In the late 1700s Scotland had way too many people and no land, no opportunity, no jobs for the young. John and Robert at one point were driven to steal a pig, so the story goes. The authorities were after them and they took a boat of some kind over to Northern Ireland.

Life wasn't much better over there, but there were plenty of Scots there, called the Scot-Irish. Many of them were moving to America because they were settling the mountain areas and the Scots knew they could make it there. In fact, John and Robert had an uncle James who was already over there, I believe. He had settled in a part of Pennsylvania, Beaver County, that was rugged and mountainous, a little isolated. They knew they could stay with Uncle James and his kin.

They crossed the ocean I believe sometime around 1810. Robert would have been only 14 but John was 22. They'd have to make their way over to Beaver County, in the western part of the state. The War of 1812 broke out and Robert enlisted; he was barely 16 if even that. John made his way out to Ohio. I'm not clear on the order of how these things happened.

After the war Robert married a New Castle woman, settled in Wallace Run (Uncle James' valley), and had ten children. He became a pillar of the community. Several of his boys became doctors, Several of his sons became doctors. One of those was my grandpa's grandpa.

Becoming a doctor was one way of getting out of the valley, Wallace Run. In uncle James' clan one woman's parents were first cousins; her father's parents were also first cousins. I'm not totally clear on that or how that happened, but it shows that Wallaces were so common you could marry a cousin and consider them an outsider. Grandpa wanted out. He tried farming but the soil was too rocky, so he gave it up and moved out to Iowa.

His own son my Uncle Bones ended up in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. Several generations from Scotland, he no longer had the hills, the fog, the sea, anything. An outlaw spirit, is what he had left. In Scottish "Wallace" meant "Welsh" but was also used for "outsider" or "foreigner" - in fact it was used for just about anyone. Once you left, though, there was no going back.