It's a family story that once two brother stole a pig, and, fleeing from authorities in Ayrshire, went over to Northern Ireland. From there, they had relatives in Pennsylvania, and came over.
They would have been Wallaces, and would have landed on a road called Wallace Run in Beaver, Pennsylvania. A few generations later, there were generations of doctors but my Grandpa Wallace wanted to be an agriculturalist. And that wrapped up the Wallaces' explanation of their own origin.
I have been to New Castle, Pennsylvania, a few times, and my sister has been there recently. A lot of the Wallaces came through there and in fact there is a Wallace Avenue right near the center of town where two prominent brothers, one an ancestor of mine, I believe, lived. The pig story has become somewhat cloudy though. Who was it that stole those pigs? When was it? I know that Scotland was not a friendly place for a whole generation or two of people who were basically deprived of the right to make a living and live peacefully; the fact that the USA was a reasonable option for them amounts to a huge number of immigrants in a certain era. But I can't remember the era, or match it against these particular relatives. Were we ever able to find Wallaces in Ayrshire? Wallaces that had two young boys who disappeared and sailed west?
I wonder also if the anti-authoritarian streak came across with them. Was one the leader and the other a follower? Did they come to detest the system that had made stealing a pig necessary? Of the twelve Wallace cousins, almost half were against-the-grain kind of people, some of whom ended up way out in the desert avoiding other people as much as possible. One was a musician and his brother spoke proudly of his never having had an ordinary job. Does this hark back somehow to the days when the world seems aligned to lock you out, so that leaving for a faraway land is really the most reasonable alternative?
When I mentioned to my cousins that my book vision for this situation amounted to a mix of fact and fiction, they got a little jumpy. Really I'd like to document all the true stuff I know about this interesting family and the twelve cousins as we've come into our old age. I could change names, but I want to be able to hand it to my descendants and say, You want to know about Mom's side? The Wallace story is all in here...whether I've changed the names or what. But my idea really encompasses what happened to the Scotland they left, and whether those who stayed behind fared any better. And since I don't know anything about those who stayed behind, at least part of it would have to be fiction.
Of course, I could fill it all up with facts: fact about the era in which poor people were run off the land, facts about Scottish diaspora singers, writers, etc. in the US, facts even about Robert Burns, Ayrshire's most famous resident. What does it mean to be a Scottish exile? Maybe my first step should be knowing the difference between Scottish, Scot, Scotch, etc. so that I'm not out here misrepresenting everyone in my far-western, ignorant naivete. But one reason I envision projects like this is that I need to know this stuff myself, and now I at least will have the motivation to go out and find the story.
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