Roots and wings

Mary Kay/Mom/Honey

Mary Kay (Heffernan) Renshaw, 91, died on December 12, 2006, after a short illness, in Tempe, AZ.

Mary Kay was born Dec. 6, 1915, in Miami, FL, to David and Lillian Heffernan. The Heffernans were active in the early building of Miami. Mary Kay attended the University of Miami, wrote for the Miami Beach News Service and talked her way in to a job with an exciting young airline – Pan American Airways. In 1941, she married Downer Renshaw, of Miami Beach, a Pan Am pilot. Over the next 33 years, they took advantage of all that being a Pan Am pilot had to offer. They accepted assignments in foreign countries – Barranquilla, Colombia (1942-43), Johannesburg, South Africa (1948 – 49) and Lisbon, Portugal (1957-1958). Mary Kay, whose motto was "there’s always room for one more," traveled the world, often with her six children in tow. She was an active member of her college sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma.

She lived in Fairfield County, CT, from 1949 until 1974, when she moved to Tempe. She opened and ran Knit Wits, a needlework store in Tempe, for five years until she decided to retire to a well earned life enjoying time with her family and friends. She continued to travel extensively, only recently declaring each trip to be her last one. But her family continued to find places she wanted to go, so she never retired her "always packed" Pan Am flight bag.

Mary Kay is survived by her sons Claude Renshaw of South Bend, IN, and Mark Renshaw, Gilbert, AZ; her daughters, Tia Renshaw, Phoenix, Julie Renshaw, Tempe, Lucia Renshaw, Phoenix, and Amy Renshaw Kyle, Tucson. She also is survived by 12 grandchildren and one great grandchild -- who all called her "Honey" and meant every word of it. She also is survived by "the Renshaw Outlaws," the group of people who married her children – Mary Ellen Renshaw, Mike Yarnell, Andy Philippakis and Bruce Covill.

Private memorial services will be held for family and friends in Tempe. Her final resting place will be in Miami Memorial Gardens, Miami, FL, with her parents and brothers.

The family requests that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to Hospice of the Valley 1510 E. Flower Street Phoenix, AZ 85014-5656.

Dennis Lyons Descendants (rev Oct 10, 2006)

To help you navigate the Lyons family stories, here is the lineage chart, showing the direct descendants of Dennis Lyons, Mary Kay's great grandfather on her maternal side.   

Descendants of Dennis Lyons.

Nana and Poppy - September 29, 1913

HEFFERNAN –  LYONS.  Former E Weymouth man, now a resident of Florida, weds well-known young woman of Quincy.

  Wedding announcement, 1913.

Lillian Lyons (Nana) and Dave Heffernan (Poppy) met while he was attending law school at Northeastern in Boston.  At that time, he was also working Cunard Lines and happened to sail to Miami which he loved.  He moved there immediately.   When he finished his law studies two years later, he wrote his marriage proposal in a letter, returned to Boston, and returned to Miami with the former Lillian Lyons.

   M. Lillian Lyons, 1913. Engagement photo (age  26) 

This was quite a move. In 1913, Miami was so young - the total population was only 1,500. Nana told me one time that her family thought that alligators roamed the streets of Miami. Between their two families, there were 12 siblings. Nana and Poppy were the only ones to leave the Boston area.

They prospered and grew along with Miami. They also worked hard to help build their community. In addition to Poppy’s career in law, both Nana and Poppy were very active in the civic and religious growth of Southern Florida – they were founding members of the Knights of Columbus, the Elks St Vincent de Paul Society (President of the Chapter for over 20 years), Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce and Catholic Daughters of America, to name a few.

Poppy started out as an attorney practicing law. He was the first Catholic to enter legal practice on the east coast south of St Augustine. In 1925, he was appointed Judge of the Dade County Police Court. (According to family legend, he was on the "red light" beat.) He was appointed Judge of the Civil Court of Record from 1937 until his retirement in 1959.

His first appointment to the court in 1925 was controversial because Poppy was Catholic. It took active support and involvement of John Martin, then governor of Florida, for Poppy’s appointment to be approved. In a letter to Poppy on his retirement, former Governor Martin said it was one of the best decisions he had ever made and he was quite proud for it.

