
When author Tasha Tudor's ashes were finally buried, it wasn't in one place. Her bickering survivors couldn't agree on when, where and how, so a judge ordered her cremated remains divided in half.
On Oct. 17, sons Seth Tudor and Thomas Tudor and daughters Bethany Tudor and Efner Tudor Holmes buried some under a rosebush she loved in her garden and the rest on Seth's neighboring property, where her precious Pembroke Welsh corgi dogs were already buried.
"(Seth) got the ashes, we went outside and he gave us half the ashes and he went down to his property and scattered or buried the ashes there and we scattered ours," said Thomas Tudor, 64. "It was really an unpleasant situation."
Call it the war of the Tudors: Almost two years after the famed children's book author and illustrator died at 92, a battle over her $2 million estate rages on — pitting sibling against sibling, blasting through her assets with Probate Court litigation and sullying the eccentric artist's name.
At issue: family grievances old and new, including whether Tudor was unduly influenced when she rewrote her will to give nearly everything — including dolls now on loan to Colonial Williamsburg — to Seth Tudor, 67, her older son.
"If they don't do anything soon, the lawyers will get all of it, that's what I think," said Bethany Tudor, 69, the elder daughter.
Corgiville was never like this.
Beginning with "Pumpkin Moonshine" in 1938, Tudor earned fame for the delicately drawn images and watercolors illustrating "Little Women," "The Secret Garden" and dozens of other children's books and for her own "Corgiville Fair" and "The Great Corgiville Kidnapping."
Her works celebrated holidays, family and her love for children, a back-to-basics lifestyle and the sturdy little dogs she loved so much.
Tudor, who was fond of saying she wished she'd been born in 1830, lived much of her life as if she had been.
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