The first son of the family — and, after his Dad's death, the only — Tyr grew up one of those shy, quiet kids. With Dad on his drunken rampages, it's how you stayed out of the way. You didn't speak up. After his Dad's death, Tyr, aged seven, did what he could to help around the house with Mom. Family and friends and neighbors helped at first, but, as things go, they quickly forgot about Tyr and his Mom and Tyr had to put up with more than a few "friends" of his Mom that would end up staying for months — one time a year — over at the house. That never worked out well.
Tyr took to tinkering as he grew up, trying to fix some of the constantly-breaking farm equipment that his Mom relied on to try to keep the farm going with his Dad dead. But when you're a quiet geek in an Aerilon school, that meant you got shoved into lockers a lot. With that sort of "encouragement," Tyr became all the more introspective, taking to the Chess team and his keyboard that his Mom got him to try to give him "something productive to do than just sit around and read." Perhaps the only time Tyr ever stepped out of his shell is when he sang the jazzy songs he learned from the second-hand sheet music his Mom bought him.
It was this music that led him to meet Veronica. The two of them met when they were freshmen in high school. He was hiding out in the small music room in the high school playing the piano when she passed by on her way to study hall. Intrigued, she stopped by to hear who the soft-singing piano player was. Surprised to find it was the introverted geek, she stayed to listen more. They were soon inseparable.
Soon, graduation came. Veronica and Tyr were just as much in love as they were freshman year, but both of them knew that the Fleet would be the best way for Tyr to further his career. Enchanted by one of the Aerilon naval recruiter's pitches, Tyr and Veronica promised that they would wait for each other. Besides, it's a peacetime Fleet; maybe Tyr could even get assigned to a ship over Aerilon. And Tyr knew that he could save his enlistment bonus and a little bit of his pay to save for a ring. When he returned from his tour, they would be engaged and then married.
It was then that Tyr shipped off to basic and then AIT, where his nerdy nature let him qualify to train as an avionics technician, one of the "brains" of the flight deck. Then, freshly out of AIT, he got his first assignment: Battlestar Cerberus, one of the gems of the Colonial fleet.