Carl Hjalmer Hallberg and Anna Elisabet Jonsdotter, the parents of Beatrice Hallberg Tifft, were immigrants from Utterbyn, in Värmland, Sweden. They settled in North Minneapolis in the early 1900s. This is the story of their ancestors.
Cyril Richardson Tifft was born into a family of pioneers. Most were among the earliest settlers in New England in the mid-1600s. Later they became early settlers in Illinois and Minnesota. This is the story of Cyril’s ancestors in America.
Cyril Richardson Tifft, a revered physician and surgeon in St. Paul, Minnesota for over forty years, was born in Glencoe, Minnesota in 1906. He was married twice—first to Beatrice Hallberg, who passed away suddenly in 1946, and second to Jean Goodrich Watson, a WW II widow with a small son. With Beatrice, he had two daughters, and with Jean he had a third daughter. In 1949, Cyril and Jean adopted each other’s children, creating one large blended family.
Beatrice Hallberg was born to Swedish immigrants Carl and Anna Hallberg in Minneapolis in 1908. She became a teacher, and later married a young doctor, Cyril Tifft, with whom she had two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary. She died suddenly at age 38, leaving Cyril without his beloved Bea, to raise his two little girls.
Mary Tifft’s mother died when Mary was twenty-six months old. Her father valiantly tried to find a suitable housekeeper to take care of his motherless daughters and his home but for more than six months housekeepers came and went through a revolving door. During that time, Mary was more-or-less unsupervised. This is the tale of the capers she got into with the neighborhood kids, and the mischief she introduced her new step-brother to when her father remarried.
William Wallace Watson II was born into the Watson-French family—a family of brilliant and colorful characters. Virtually all branches of the family are of English and Scottish heritage. They all came together when Percy Watson met Clara French at Carleton College in 1899. Percy, a doctor, and Clara, a teacher, were missionaries in China for twenty-five years, where they raised five extraordinary children. This is the overview of the complex Watson-French family.
