introducing the towsons

I feel like genealogists often have a "main family" that spurs their interest, that family name that they always come back to. For a lot of folks that main family seems to be the surname that they were born with. For me, my interest lies in my mother's family name.



Growing up in Harford County, Maryland, my mother would always clarify the spelling of her name by adding "like the place"– the county seat of the neighboring county, just 45 minutes away, is Towson. Visiting my great-grandmother in her nursing home, I remember sitting on her balcony and looking out over the huge Towson Town Center shopping mall and feeling like royalty. It didn't hurt that family legend said that it was our family that Towson was named after.

It was only after my great-grandmother died in 2006 that I really started to take an interest in uncovering my Towson family heritage. Of course, I had just lost my best possible informant. Born 11/11/11, my great-grandmother Kathryn Virginia Henderson, aka "Kitty" to friends and "Grammy" to the kids in the family, married into the Towson family. She and her husband, Charles Edward Towson, had one son, my Pop Pop. Charles Towson died long before I was born, but Grammy lived until I was 11 and was a huge part of my childhood.

When I started doing family history research, I asked my Pop Pop, their only son, what he knew about the family. His answer: not much. He had never really taken an interest in family history, and it took me prodding to get anything useful out of him. I would ask, over and over again, where I could find family photos. According to both of my grandparents, none existed for the Towson family. It wasn't until I was rummaging through a closet in their house that I discovered that this was not entirely true. I found three photo albums. One was of the Henderson family, lovingly labeled in Grammy's handwriting. The other was more modern, with pictures of my mom and uncles and other relatives that were unidentified and unrecognizable to me. But the last was the goldmine. It was an album that had once belonged to Chuck Towson's parents, Thomas Walton Towson and Cordelia "Delia" Anne McCauley, and inside it were notes from Grammy.

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In the years since, I've come to discover a lot about my family, but there's still much more to learn. In the meantime, I'd like to share with the rest of the family (and the world) what it is that makes our family so great. If you are a Towson, or think you might be related to anyone you see mentioned in one of my posts, please email me. I love getting to know new relatives!