The Lucas of Youghal: where two lines meet
A small family with an outsized role. By tradition, the Lucas family came to Ireland with Sir Walter Raleigh around 1580, settling in Youghal as merchants. Jasper Lucas of Youghal (d. 1710) is the meeting-point of two of my lines: his daughter Frances Lucas married Joseph Travers in 1735 (Chapter 3), while his great-granddaughter Dorothea Lucas married Richard Smyth (Chapter 9). So Jasper Lucas is my 7× great-grandfather twice over, by two separate descents that meet in him. And Youghal is the town where Spenser wrote, a coincidence I come back to in Chapter 14.
John Travers, the settler, married Sarah, sister of the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, who was then seated at Kilcolman in Co. Cork. So the great Elizabethan poet is a brother of my 10× great-grandmother: Spenser is, by blood, in my family. (More on what that does, and does not, make of the Diana story in Chapter 14.)
And one marriage here gives me a Hyde kinship that is real: a Lucas of Youghal married Elizabeth Hyde of Castle Hyde, of the Cork Hydes whose seat on the Blackwater lay among Spenser's own neighbours, so I am genuinely kin-by-marriage to those Hydes, if not to the royal Hydes of Clarendon that a shared surname elsewhere likes to promise (see "The Stuart queens").