Up a Tree

I promised a dive into the British peerage system for this post, and we'll get to it in just a bit.  Before that, I ran across a bit of a surprise as I began looking into some of the documents about my closer family members while taking advantage of a trial membership on Ancestry.com. In one of the censuses, I found out that in 1930, my dad's family lived in Hoboken, NJ. Hoboken, y'all. I can remember when it used to be popular to make jokes about the city.  Hoboken, by the way, is where Frank Sinatra was born, six years before my father, so he would have been in high school -- if he went to high school; I don't know his history -- while my father was in elementary school.  Dad and family wound up in the Bronx, and I remember in my early years how people would comment on his accent. I can remember him saying "deese" and "dose" (pronounced "doze") and "dat." After spending about half or more of his life in Texas, though, the accent...