Hi there!

My name is Lori Lyons and I am a genealogy addict.

The first step is to admit it, right? I am one of those people who stays up to the wee hours of the morning, trying to find the missing pieces of my family puzzle. I'm also not too shy to ask "who were your people?" to see if we may have a family connection.

I am the daughter of an English-Cajun man and an Irish-German woman. Their parents -- all born in Louisiana -- were a mixture of Cajun, English, French, Irish and German. Half of them were born in the big city of New Orleans, the other half down the bayou in Houma.

Here in Louisiana, we call people like me a Heinz 57.



For 57 varieties. Or a gumbo... maybe a spicy jambalaya.

I also am a Mayflower descendant and can claim a very thin link to the Royal Family of England (Queen Liz and I are 20th cousins once removed.). Some trees have me as the 15th great-granddaughter of King Ferdinand I and Queen Isabella II of Spain (but probably not).

I belong to the 31st generation of Lyons descended from Roger de Leonne, the first known of our esteemed line. I am the 12th generation of Lyon/Lyons in America, descendent from William Lyon, "The Immigrant," who came to Massachusetts from Harrow, England in 1635.

I belong to the 5th generation of Lyons in Louisiana, descended from Joseph Lucius Cincinatus Pitt Lyon, who came south from Illinois in 1849.

I have been putting together my family tree since the early 1990s. It was my grandmother who did all the work. The granddaughter of three different Louisiana plantation owners, she spent much of her free time chasing down relatives.

I would walk into her house and find her slumped over her dining room table, surrounded by books and scraps of paper. Sometimes she was asleep. I found quite a few papers with her pen mark scribbling off the page as she dozed off. I can only imagine what she might have accomplished if she had the Internet.

When she died in 1988, my mother asked me to go through Grannie's papers to see what was there. I spent a weekend hunched over my own dining room table -- and dozed off a few times myself. And I was hooked.

I think we have a fascinating story -- Knights, queens, kings, orphaned children placed on ships to the new world, entire families wiped out in a single shipwreck, soldiers, Patriots, plantations, Cajuns expelled from their homes, Civil War rebels.

And yes, slave-owners.

I spent my life as a journalist -- a storyteller. It's up to me to tell this one.

Like all good recipes, this will be a work in progress. Feel free to add your own ingredients -- give a little, take a little. And don't be afraid to let me know if you find a mistake. Genealogy is not an exact science.

So come on in. Sit a spell and take a look around. You might be related -- an ingredient in our family gumbo.

If so, welcome to the family!


Lori Lyons
Louisiana
email: thelyonsdin@gmail.com

Friday, April 15, 2022

Nectar, the food of the gods and the flavor of New Orleans

Written for The Lyon's Tales, the newsletter for the Lyon(s) Family Association

In Greek mythology, nectar is the food of the gods. But in New Orleans, nectar is one of just about everyone’s favorite flavor of snowballs (that’s a snow cone to you folks up north).  

Hot pink and super sweet, it is on the menu of every corner snowball stand in southeast Louisiana – and there are many of those. But back in my mama’s day, back when every drug store had a soda counter inside, nectar also used to be a flavor you could order in your soda or milkshake. A Nectar Soda used to be one of my favorites when I was little as well. But now that drug store soda counters have gone the way of full-service gas stations, the nectar soda has all but disappeared and is pretty much just a snowball flavor. ‘Tis a pity, too.

So imagine my joy and surprise to learn that the famous (to us) New Orleans nectar was, in fact, created by a man named Lyons!

Isaac L. Lyons was born in Columbia, South Carolina, but moved to New Orleans just before the start of the Civil War. He enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private but eventually achieved the rank of captain. After the war, he opened a wholesale pharmaceutical supply company under the name Tucker & Lyons. That eventually changed to Ball & Lyons and, finally, to I.L. Lyons, Ltd.

Of course, Lyons’ drugstore storefront had a soda fountain inside and one day he mixed up a delicious pink concoction he called “nectar,” and which soon became ubiquitous at New Orleans soda fountains.

You still can buy nectar if you know where to look and don’t confuse it for hummingbird nectar. All the snowball stands have it, of course, so any snowball supply company has nectar. There are some specialty shops in New Orleans that sell it, along with pure cane syrup (that’s another story for another day). Even Walmart has a version of it.

If you get your hands on some, here is the recipe for an old-fashioned New Orleans nectar soda: Put about an inch of nectar syrup in the bottom of your fancy ice cream soda glass, add a scoop of vanilla ice cream, then pour soda water/seltzer over the ice cream. The nectar will fizz to the top. Add whipped cream and a cherry. Nectar is also good in vanilla milkshakes or just poured over vanilla ice cream, but take heed – it’s very, very sweet. 

I have no idea if Isaac was a relative or not. He does not show up in my particular family tree and I can’t connect him to the first of my lot to come to Louisiana, but that is not to say that he was not a cousin of ours. In fact, it was one of my own cousins who led me to this discovery during a recent visit to the Rural Life Museum in Baton Rouge. There, she discovered a couple of bottles stamped with “I.L. Lyons & Co.” She texted me to ask if he was a relative. I had to look him up and found this amazing story.

Even if he’s not a direct relative, we both will claim him.