Cheryl England

March 30, 1951 - August 12, 2021

Obituary

Cheryl England, 70

 Cheryl Ann (Allred) England, 70, graduated to the next chapter of her life peacefully at home surrounded by her family on August 12, 2021, after a long and courageous battle with Multiple Sclerosis and Breast Cancer.  Cheryl was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 30, 1951, to Irvin Lynn Allred and Barbara Jean (Newbold) Allred.  She was the first of four children and was born while her father was fighting in Korea.

 While Cheryl and her mother were waiting for her father to come home from Korea they lived for a short time in the San Diego, California area.  While there, a local newspaper printed an article about Cheryl Ann never having met her father and waiting for him to come home from Korea.  One of the television stations picked up on the story in the newspaper and gave Cheryl’s mother some money for the rights to use her name in an upcoming T.V. show called “The Water Front.”  So the Tugboat in the T.V. show got the name the “Cheryl Ann.”

 Cheryl was raised in the East Bench area of Salt Lake City.  As a teenager she taught piano lessons so she could afford to take ballet lessons at the University of Utah with William Christensen. She graduated from Skyline High School in 1969.  Because of her high ACT scores she was offered several scholarships, but she finally turned them all down and agreed with her parents to stay home and attend the University of Utah, a move she soon learned was one of the best decisions of her life.

 On a dare from her girlfriend she enrolled in a class at the L.D.S. Institute of Religion.  On the first day of class she saw a newly returned missionary she was sure she knew and felt like they had been best friends all her life. Later that day her girlfriend introduced her to him, Lee England.  They soon discovered they grew up in the same stake only two miles apart, but had never met.

 The two only dated a few times before Lee left for Texas for his six months of training as an aircraft maintenance specialist for the Utah Air National Guard. Cheryl said that Lee taught her the gospel by air mail over those six months. They started dating shortly after he returned home and were married in the Salt Lake Temple on February 12, 1971.

 Cheryl worked at the Salt Lake Genealogical Library where she was trained as a professional genealogist and gained a lifelong love for genealogy.  Her family teased her that if she could not find someone’s ancestor it was because they did not want to be found.

 When Cheryl was expecting their first child she had a miscarriage early in the pregnancy.  When she still had symptoms and bad morning sickness her doctor did another test and found she was still pregnant.  She had a lot of problems with the pregnancy , but their daughter, Cheralee, was born on the first day of Spring, 1972.  The baby was having problems, but a well known heart surgeon, Russell M. Nelson just happened to be there because his wife had just given birth to their son.  When Dr. Nelson saw Cheralee in the nursery he recognized she was having problems with her heart. Dr. Nelson called in a pediatric heart specialist and they determined she had a rare heart defect called Wolf Parkinson White Syndrome.  Prior to this time most children with this condition did not survive. Because they caught it so early they were able to treat her and she was able to go home, with medication, on time.

 Three years later Cheryl gave birth to their son, J Lynn.  When he was just three months old he came down with meningitis and came close to dying. They soon found out that as a result of the illness J Lynn was profoundly deaf.  Because of this the whole family learned sign language. 

 They lived in Salt Lake City, Hunter and West Valley City.  When Cheryl’s asthma finally got so bad they were going to the emergency room at least once a month her doctor wrote her a prescription to move out of the Salt Lake Valley.  As a result they moved to Vernal, Utah where Lee got a position with the Uintah County Sheriff’s Department. Not long after moving there Cheryl discovered she pregnant again after wanting another child for several years.  It was a very difficult pregnancy and she was ordered to bed for most of the time.  Both mother and baby were not doing well so as soon as they determined the baby would survive, the doctors induced labor.  The baby appeared to be doing well, but Cheryl required a complete hysterectomy ending her hopes for having a large family. It was soon evident that the baby, Martena, was not developing as quickly as she should. After many tests it was determined that because of the difficult pregnancy Martena was born with Cerebral Palsy. Cheryl immediately started studying the illness and started doing physical therapy on Martena’s  muscles on a daily basis.  The doctors told Cheryl that because of Martena’s extensive brain damage she would probably never walk or be able to learn much.  However, as a result of Cheryl’s therapy and work Martena eventually started crawling and walking and first learned to communicate by using sign language. Today you would never guess that Martena still has C.P.

 To help with the family finances Cheryl started working for the Sheriff’s Department as a dispatcher/jailer and cook.  She also worked as a grocery clerk and manager, a butcher and an office manager.  All this time she was also taking extension classes from Utah State University. Along with her education she did a year-long internship at the Vernal Junior High School where she supervised a class of special education students that included her son, J Lynn.

 After living in Vernal for eight years the bottom fell out of the oil shale market and Vernal almost became a ghost town.  As a result Lee and Cheryl decided to return to Salt Lake and finish their educations.  They both enrolled full-time at Weber State College.  After two years, Cheryl finished her lifelong dream with a degree in mathematics.  While she was working on her degree she helped support the family by working for the college as a tutor.

 Because the job market was so bad in Salt Lake after they graduated, Lee and Cheryl took a job as dorm parents at Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho.  Cheryl said she finished raising 250 young men.  She also tutored most of them and got the nickname as the “Mathemagician.”  The following year, Lee got a job as a Pre-Sentence Investigator with the Idaho Department of Correction and they moved to Blackfoot. Cheryl soon started working for the Bingham County Sheriff’s Department first as a 911 dispatcher and then a correctional officer.  After working there several years she felt that she no longer had the strength to assist her fellow officers if they needed help in the jail so she took an early retirement and turned in her badge. It was shortly after that it was confirmed that she had Multiple Sclerosis. When she and the doctors researched her history it was determined that she probably had symptoms since about the fifth grade.

 Cheryl couldn’t sit home without doing something very long so she and Martena both enrolled at Idaho State University. In 2007 Cheryl graduated with a degree in English, specializing in Old English Literature.  While studying she became proficient in French and reading “Old English” and “Middle English.”

 Cheryl couldn’t stay home very long so she started volunteering at Lee’s office to help organize their paperwork and records. She was so proficient at her work she was soon given a full-time position doing the same thing in their District Office in Idaho Falls.  She soon received enough recognition that she was asked to move to the Boise office to do the same thing with the records there. By then she was feeling poor enough that she had to turn down the offer. Not long after that she was getting weak enough from the M.S. that she had to quit and soon had to start using a wheelchair to get around.

While at home she couldn’t stay still either so she began writing. First she wrote histories of both her parents then she started to write books based on the bed time stories she told her children. By the end she had published four books. Her health kept slowly deteriorating until in the Spring of 2020, she was diagnosed with stage 4, metastatic breast cancer.

 Cheryl was an active member of The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  She served in many positions in the Relief Society, Primary and Sunday School.  She loved teaching in any position in the church or anywhere. 

Cheryl is survived by her husband, Lee, her children, Cheralee England (Martin), of East Carbon, Utah; J Lynn England (Kenohra), of Blackfoot, Martena England, 10 grandchildren, 2 great grandchildren; brother, Kevin Allred (Jenice),of Vernal, Utah; sister, Charlene Ryan (David, deceased) of Ogden, Utah; and sister, Julie (Darren) Jensen, of Salt Lake City.

 Cheryl was preceded in death by her parents, Lynn and Barbara Allred.