Richard Lee Lyons, a long-time resident of Palm Harbor, Florida, passed away on July 15, 2025. He was born on Christmas Eve, 1941, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where his father was stationed, to Robert E. and Nancy Lee Lyons, the eldest of four children.  After WWII ended the family settled in Northern Virginia; he spent his childhood there and in Asheville and Waynesville, North Carolina, where he often stayed for extended periods of time with his grandparents and other members of his mother’s family. This experience probably contributed to his lifelong interest in genealogy and family history.

After graduating from high school, where he played football and ran track, he started his college career at American University in Washington, D.C. He subsequently continued his college studies at George Washington University and the University of Virginia before ultimately earning a bachelor’s degree in geography from George Mason University.

He was a 34 year employee of the federal government, serving 23 years with the Department of Defense’s Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, D.C. in highly classified positions during the Cold War. He then made a career move to the Department of Interior; he worked for the next 6 years for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Arizona Project in Phoenix, Arizona. This was the initiative to bring water from the Colorado River to the cities of Phoenix and Tucson and to farmlands and indigenous communities. As this project began to wind down, he transferred to the Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he spent the last 6 years of his career working with the National Wetlands Inventory’s mission to map wetlands on military bases around the country.

Upon retiring in 1996 he was able to devote his time and talents to his passions which, in addition to genealogy, included chess, origami, stamp collecting, vintage aircraft, woodworking, vintage Indian motorcycles, and the histories of the Civil War and World Wars I and II. He was a Mason. He authored a work on the history of motorcycle racing in the 1940s and 1950s and he was in demand for his expertise in the field of antique motorcycles.

His marriage to Margarita Hurtado of the Panama Canal Zone lasted 63 years and resulted in two daughters, Julia (Jon) and Carolyn (Jim), four grandchildren, Zachary, Christopher, Brittany and Claudia, and seven great grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother, William, and a sister, Mary Jane. Another brother, James, predeceased him.

He will be buried in Andrew Chapel Cemetery in Northern Virginia among other family members.