Preliminary Conclusions: Is There a Lew Wallace Connection?

Family history in the Shult and Pease families has long held that we are somehow related to Lew Wallace, who achieved fame as a civil war general and as the author of the classic novel, Ben Hur. A document compiled by Virginia Helland Ash in the early-mid 20^th century makes two claims about our family’s link with Lew:

·         That the Shult family’s Wallace ancestor, William Wallace, emigrated to the US with his brother, the father of Lew.

·         That Miller Allen Wallace, brother of our direct ancestor Benjamin Franklin Wallace and son of William Wallace, was a second cousin to Lew.

These claims are not substantiated in the document, but I’ve set out to find out what I can about them. The Ash document contains multiple errors, and its facts must be corroborated before it can be taken as fact.

Benjamin, Miller and William Wallace

The information we have on Benjamin and Miller Wallace shows that they were brothers, both born in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s to William Wallace and Bethiah Steel. While no vital records (birth, death, or marriage certificates held at the state or county level) have been located, county researchers in Huntingdon Co., PA, have confirmed that William Wallace and his wife lived in Huntingdon and Franklin counties in the 1800s, and correspondence with several sources researching different Wallace lines have provided corroboration of Benjamin and Millers births, as well as the births of their ten siblings.

Preliminary research on William Wallace (called William II from here on) indicates that he was born around 1774, in Ireland. His father is also reported to have been a William Wallace (called William I for the remainder), born around 1760, although this date is approximate and unlikely, given William II’s birth date just 14 years later. William I was born in Scotland, and reportedly was sent with family members and other countrymen to Ireland by the king of England, as part of a measure to gain ground in Ireland. These people became known as the Scotch-Irish. According to historical sources, the Scottish colonists in Ireland mainly kept to themselves, and tended to marry within their nationality rather than marry the Irish. Many of them left Ireland in the 18^th century and early 19^th century for the US. 

We don’t have emigration dates for William II, but it appears that he left for America somewhere in the later years of the 18^th century, because his first child was born in the US in 1802. An original document from Virginia Helland Ash states his birthdate as 1790, but this has been proven incorrect by the discovery of a record dating his birth as 1774. I wonder, therefore, if 1790 may have been his emigration date, but this is pure conjecture.

Lew Wallace

While our own family’s Wallace branch isn’t well documented, we have a partial advantage in trying to trace this link in that Lew Wallace’s ancestry is very thoroughly documented in multiple locations, including several published biographies, an autobiography, and the Lew Wallace museum in Crawfordsville, IN. I made a trip there in the summer of 1996 and copied a 6’ by 6’ genealogy chart of Lew’s ancestors.

Lew Wallace’s family also seems to have been part of the Scotch-Irish colonization. The earliest Wallace in Lew’s history is a Peter Wallace, noted on the chart as a Scottish Highlander born in 1680. He and his family were in Ireland by 1706, when his first recorded child is born to an Elizabeth Wood. Elizabeth and her six Wallace children emigrated as a group to the Pennsylvania in 1724 after Peter’s death. Among the children are Andrew Wallace, the great great grandfather of Lew Wallace, and a brother William Wallace, but his birth date and emigration date remove him from the possibility of being our ancestor, and make it seem unlikely that Virginia’s story of Lew’s father and his brother, our ancestor, emigrating together. Our ancestor was still in Ireland 36 years after Lew’s ancestor made the journey to Pennsylvania, and Lew’s father was not born for another 54 years. 

However, there are striking similarities between the two groups. Both were Scotch-Irish colonists, a tight-knit community that tended to keep to itself. Both made the journey to Pennsylvania, and family legends persisted a connection between the two families that has endured for almost two hundred years. It seems possible that these two Wallace groups were, in fact, related, although perhaps not as closely as we have been told.

The two charts below sum up the known lineage of the two families, corresponding the location of each family by approximate generation:

Second Cousins?

Virginia Helland Ash states that Miller (and by extension, his brother Benjamin) Wallace were the second cousins of General Lew Wallace. For this to be true, that would mean that Benjamin, Miller, and Lew would have to have the same great grandfather. Investigation proves this unlikely to be true, even without knowing exactly who Benjamin and Miller’s great grandfather was.

The evidence:  first, Lew’s great grandfather was Michael Wallace, born in 1734 in this country.  For Benjamin and Miller to be Lew’s second cousin, Michael Wallace must also be their great grandfather. However, this seems impossible. As you can see from the previous chart, Benjamin and Miller’s grandfather was supposedly born in Scotland in or around 1760, and his father would need to be Lew’s great grandfather, Michael Wallace. Although Michael is old enough to be the father of William Wallace I in 1760, he is in the entirely wrong place to make this a likely scenario.

This second cousin theory could only be true if one of the following were true:

·         If the information we have on William I is completely incorrect and he was somehow born in the USA rather than Scotland, then returned to Ireland to have William II. This seems unlikely.

·         If William I was in fact the child of Michael, but was born when Michael was on a trip overseas. Again, this seems improbable to the point of absurdity. Even if this were true, Michael would undoubtedly have brought the child back to Virginia with him, and William’s son would have subsequently been born in the US, not in Ireland.

A more likely explanation:  perhaps the original source of this information had difficulty sorting out the confusing relationship between distant cousins, and said second cousins when in fact the connection was much more remote.

A More Likely Scenario

Given the supposition that Benjamin and Lew were, in fact, some form of cousins, it’s interesting to look at what might allow this scenario to be possible. We’re given a slight hint on how the two families could have been related by the fact that we have the exact locations of Lew’s family in Scotland, Ireland, and the US at regular intervals (almost to the decade) throughout the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries. Matching these up to the reported locations of our own Wallace group, and the following appears to be possible:  that Benjamin, Miller and Lew were in fact fifth cousins, with their common ancestor not being Lew’s father, Andrew, as originally posited by Virginia Helland Ash, or Michael Wallace, as the second cousin theory necessitates, but the Scottish Highlander Peter Wallace himself.