A Family Historian’s Journey

I come from a large and extended family—very large and very extended. I grew up with two living parents, two parents who’d passed away during World War II, three half-siblings, and seven living grandparents. Let me explain. My mother, Margaret Jean Goodrich Watson Tifft, and my father, Cyril Richardson Tifft, were both married twice. Cy, as my father was called, married Beatrice Anna Matilda Hallberg (“Bea”) in 1933. They had two daughters, my half-sisters, Elizabeth and Mary. Bea died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition in February 1946, when she was barely thirty-eight, while Cy was stationed with the U.S. Army Air Forces in Newfoundland. At the time of their mother’s death, Elizabeth was nine and Mary was two years and two months old. My mother, always known as Jean, married her first husband, William Wallace Watson II (“Bill”), in 1941. Bill Watson served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and was killed in a plane crash in China in June 1944, leaving behind his widow, Jean, who was twenty-eight, and his son, my half-brother, Bill, a baby who was not yet six months old.

Cy and Jean found each other in Minneapolis in May of 1947 thanks to a blind date set up by mutual friends. They were married four months later, at the end of August. I—their “only” child together—came along in the spring of 1949 and later that year, Cy and Jean adopted each other’s children, and we became one big, albeit grieving, family.

Mom and Dad did many things to glue our unique family together, but I think treating all of our grandparents as equally important members of our extended and blended family was the most important. When we were young, all of our grandparents lived near the Twin Cities, so my parents maintained and strengthened these family bonds by inviting all of them—as well as our many aunts, uncles, and cousins—to our house for birthdays, holidays, summer picnics, and many, many Sunday dinners. At least three or four grandparents, plus a smattering of cousins, aunts, and uncles, were at our house for every major event, and it wasn’t at all unusual for all seven living grandparents to join in our gatherings.

My favorite family events were Sunday “dinners” when several of our grandparents often joined us. Sunday dinner was served in the early afternoon, after church (Methodist). The conversation around the dinner table was always lively: current events, politics, gardening, school, work, college choices, economics, medicine, and jokes. We were all encouraged to participate, from the youngest (me), to the oldest (my dad’s mother). No topic was out of bounds. It was all on the table, along with the pot roast or beef stroganoff, potatoes or rice, salad, veggies—and always ice cream for dessert because Dad and Grandpa Goodrich, my mom’s father, shared a love of ice cream. Sometimes, if my big sister Liz was home from college and rhubarb or berries were in season, we had the best dessert of all, pie—with ice cream, of course. One Easter Sunday there were even live baby chicks on the table, much to Dad’s horror, and Mom’s and the kids’ delight! (More about that day in a later post.) In my child’s mind, the best dinner table conversations were the ones when my parents and grandparents told us stories about their families. As a small child, I was fascinated by the “olden days,” as I thought of 1930. But as I got older and learned more of the history of Minnesota and the United States, I started to imagine the lives my ancestors might have led as actors, albeit minor ones, in the events that shaped the state and country that we live in.

My sisters’ maternal grandparents, the Hallbergs, were immigrants. They had come to Minnesota from central Sweden in the early twentieth century and on rare occasion told stories about their childhoods. Our Tifft and Goodrich grandparents all told fascinating stories about their families, often going back many generations in the United States—sometimes all the way back to the mid-1600s in New England. (That’s where the name of this website, tengens.net, comes from—I can trace many branches of my family ten generations or more back to the early settlement of the New England colonies.) Family stories were part of my parents’ and grandparents’ identities.

Our Watson grandparents told the most exotic stories of all. Grandpa and Grandma Watson had gone to China in 1909 as newlyweds to become missionaries—Grandpa as a doctor, and Grandma as a teacher. They were in China for twenty-five years, built a modern hospital in the early 1920s, and raised their five children there, living through famines, outbreaks of bubonic plague, and several invasions of their town by competing warlords. During one such invasion, Grandpa stayed to take care of the wounded from both sides, and Grandma evacuated with her young children to Korea in an open railcar. The Watsons finally left China in 1934, just a few years before the Japanese invaded China in the earliest days of World War II. Grandma and Grandpa Watson’s stories about their life in China fed my resolve to make the trip myself, which my husband Jim Janis and I finally did in 2012.

If the dinner table stories reached back further than the mid-1800s, they were tantalizingly vague. For example, Mom told us of a family, ancestors of our Grandfather Goodrich, who were wiped out in an Indian raid in Massachusetts in the late 1600s. She wasn’t clear about exactly who these ancestors were though. We also heard from our Grandmother Watson about her seafaring grandfather who was killed by a mutinous crew on his clipper ship off the coast of Brazil in the 1800s, but she didn’t tell us much more about him than that. Dad told a story about his maternal grandfather selling his brickyard in upstate New York to John D. Rockefeller after the Civil War so the family could move to the wilderness of Minnesota. That one, I discovered through my research, had gotten pretty confused during a century of retelling. (There will be more about these and many other stories in later posts.)

Throughout my childhood, I heard so many riveting family tales, whether in whole or in fragments, that I knew there had to be some fascinating characters tucked away among my ancestors. It turns out that there are many, and they are more fascinating than I ever could have imagined!