Flashback: How the Wolfe family came to California

The Wolf family originates in the territory around the Electoral Palatinate region of (modern) southwestern Germany and in the area near Strasburg (now Strasbourg, France). They were Calvinists in an area of Catholic-Protestant conflict, perhaps suffering in the 1688–1689 Nine Years War (especially the 1688–1689 Rhine Campaign by the French). With some variation in the surname spelling Wolf/Wolfe, the family arrived in the United States after 1700 and married into Protestant English immigrants (arriving after 1600) and Scots-Irish immigrants (arriving after 1700). 

The family religion was Presbyterianism, from those Northern Irish Protestant ancestors. They settled in northwestern Pennsylvania, near the city of Erie, and took up farming. During the Pennsylvania Oil Rush of the mid 1860s they invested in oil drilling, as seen by the share certificate below, issued to Hazel Nevis's grandfather William Guy Wolf (1829–1899). 

200 shares of Oil Creek & Gordon's Run Petroleum Company, William Guy Wolf, November 25, 1865

200 shares of Oil Creek & Gordon's Run Petroleum Company, William Guy Wolf, November 25, 1865

Mary Hazel Wolfe with a dog, circa 1898, Venango, Pennsylvania

After 1910, the family moved to Minnesota for a brief stay (maybe just a year) and then to New Mexico (the U.S. Census places him in Navajo County by 1920). His children finished their education in Albuquerque. (Daughter Hazel — Arnold's mother — trained to be a school teacher in Albuquerque.) When Hazel's family moved to Los Angeles, he was by then widowed and lived in the apartment over the detached garage. My father remembered him as the one who ran the family victory garden (continued from World War I into the Great Depression) and also as disappearing for weeks at a time to pan for gold, certain he would recover his lost fortune, still due to him in some manner. 

James Tarr Wolfe and family (Jennie Hasting Wolfe with children Hazel, Leslie and Ellwood),
probably New Mexico, circa 1912

A family myth I grew up with was our direct descent from Major-General James Wolf, the officer responsible for the British victory over the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759 that helped to end French rule and put it firmly under British control. In the 1960s my older brother Allan saw in the encyclopedia that General Wolfe had never married, so this great-great grandfather was converted immediately into a great-great-great uncle. Further investigation shows that General Wolfe was not of German origin and did not originate in the Hessian auxiliaries who settled in the United States after the Revolutionary War ended; he was English, from the County Kent, England. There appears to be no evidence for a relation between our German Wolfs and the accomplished general.

Mary Hazel Wolfe Nevis's family tree in Ancestry.com according to her grandson Joel A. Nevis y Flores

next post  Flashback: Plumer, Venango County, Pennsylvania

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first post in Arnold's Story  July 1943

first post in blog  Leonard's Story: May 29, 1943