Starting a family brought sorrow as well as joy.  They gave birth to 8 children, only 3 survived.  The 5 died near birth, victims of the Rh factor - generally, incompatible blood types between mother and fetus.  They were called "blue babies". Mary Kay recently told me the story of the last child's death.  Mary Kay must have been about 10.  She and Poppy were leaving the hospital after visiting Nana.  Poppy just sat at the steering wheel and sobbed while Mary Kay looked on, helpless. The cause of this condition and a cure was finally discovered in 1940.  This condition is now very rare.

  , The Heffernans, 1924 and 1942.

They raised three children - Mary Kay Renshaw, Father David Heffernan and Paul Heffernan.   Mary Kay describes her childhood as that of "a spoiled, Irish daughter".   Mary Kay assumes that they were somewhat insulated from the Great Depression because Poppy's job was secure.  Mom remembers that they shared their good fortune with others in the form of service, donations and many people over for dinner often.

In September, 1963, Nana and Poppy celebrated their 50th Wedding Anniversary the way they did many other things – surrounded by family and friends, with great joy and enthusiasm.

     September 29, 1963.

When Nana died in 1971, they had been married for 58 years. Not bad for childhood sweethearts turned pioneers.

Family history...what's up with that?

I'm going to Prince Edward Island next week to continue Lyons family research.  I've wanted to make this trip for 8 years since I first started the Lyons family history obsession research.  This is a little of that story.

In September 1997, I saw one of those eye-catching, impossible-to-believe ads in the Sunday paper: Ireland for a week for an amount that sounded too low to cover food let alone airfare and hotels. I soon discovered the reason for the low price – very few tourists go to Ireland in November. Not only is it a slow vacation time in general, but Ireland is cold and rainy in November. The only variant to that weather norm is that it could get "very" cold and "very" rainy. But I knew the exact right person for a traveling companion – Mary Kay. She’s never let a little weather bother her.

Up to that point, Ireland hadn’t been on my radar screen as a travel destination. But suddenly it seemed like a perfect trip to take with Mary Kay. Her parents - Nana, Margaret Lillian Lyons and Poppy, David J. Heffernan - were both Irish.  Even though there were only five weeks ‘till our departure, I decided to use the trip as an opportunity to research the roots of Mary Kay's Irish families.

To say that Mary Kay is not nostalgic is a great understatement. Her philosophy for life is grounded quite firmly in the here and now. Yesterday? Old news. Her response to the genealogy research project was a quick, "Whatever for?" She accepted it as something that would amuse me.

Needless to say, she had no clues for me to start my search. So first I turned to my collection of family scrapbooks, which yielded nothing of immediate value – no birth dates, no mention of great grandparent names, not even the names of the siblings in the families just one generation up. It seemed the entire family had evolved some anti-nostalgia gene. The struggle was disappointing. I was running out of time.

I got my big break in the newspaper wedding announcement about Nana and Poppy's 1913 wedding. I had read the article many times in my life but on this particular reading, I found a clue. The final line – the mention of the bride’s  (Nana, nee Margaret Lillian Lyons) deceased father, Matthew Lyons – included the fact that he had been a member of a fraternal organization. I called the national headquarters to see if they had and record of members from 1900, the year I estimated his death. No. But the helpful fellow mentioned that one of the major benefits of fraternal organizations at that time was the ability to buy life insurance. "Perhaps your great grandfather bought a life insurance policy that paid a death benefit," he suggested. He gave me the phone number for the appropriate department to research life insurance claims. I hit the mother lode! A death benefit had been paid in 1899, and this one record was a genealogical Christmas tree – it had names, birth dates, death dates, and addresses. I was off…

In the next three weeks, I dedicated many hours to the researching the Lyons.  I leveraged the information from the insurance benefit payment and ended up tracing Mary Kay's family back to the first generation of immigrants who traveled to Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia from Ireland in 1835 and 1845. (Matthew's father, Dennis Lyons, and mother, Margaret Costello Lyons) Unfortunately, I ran out of time and couldn’t "jump the pond" and trace the immigrants to their place of origin in Ireland. No problem. I had read about the National Genealogical Society in Dublin. They helped people with just this sort of thing. So I would visit them while we were in Dublin.

