We Can't All Be Descended from Napoleon or Pocahontas

I've always wanted to fill in some of the details of my admittedly sketchy knowledge of my ancestors. The facts were few and often contradictory. Among the smattering of things that my sister Peg and I knew for certain was that our mother's paternal grandfather came from Alsace-Lorraine and her paternal grandmother was from Hamburg and spoke high German. Our mother would tell us this in such reverential tones that, even though we had no idea what was so high about high German, we knew this was, for her, a source of great pride. We even used this as a way to explain how different our mother was from her shall-we-say "earthier" sister Eleanor. Aunt Eleanor was loud and likely to chop up the furniture for firewood or refinish all the floors in the house without asking for--or even wanting--anyone's help. Our mother was soft-spoken and partial to wearing white gloves. She was more refined, we surmised, because she had spent much of her childhood with her Hochdeutsch-speaking German grandmother. Now, thanks to a few old census records, I've learned that my revered high German great-grandmother was named Annie and was apparently the daughter of Irish immigrants. Go figure!

About my father's family, I knew even less. He always told us he was Irish, but when mom would get mad at him, she'd occasionally refer to him as a "damn limey." Again, go figure! Of one thing I am fairly certain: when my father would tell me that we were descended from Sir Richard O'Lyons of the Third Royal Fusiliers, he was bestowing a bit of the blarney. I use the term "blarney" in the belief that, despite my mother's epithet, he was in fact a son of the Emerald Isle (the census records seem to support this). Are we descended from Sir Richard? Who knows. I rather hope not if he's the Sir Richard Lyons (an Englishman whose name lacked the O') that I stumbled across in my research, the one who was "killed in a riot--possibly for selling bad meat to the troops" back in 1383. 

As you might imagine, it was with some trepidation that, after this initial foray into genealogical research, I decided to see what more I could find out about my roots. Who knows what other parts of our cherished family history would turn out to be more accurately described as family mythology. So far it's been pretty frustrating: there's not an uncommon surname in the batch, and the given names of four generations seem to be limited to Johns, Marys, Catherines, Patricks and Bridgets. These were, mind you, people who had enormous numbers of children, but apparently they subscribed to the George Foreman school of child-naming. Nevertheless, I intend to forge onward and use this blog to occasionally post updates on what I find. I can't guarantee what form this will take, though given my own inclinations and familial tendencies, I expect that it will veer more towards storytelling than the recitation of hard data. I will try not to lie or turn any Germans Irish or vice versa. But I won't promise not to add some imagination to the mix in an effort to give life to what little I find about these people whose lives perhaps went largely unnoticed by the movers and shakers of history, but with whose lives my own is so thoroughly entwined.