More thoughts on placing John

In a kind of hazy overview-kind of mood, I am remembering that a lot of times the Wallace boys are reported with different mothers, or different birth dates, or something like that. There is no way to know, tuning into Ancestry in May 2025, what has been repeated most often simply because it was there, yet often it's not right, and just repeated because someone else accepted it. Being in the position of that someone else, I now find myself wondering whether to repeat information, just because I found it, or instead do a deep dive and see if I can't find the truth through deeper clues. Maybe someday AI will do all this for me. Probably the last thing I can do before AI takes over is to get at the truth and get it up there in some form or another, so that AI and anyone using it will at least see one variant that they can then choose or not.

I am now convinced that six Wallace boys found their way over here somoetime between 1770 and 1820, with probably the four mentioned by the BCHS (James, William, Hugh, and John) coming together but John at least going back for a while before bringing his entire family in 1797. Believe that story if possible, I say, until you can see how someone might have mixed it up. I am finding what they said to be mostly true, with James ending up in York, PA, William up in New York, Hugh in South Carolina (but then returning to PA) - why not believe what they say about John? There's also Nathaniel and Thomas connected to the family, who came over at some time or another.

Most people have put them with William Wallace and Mary Coke, about whom very little is written. One person put Nathaniel and John with Mary Margaret Helen Muir as mother, which could be possible. I'm not ruling out a second marriage or step relationships, half brothers etc. But to me the whole thing opens up the possibility that alll of them were placed in the wrong family, that, with all the William Wallaces around, someone just stuck them with this one (Mary Coke's WW 1711) because he was there and was prominent. He was, after all, a Cairnhill Wallace, and the boys were born in Glasgow or Ayr. It's not solid enough proof for me though. I want to see clues that all six came from that family.

Of course I would like to see them connected to the Muirs. But most of all, I just want the truth about who my Scottish ancestors are. The reasons they came over are easier to find.