The general overview I've been working on, in John the senior's family, has been totally altered by new information I came up with in the course of investigating his son, John Junior. In short, some people had a tree on Ancestry that contradicts most of what I believed, and has a few other curve balls in it, for both people.

Starting with John Sr.; he was part of a very large family in Ayrshire, and was born in Ayrshire himself. The new tree, which can be called the Veach/Moore tree, claims that his father had a second wife, and that he and five other people were born of that second wife, Joan Campbell. In the list I had before he was tenth out of eleven, with a good thirteen years between him and number eleven. Now there are five more in there, though I have already eliminated one or two.

The biggest difference is its general orientation toward Geneva Jane. In the Veach/Moore tree, he marries Geneva Jane, but then comes to New York (1774), and then presumably she dies because he remarries Mary Alexander, and has seven children with her, including a Robert (1782) and John Junior (1788), who for some reason is listed as being born in Donegal even while the others are all being born in Washington County PA. Now I should say, a second wife in Wash County would answer a lot of my questions, which I may have stated earlier: why did he appear to fall off the face of the earth? What happened to Geneva Jane? And, is it possible that he died in Butler, PA when he was living out his life in Maryland? Apparently he was up in Pennsylvania by then. And he did die in 1808, although the Veach/Moore tree says he died in Cecil County but was buried in Finleyville, Wash County.

The son John Jr. has the most stunning changes. Before I encountered the Veach/Moore, I knew about his first daughter Jane, Crawford, and Elizabeth. I knew that he found his way out to Ohio. This tree has him marrying Margaret Wallace in 1808 - same year his dad dies. He is therefore in PA at that time, and according to them they have twelve kids, among them Jane, Crawford and Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Crawford appear at the back of this list, actually, while most of the twelve including Jane come before them and are born in Pennsylvania. And we seem to be talking about Somerset, just east of Pittsburgh, but sometimes Johnstown.

There was also something bizarre. The page I looked at first said that his wife was Margaret Wallace - she was a Wallace before they married. That is, he went up there to visit cousins, and married one of them, perhaps. I'll have to look into this. She was already Margaret Wallace because her father was a Robert Wallace....What happened to Margaret Ellison, who seemed to be hard to find, perhaps not real? Did he also have two wives? That was actually quite common in the era, a guy whose wife died could barely wake up oin the morning without remarrying, quick, especially if they had kids around. You help me watch my kids, and I'll bring in the food. It was a prectical deal. There were lots of half brothers that way.

SO, not all the people make sense, and a few have been thrown in there no doubt. In some cases they have two with the same name who both lived and thrived - one was obviously placed in their tree for lack of their own. People were coming from Ireland left and right, so to speak. But it makes sense to know that, as long as they were alive, they seem to be cranking out lots of kids, who in turn are our relatives today.