Clancy Lyall

Clarence Odell Clancy Lyall served with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, in the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army during World War II. This unit would be popularized in the miniseries Band of Brothers based on the book by the same name.

Clancy Lyall was born in Orange, Texas. His father, Arthur Edward Lyall, who worked on ships transporting oil from the United States to Scotland, was a Scot. His mother, Beulah, was a fullblooded Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma. His father met his mother on a trip to the US after wanting to see the native peoples in Oklahoma. They married and Beulah eventually moved to Orange Texas to set up a farm. Clancy was raised for a time with his maternal Grandfather on the reservation while the farm was being built. Once the farm was completed Clancy attended a oneroom school and worked on his parents 120 acre farm in Orange until they moved to Pennsylvania in 1939. In the summers he would also cross the Sabine river to work in Louisiana, earning some money by picking Spanish moss for use as mattress batting. The skills he learned from the Cajuns in how to survive in the swamps would prove useful in his later military career as did the hunting and tracking skills taught to him by his Cherokee gra

Source: Wikipedia