1. Introduction

The Klee family was founded in Denmark by Heinrich Gottlieb von Klee and Anna Elisabeth Fabritius Klee. Anna came from an prominent old Danish family, which we will speak of later as the Web page grows. Heinrich was of German ancestry and came from Riga, Latvia, which had been incorporated into Russia by Peter the Great, early in the 18th century. Riga had been part of  the Hanseatic League, which was a mercantile league of medieval German towns and which became an important influence throughout much of Europe. The genealogy of the Klee family in Riga , dating from the 15th Century, is shown on Table 1 in the Genealogy section of the Website. I will skip over a generation to the founding of the Klee family in the United States, but I will return to the earlier generations later.

The American branch of the Klee family was founded in California by Waldemar G. Klee (1853-1891), a Dane, who came to the US in about 1872, and Jane (Jenny) Barry (1853-1898). Verbal history tells that Jenny's family migrated from Ireland around 1848 and she was born in 1853, only three years after California gained statehood.