From: dmac@julia.math.ucla.edu (saki)
Subject: Re: Alfred Lennon
Organization: UCLA Mathematics Department
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 01:12:29 GMT

In article <1992Sep14.193051.8337@nsisrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> alex@tpocc.gsfc.nasa.gov (Alex Measday) writes:
>I'm posting these for a friend, Don Sauter, who doesn't have access to
>USENET....
>
>On 8Feb92, Saki posted some info on John's family tree.  It was pretty 
>consistent with Davies, Coleman and the WALLS AND BRIDGES booklet.  To 
>summarize, John's grandfather *Jack* came to Liverpool from Ireland and 
>had sung in the Kentucky Minstrels in America.  However, it doesn't jibe 
>well with what Aunt Mimi found out.
>
>In the early '70s, John was apparently quite interested in his ancestry, 
>to the extent of hiring and sending a genealogist to Liverpool.  In 1973, 
>Aunt Mimi sent an audio letter to John.  (Fragments of this tape were played 
>on at least 3 Lost Lennon Tape episodes.)....
>
>Anyhow, Mimi apparently had checked out some of Alfred Lennon's (John's 
>father) claims about his father with Sid Lennon, Alfred's brother (John's 
>uncle). 

Although I have a vague memory of seeing an actual genealogical tree
for the Lennon family drawn up somewhere, I'm unable to locate it
and may well be mistaken (it might have been a tree of the British
royal family or ancient pharaohs, all of whom are occasionally
intermixed with Beatles in my mind. :-) And while I recall that
there may well have been a passel of young Lennon children left
orphaned by John's grandad (among whom would have been young Alfred
Lennon, John's father), I don't offhand recall a Sid Lennon, nor
can I locate a reference to said Sid. There is a Charles; Charles
was quoted by Ray Coleman. He may have been the source for the
information Coleman offers about John's grandad "Jack" Lennon
having been born in Dublin in the 1850's, rather than Alfred
Lennon himself being the source. By the time Coleman was working
on John's bio, "the ignoble Alf" (as John called him) had been
dead for some years. 

I don't know if Alfred was the source for the story about "Jack"
joining the Kentucky Minstrels, who were said to have toured the
U.S. as singers in the nineteenth century. It's clear that musical
legends abound in the Lennon family, even if they turn out to be
only the urban variety. By his own admission, Alfred was quite
the vocalist himself.

I'm rather surprised that Aunt Mimi found herself speaking to any
member of the Lennon clan, even this mysterious Sid. The Stanley
women were not enamoured of the Lennon side of the family (even
the late Julia seemed to have grown weary of Alfred's charisma
after just a few years) and to my knowledge did not hobnob with
John's paternal relatives. But Mimi's actual voice would be
interesting evidence (if authenticated...and I assume everything
on "The Lost Lennon Tapes" has been authenticated? :-) I'd also
be curious to find out whether Coleman based his research on a
copy of Jack Lennon's birth certificate from Dublin or just repeated
accepted Lennon legends. It bears further investigation. If Sid is
or was indeed one of Lennon's uncles and flatly refutes the story
of the Kentucky Minstrels, it ought to be verified. Perhaps
the Liverpool town hall still keeps birth certificates from the
1850's, and someone could check whether "Jack" was born there
or not?
--
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"And when I plugged 'er in she just blew up."
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saki (dmac@math.ucla.edu)
Organization: Junior, Architecture, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA