reconciling possibilities

What I think happened is this. Genealogists such as myself took what they knew - that John was born in Craige, etc., and made assumptions. Perhaps they knew that his father was William Wallace (1711) of Cairnhill; perhaps he was. William was according to some sources married to Mary Coke. So you have his father and mother, and go from there; The trail leads up through William's father to Cairnhill, where the Wallaces were a large clan.

But part of the family lore is that they were from Ayrshire. Ayrshire it turns out is rural, near the sea, surrounding the town of Ayr. Now the family lore also includes the story of the boys and the pig, and I'll be the first to admit this could be changed by time or even by impressions, or somebody made an assumption based on how easy it was for them to get over to Northern Ireland. Who knows? I thought I'd set about trying to find out whether it was possible they were from Ayrshire.

It turns out that there were William Wallaces who married Marys all over the place, and dozens in Ayrshire, though mostly not at the right time. It is possible John and/or his brothers were from one of these Ayrshire William Wallace/Mary combinations, and were put into William and Mary Coke's tree based on assumptions or just based on what could be found at the time.

What set me onto a wider search was this: someone said the Wallace clan of Cairnhill was known to be involved in the slave trade. Sure enough, some of those cousins were involved in a plantation in Jamaica and some even died there. This didn't sound like the Wallaces I knew, but then again, they were about eight generations up, and they were cousins; it didn't seem to involve our William (1710), or his father or even his father. Their large estate, Cairnhill, was just east of Glasgow; they had in some cases eleven, or thirteen kids in a family; they had to keep the money coming in etc. etc. I would actually rather think of my ancestors as rural Ayrshire kids who just hopped on a random boat. But who knows, I'll face the truth however it pans out.

The next step obviously is to map out all the William Wallace/Mary combinations that it could be, and gather clues from the boys' lives to help us lead to which family to place them in. There are six boys altogether who seem to have ended up in America. They had connection to each other, in accounts of their own family, and geographically. In other words, because Thomas and Hugh lived in Cecil County Maryland, and John came there when he finally emigrated with his family, we can guess that Thomas and Hugh are of this family and were probably the reason John chose Cecil County. The problem is that the Hugh could be any one of a dozen Hughs who came from Scotland - both Cairnhill and Ayrshire - and same with Thomas. The trail is interesting but definitely not conclusive. Not yet anyway.

But I have to watch out that I'm not biased toward what I want to find. When I found a William and Mary Margaret Helen Muir (allegedly the mother of Nathaniel and John, but also possibly to others), I was really happy that I'd found the true mother. But people are just as likely to misassign these boys to her as they are to any other Mary. There was a William and Mary Muir in the records. There may have even been one in Ayrshire. But I'm going to stop doing what other Americans might: just assume that Ayrshire, Glasgow, Cairnhill, they're all the same. They aren't. Thewe boys go in one family (or maybe a step situation) but not six different ones.

This leads me to the birth records and marriage records of rural Ayrshire and Glasgow etc. All I can say is that there are plenty of William and Marys out there. It's a world of William and Marys. Two of them, these boys looked back and said, those were our parents. I'll find which two, I hope.