Cyril Richardson Tifft, a widower, married Jean Goodrich Watson, a widow in 1947. Over many years of their marriage, they created a large, blended family made up of four sets of grandparents, four children, eight grandchildren, many great-grandchildren, in-laws, and several foreign students. This is the story of how the extended and blended family of Cyril and Jean Tifft came to be.
As a child, Margaret Tifft heard many stories about the history of her blended and extended family, told by her parents, and her many grandparents. She was intrigued by these stories and always wanted to research the genealogy and history of her extended and blended family. This is the story of how her passion developed a very early age.
Mary Tifft’s “momma” died when she was just two. Missing her mother’s love, she gravitated to her mother’s parents, Swedish immigrants Anna and Carl Hallberg. In college, she went to Europe for the first time and visited her grandparents’ home in Utterbyn, Värmland, Sweden. There she met several second cousins who have become lifelong friends, and found records of her grandparents’ departure from Sweden in the parish church, igniting in her a lifelong passion for discovering her Swedish roots.
At age sixty, Margaret suffered a seizure caused by a meningioma, the most common type of brain tumor. She recovered quickly but suffered extensive cognitive damage. She recovered with the help of the Tengens project.
