Nothing has caused more controversy among Rigg Family genealogists than the tale of how Charles Rigg the first met and married Mary Townley. It seems as though a great deal of time has been spent trying to prove or disprove, as the case may be, the tale of this beginning of our Rigg family. The only thing that I think everyone consistently agrees on is that the matriarch of our clan was a woman by the name of Mary Townley. But it’s such a GREAT story! And I find it interesting to note that every branch of the family tree was told this story but none of us had knowledge of the other branches until genealogists began their research and slowly we have come to know each other...especially since the advent of the computer technology that has made it so easy to contact our family lines across the world. How could we all have the same story in our lines except that there was a common story told back when the Rigg family first came to this country? Is it an event that changed with the telling of the story much like the childhood game of whispering to each other around a circle and the final child tells the whispered story out loud with usually many changes from the initial one? Or was it an elaboration of the crossing the ocean, coming to America story told by parents as a nighttime story to put their children to sleep at night? Remember, it was a time in history when storytelling was the main type of entertainment! Unless we can travel back in time or some obscure piece of documentation comes to light on this matter I guess we will never know. But it’s such a GREAT STORY! This is how it was told to me by my father, Lauren Howard Rigg (b. July 1, 1909 d. January 2, 1969), as it was told to him by both his father, Lauren Dale Rigg (b. March 25, 1884 d. April 11, 1970), and his grandmother, Miranda Gambrel Rigg (b. July 2, 1851 d. June 28, 1924). For those curious out there, the reason he told me the story was for a school report on family history that I worked on when I was in grade school. Here goes...