Pandas question

[DPaul]

Hi,
I now have been handed a bunch of legacy excel files.
The author had the good idea to put two header rows, but both have column names i want.
So I do:

xls = panda.read_excel(exel,header = 1,sheet_name = 'Sheet1')

But: some headers take up the 2 rows (0 and 1), others have something in row zero, and something in row 1 , like this:
..... | Family Name and firstnames..... |
NR | Name | Firstname | second name | etc...

When I specify header = 0, I can't get the second row names , when header = 1 the "NR" field is not recognised.
This happens 4 times. in the header rows. All excels are like this.
Remedy ?
Or skip the headers?
thx,
Paul