Geneva Jane (cont'd)

I like her name, that's where I'll start. Her existence has made my St. Patrick's Day a little brighter.

It's a bleak St. Patrick's Day here in Illinois; we had one more snow a day or two ago and then it got cold, as it usually does, and the snow is going away very slowly if at all. And now the sun has gone back behind clouds and it might snow again. Nothing unusual or surprising, you might say, if you're from Illinois or Iowa which is just a short ways away, just bleak, a good reason to go out drinking, which I won't do.

But my research in the last year dug up something I want to talk about, just because, if I was a bar, that's what I'd be doing, just blabbing and not being too concerned about the facts. In this case the facts came out somewhat tenuous; we don't know them all. We may not even have a clue, so to speak. But I'll tell you what I know.

In 1770 John Wallace came over to the US and landed in Carlyle, Pennsylvania; allegedly he had a couple brothers, James and William, with him, and allegedly there was a guy named Hugh who may have already been in Pennsylvania, but who would have been perhaps a cousin. All these Wallaces joined hundreds of Wallaces who were leaving Northern Ireland and Scotland for the mountains of Pennsylvania because land could be had, and because Northern Ireland was like Scotland and just a bit too crowded and too hostile for a guy starting out. John, however, did not find life easy in Carlisle either, and in fact a war was about to start and Hugh was about to join up, but who knows how that influenced his decision. In any case he got passage back to Scotland where, in a place called Port Renfrew, he married Geneva Jane Crawford, daughter of a fisherman on the northern coast of Ireland.

Now this brings up a number of questions but I'll start with what we do know. She lived on the coast near Londonderry; she had a sister; her father was wary of storms and didn't go out, on the day of a particularly bad storm that wiped out their village. John, who was originally Scottish but who had spent some time in Northern Ireland already, settled down with her and, over the next twenty five years or so, had a family of about six children, all in Northern Ireland, at some unknown location but probably not far from her native village outside Londonderry.

Now this is where it gets cloudy and some of the questions come up. Of those six kids only two have any certainty about where they ended up, because he brought the family to Cecil County Marlyand in about 1796, and two of the boys had a long and illustrious life in the USA. It is not certain what happened to the other four: did they also come over to Maryland? It is also not certain what happened to John and Geneva Jane: did they die in Maryland? In Pennsylvania? Or did they come back to Northern Ireland?

Here are some more questions: So they married in Port Renfrew, where one would land if one were going to Glasgow or Renfrewshire. She would have had a fishing boat, or access to it, or at the least, the ability to go from the coast of Northern Ireland to Renfrew. So she was doing the transport? So he met her, perhaps, trying to get from Scotland to Northern Ireland? Or back? This is not clear.

She was a Crawford; that seems to indicate that she was orange Irish, Protestant, among the group of Scots put in Northern Ireland by the Queen, against the will of the Irish people, presumably. Her sister married a guy who was in trouble with the authorities for saying something bad about the Catholic Church, but what do you expect of Protestants? The sister fled to Pennsylvania before her husband even got out of jail, but it was her way of saying, we can have a life over there in Pennsylvania, but not here. Northern Ireland was contentious and particularly about that issue of religion. But somehow John and Geneva Jane managed to have six children, live somewhere, and then pick up and buy passage back to Pennsylvania by the end of the century.

A census in Cecil County Maryland specifies JOhn, his wife, and six children, in a house, without telling their names and being very general about their ages or birth dates. This was in the early 1800s and was the last we know of both John and Geneva Jane. Did she die? Go back? Move to Pennsylvania? No telling. No evidence one way or the other.

On Saint Patty's Day I often say that I was lucky to marry Irish, and also that I'm 1/365 Irish. In fact I have Geneva Jane, who was orange Irish probably, but Irish nonetheless. Daughter of a fisherman, came over to Maryland, had all these kids. Some genealogies say she lived to a hundred, but I seriously doubt that; I think we would know more about her kids if she did. lI also think there's an explanation out there somewhere to be found, and I'm still hoping to find it.