I had kept Mary Kay informed about the breakthroughs while doing the research. It was fun to sense her interest build over the course of a few weeks. She became engaged and even started looking forward to finding "the town" her family was from. We naively let ourselves get carried away with the enthusiasm.

Mary Kay and I arrived in Ireland as people undergoing a transformation. Throughout our lives we had dutifully reported that we were Irish when asked about our ancestry. While growing up, people would peg me as Irish because of my red hair. Mary Kay's favorite college football team always has been Notre Dame – yes, the Fighting Irish. There was some vague sense of affinity but there had never been a real connection. But by the time we arrived in Ireland, we felt truly connected. We belonged to all of Ireland. We were no longer tourists. We were Irish.

This enhanced our experience in many ways. We went to an Irish dinner and show at Bunratty Castle – something I would normally have avoided because it was too "touristy". In fact it was 40 percent corny but 60 percent great fun. Tears filled our eyes when some Dennis O’Day sound-alike started singing "When Irish Eyes are Smiling." I was so excited driving through County Clare that I almost got into an accident for all my gawking. I wanted to take in every sight, sound and smell that my ancestors may have lived. We were much more attentive to even the smallest of details. We talked to every cab driver in Dublin. "What do you call traffic lights in Dublin?" my mother asked. "A damn nuisance!" the driver shot back. It reminded us of our own sense of humor – we laughed hysterically and felt another tug of connection.

The most surprising emotional moment came when I was standing in Kilmainham Jail – the site of the British executions of the Irish rebel leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising. Those executions triggered a civil war in Ireland that led to the separation of Ireland into North and South six years later. I knew about the "troubles" in Ireland since its ugly resurgence in the ‘70s. But I had never been able to piece the information together. As a result of reading about Ireland for this trip, the tour guide’s commentary and standing there, it all came together. I got it. And I found another connection. I remembered that in Nana and Poppy's scrapbooks – where I had started my genealogy search and found "nothing" – my grandparents had pasted clippings of articles about Ireland’s long struggle for freedom. Even in the sunny light and prosperous life in southern Florida, Mary Kay's parents were still connected. After all, they were Irish.

Now more than ever, I wanted to make the final "jump". I headed to the National Genealogical Society to do some research. I was so excited at the prospect of finding more connections that I wasn’t bothered a bit by the downpour as I walked.

That visit turned into one of my worst travel experiences. Ever. I ended up talking to a man who should not be working with the public, let alone in a library built primarily for tourists. He basically "lectured"  me that there was no way I was going to find my family. He intimated that I was completely unprepared and was wasting his time. On top of that, closing time was in 45 minutes so there was no reason to start a project then. I’m not a person who’s easily dumbfounded. Yet I was standing there, with my mouth open, unable to petition my case on even the smallest scale, and holding back tears. I couldn’t believe this bureaucratic nincompoop was blowing me off. It was his job to help me!

The entire visit took less than 10 minutes. I left the library crestfallen. I did start crying. I think more at the crashing disappointment after such a long, wonderful, heady buildup. I walked in the rain, mapping out my revenge. Then I started trying to figure out how I could find the information I needed to close the loop. Then I started thinking about where I could go for the hour or so that had just been freed up. I found great comfort at Fred Hanna's, a wonderful bookstore where I bought several books on Ireland.

When I got back to the hotel, I told Mary Kay the story – over a glass of Irish whisky, of course. I polished it with my best Irish story-telling skills. The whole incident eventually became quite funny, amusing both of us to no end, setting the stage for another wonderful evening on the town in Dublin.

As it turns out, my mother and I are very resilient. After all, we’re Irish.

PS. Mary Kay's maiden name is "Lyons". We discovered a tiny town in County Cork named "Castlelyons" and made a side trip to see it. To our delight and amazement, we discovered that Castlelyons was the town of our family’s origin.

Blarney or not, that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.