Theodore's birth father, Edward Waldo, was a color and dye manufacturer of middling success. With his second wife, Anne, he had one daughter, Joan. Theodore's mother, Christine Hamilton Dicker (Waldo) Sturgeon, was a well-educated writer, watercolorist, and poet who published journalism, poetry, and fiction under the name Felix Sturgeon. His stepfather, William Dickie Sturgeon (sometimes known as Argyll), was a mathematics teacher at a prep school and then Romance Languages Professor at Drexel Institute Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. Sturgeon's account of his stepfather is included in a posthumous memoir. Sturgeon's sibling, Peter Sturgeon, wrote technical material for the pharmaceutical industry and the WHO, and founded the American branch of Mensa.