About Margaret Tifft Janis
I think my interest in family genealogy and history is in my blood—the interest has been part of me as long as I can remember. Both my father, a doctor, and his father, a judge, were wannabe genealogists, and my sister, Mary, was so fascinated by the subject that she put together a scrapbook on our family history in high school that earned her an A+.
Family stories were regular fodder for dinner table conversations throughout my childhood. Both of my parents and several of my grandparents were great raconteurs who enjoyed nothing more than telling stories of their families. The stories were sometimes sad, but more often funny, and always interesting. So even though the desire to explore my family history is probably not an inherited trait, I still come by it naturally.
For the first sixty-plus years of my life, I was really busy. I was going to school, working, married, raising two children, moving around the country (Minnesota to Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. to Virginia, to New Mexico, to California, and in 2017, back to Minnesota), traveling, taking care of aging parents, and dealing with everything else that life throws at all of us. I was too busy to spend time investigating my family history.
Then in 2010, I became seriously ill. I had a brain tumor. It was a meningioma, the most common type of brain tumor. While technically it was benign, it didn’t seem that way to me. Though it was successfully removed, I was left with a lot of cognitive damage. Brain synapses that I counted on just weren’t functioning anymore. I was an emotional basket case. I had to stop working. I was bored, scared, angry, and depressed. I thought my life as I’d known it was over. But a psychologist who was helping me deal with the wreckage left by traumatic brain injury suggested that I find a meaningful project that would help me rebuild those damaged brain synapses. Tengens was born, though I didn’t know it at the time.
It seems that my brain tumor gave me both the motive and the opportunity and the permission to do work that I love. For more than a decade now, I have been researching and writing about my extended family, the Tifft–Richardsons, the Goodrich–Bakers, the Hallberg–Jonsdotters, and the Watson–Frenches. Our ancestry extends back ten generations in New England, and even further in England, Scotland, Sweden, and beyond. I expect my first publication, a monograph entitled “The Sara Tefft Gravestone ~ A Mystery Carved in Stone” to be published in 2024.
Prior to beginning my family history research in 2012, I worked as an organizational development consultant and financial manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Office of Management, the World Bank, and an environmental non-profit. I founded and was the principal of a management consulting firm specializing in the management of change in organizational cultures. Our clients included federal agencies, international development banks, and private organizations. Later, my husband, Jim Janis, and I started The Janis Group, a consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, marketing, and executive recruiting for nuclear and environmental clean-up firms and for nonprofits. And still later, I served as a board member, and President of the board of Girls Inc. of Santa Fe.
I earned my BA in anthropology from Lawrence University, and my MPA from the George Washington University School of Public Administration.
When I’m not researching and writing about my family history, I read voraciously and watch everything from historical documentaries to silly rom-coms on Netflix, travel extensively with Jim, canoe, hike, and bike in the wilderness of northern Minnesota, or walk along the Pacific Ocean with our puppy Finn. We live in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and Carlsbad, California.