Napoleon's soldier--the story of a name

Anton Simonovič, my father's father was a good storyteller. Tony the tailor, as he was affectionately known in town, was suiting up the gentlemen of Bedford, Ohio, when I came into the world--in fact, I don't believe I had a pair of store-bought pants until I was about seven year, when my Mom bought me corduroy knickers to wear to school. 

For the neighborhood kids Tony was also a favorite guy to hang out with. He took them fishing in Tinker's creek and spun tales, I suspect in various degrees of tall. 

"Once upon a time," he began, "there was a soldier whose name was Simon, marching in the infantry of Napoleon. When the Corsican decided to trek to Moscow, this supposedly French ancestor thought that Vienna might be a better place to spend the winter, so he went AWOL and headed south. Ultimately he settled in the Krainer country, where his children became, in the last days of patronymics there, 'Simonovič." 

And so, the name stuck, and it came with my grandfather who, as a young court tailor's apprentice in the days of empire, came to New York to study fashion. He stayed. He had relatives in New Jersey, but ultimately sent for his young wife Barbara and his daughter Kate to join him from Austria and settled on Ohio. He opened a tiny shop and eventually invested in a few gentleman farmer acres in the town of Macedonia.  

There the story would have ended, had not my father got tired of being called, "Simonovič, the son of a bitch!" Immigration, intimidation, assimilation!