201123 November 23, 2020

        Memphis, TN -    This is the week when the question of "What were you doing when Kennedy was shot?" always comes up. As for me, I was asleep in geometry class when the announcement woke me up. Most of you will have to answer that you were in a class at Lee High School when it happened.

  Collins Wynn sent me the email about going to school with his family and it reminded me of a story I started writing several years ago but never finished enough to publish it in Lee's Traveller. 

    Back when I started Lee Jr. High I did not know about my family the way I do today. Several years ago I became interested in genealogy and started researching, but this was done long after I had graduated from Lee. My mother only had one sister, who only had one child, making him the only first cousin I had on my maternal side. My father was one of four brothers and they all had children, but since my parents were divorced when I was eight I did not visit with my paternal side of the family very often. Most of them lived up in Tennessee anyway, and the only first cousins on my father’s side were several years younger than me when I entered high school. For those reasons, I did not think I went to school with any of my cousins. To make things even more confusing, my father and one brother spelled their name “Towery” and the other two brothers spelled their name without the “e”, as “Towry.” It’s a long story, not needed to be explained here.

To add to the confusion, my paternal grandfather remarried after the death of my paternal grandmother and had a whole set of children I never knew about until I was older. I also know I had cousins from my Roden line which I also did not know as a child.

After knowing more about family connections, and using sources like Ancestry.com I now realize I did have more cousins in school with me than I knew about back then. I really don’t know what difference in my life it would have made to have known about my cousins back then, but in the past few years I have had different stories sent to me for the Traveller involving cousins, which made me interested.

I know now that even though I did not have any first cousins in school with me, I did have several more distant ones, like third cousins. I went to Ancestry to look for the definition of cousins and found this information.

    Your first cousin is the child of your aunt or uncle. 

    Your second cousin is the grandchild of your great aunt or great uncle. (If two people are first cousins, the children of each of the people will be second cousins.) 

    Your third cousin is the great-grandchild of your great-great uncle or great-great aunt. (Children of 2nd cousins, are 3rd cousins to each other.) 

    Your first cousin, once removed, is the child of your first cousin or is the child of your great uncle or great aunt. 

    If someone is your first cousin, then his or her child is your first cousin once removed. (Once removed means one generation level different from you.) 

    All your regular cousins (first, second, etc.) are at the same generation level as yourself. Those at different levels are "removed." 

    After reading that, I now know why I was so confused back then, and still am in many ways. In the last few years I now know I went to school with several cousins of different levels. Rose Sharon Towry and Bryan Towery are two of which I know. Also, it has recently come to light that Susan Simms and I are cousins as well, through a different family line. 

    One of the most confusing things about cousins to me when I was in school was my relationship with Sherry Adcock. I could not understand why she was a first cousin to my first cousins and yet not related to me as well. Turns out her family line was through the wife of my blood uncle, which means we were not blood relatives ourselves. It was a confusing time, especially to me with so many odd family relationships.