that people said he was from Maryland yet seemed to be born in Ireland. In fact there were a lot of Wallaces like that. All the others, Mary, Jane, Adeline, joined a legion of Wallaces around Maryland and Pennsylvania, some black, either registering their deaths and marriages or not. What I liked about the fire story was that it at least accounted for the disappearance of William, who, if he was not the one who died in 1839, seems to have just disappeared into thin air.

But William was at least 23 at the time they sailed, and very easily could have not come over, or come over and settled somewhere else entirely. The same could be said for the unk. s of 1777, who would have been 23 at the census, and boys didn't tend to be hanging around home at 23 in those days. Somebody 16-25, male, was, which is why I looked into Michael and Thomas. But Pennsylvania was full of Wallaces who came from Maryland, or Ireland, or somewhere, and they were just kicking around doing business and surviving in places like Sinking Valley. Both searches, for Michaels and Thomases, got lost in a sea of Wallaces.

On the theory that John and Geneva Jane picked up and moved to Wallace Run soon after arrival in Maryland: this would explain a lot. First, Robert, after fighting in the War of 1812, married a New Castle girl and settled in Wallace Run himself. Second, John married a PA girl and had his first child in PA, before leaving for Ohio for good. In this era who they marry is directly correlated to where they grew up since they tended to grow right into adulthood unawares almost. So I guess the next step is to investigate Wallace Run, and the women that Robert and John married, in hopes there is some sign of an Adeline, Jane, or Mary, or even Michael or Thomas, that we could claim.