The Irish is obvious in my name, but there's Alsatian German on my mother's side - from the Pfaffenschnick gouged on the Rhine's west side. There Sigfried slew one of the giants that built Valhalla (Faffed had slowly petrified into a lazy dragon whilst guarding his murder gold).

We can't know if those Snyders descended from the Niebulungen dwarves that sang this legend about Siegfried's Rhineland journey, later men repeating it amongst themselves, or wandering Jewish tailors evicted by war tides surging through Alsace (as the name's German connotation suggests).

Only a family bible saved from Glidden, Iowa mentions Drachensbrunn as the town of origin. Now renamed Birlenbach, the village crouches in its gulch as French Mirage jets scream overhead - Furies from the military airfield squatting on the Rhenish bluffs above.

I know - I've crouched nervously there myself;
as Faffed may have trembled.


A little English, from maternal greatgrandfather Bamford who was a Judge as Cherokees were stripped of their tribal lands in now Oklahoma . . .

The Irish stories are more plentiful -- if homely.  2 brothers stole a cake from a British wedding, and had to take ship so the rest of the clan would not be turned out of their "Barrony of the Burren" in County Clare on the southern shore of Galway Bay. It is stoutly asserted that my ancestor was NOT the O'Loghlen conspiring with John Wilkes Booth!  But just after the Civil War, as railroads pushed west, he dropped off the the end of the line in eastern Iowa to found a tent store and eventual brick mercantile, Rome, IA.

Shipping local cattle to Chicago's stockyards, my father followed the pulse of rural electrification back to jazz filled lights of the Roaring 20's. WWII put him in an Army tank corps camp, waiting to be shipped over -  when I was born. War's end and ever after saw him washing back and forth across the continent, looking for a main chance.

The mythic legends of patrimony
depend on mothers' accuracy.

This is no idle slur,
in that wives usually move into
their husband's home;
blurring the remembered continuity
of residence, inheritance, and lineage.

In Ireland I've felt the crissXcrossed bones of 1,000 years ancestry below my feet. How to know the shifting intentions of their deaths? A princely line of castles with the O'Loghlen name defended upland cattle country in Hy Burren from similar O'Brien interests. Besides that . . . The King of Loch Lann was the king of the "sea people" seals and silkies . . . Lochlann was the name of a Viking King of Norway last driven off in a great battle on the River Shannon . . . What led one branch to take the Ologhlen label when the Connochobar sept split (those "lovers of hounds") propelling the O'Conners into the 10th most common family name in Ireland - contrasting with mine own's obscurity . . . O Lochlan was one of two joint kings of all Ireland for the year 1025 A.D. while a high king was in the choosing (but that was certainly a variant from the MacLachlan sept in the Ulster O'Neal domain) . . . There is a Book of the O'Laughlin's - but it is in Gaelic, and I cannot read it . . . We cringed before Cromwell, but stood bravely forth as Fennians while the Republic consolidated . . . These sons of Mil who wandered out of Syria through Aegypt, tarrying on the Iberian Peninsula before springing over seas to drive the magical Tuatha da Danna underground as the Faeries of Ireland . . .
Then find friends and fiends on foreign fields . . .