Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York. He is the son of Mary Lee, a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III (died 1984), an electrical engineer. Cruise has three sisters, Lee Anne, Marian, and Cass. Cruise's surname originates from his great-grandfather, born Thomas Cruise O'Mara, who was renamed "Thomas Cruise Mapother" (Mapother is a Welsh surname). Cruise is of Irish, German and English ancestry. One of his paternal great-great-great-grandfathers, Patrick Russell Cruise, was born in North County Dublin, in 1799; he married Teresa Johnson in Warrenstown House, County Meath, in 1825. They left Ireland for America that same year and settled in New York.