Sadly no. My brother Ted took our family tree back to year 1525 but did not find anyone famous or notable.

Ted did uncover some interesting facts about the Pylant family:
The original spelling was Pielandt.

Pielandt has since been converted to many different spellings; Pylant, Pilant, Pyland, Piland, etc, etc, etc.

No matter how it’s spelled, we’re all related.

Ted may not have found any famous ancestors, but I insist we have notable current Pylant family members.

My younger brother Gene Paul/Jeep had acting ambitions ever since he played the lead in Music Man in high school. Even though he had a college degree, he chose an acting career and Hollywood. He was one of the FBI agents in E.T., his biggest part.

Ted was the brainiac of our family. He spent his entire career with the same aerospace corporation. His security clearance meant none of the family knew exactly what his job involved.

Besides being a brainiac, Ted was just a very good person.

Our Grandmother Howard was an only child.
Her mother, Martha, was said to have ‘lost her mind’ during childbirth.
Could this have been postpartum depression? We’ll never know.

Martha’s husband George Mapp, our great-grandfather, committed her to a sanitarium in Alabama.

I hate to think what a sanitarium in Alabama was like in 1885.

It is said that George Mapp was a wealthy landowner and that our Grandmother Howard was raised a privileged, only child.

Grandmother Howard, she was my ‘French’ Grandmother you remember, told me herself that she had a pony and also had a nanny when growing up.

When Grandmother Howard wanted to marry Dock Lushel Howard, her father was so against it, he disowned her.

After Grandmother and Dock Lushel married they had six children.
Dock Lushel eventually committed suicide leaving Grandmother a widow, poor and with six children.

It was during this time when Grandmother received a letter from the Alabama sanitarium telling her, ‘You can come get your mother now’.

Grandmother simply didn’t have the money to bring her mother from Alabama to Oklahoma; a mother she had never even known.

Great-grandmother Martha was left in the sanitarium until she died.
Martha was buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of the Alabama sanitarium.

Here is where I can tell you what a good man Ted Pylant was.

He traveled to Alabama, found Martha’s grave on the grounds of the sanitarium and placed a grave marker there.

We may not have any notable people in our family tree, but it just depends on how you define ‘notable’.

– Sue Williams