Explanatory notes about Jenny Barry’s 1890 letter to Elise:

Waldemar’s sister Elise was the oldest of three children who survived beyond childhood and  Waldemar was the youngest. His brother Dr. Frederick Emil is also mentioned in this letter

Jenny’s letters follow. In addition, there are letter to Denmark from Jenny's friends Milicent Shinn http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/shinn.html and Kate Wertz. There are also letters from Fred and Cara to "Aunt" Kate and "Aunt" Milicent. The letters were transcribed from copies of the handwritten originals.

Berkeley, Aug. 9, 1890

My dear Elise,

 I have been intending for a long time to write to you but various causes have prevented.

 My chief and absorbing thought just at present is poor Waldemar’s health.  Sash

writes he had that wretched La grippe. (Editor--I don’t know who “Sash” refers to, but given the context, it seems to have been Waldemar's nickname.)  He has not entirely recovered.  He went down there to wait upon Peter and the strain has been terrible upon him.  He came home much worse, and I almost fear that he continues to grow more so.  He has much trouble with his throat, has a hacking dry cough, digestion very bad, and his whole system is very much out of tone.

            Our money affairs are in such a sad plight that, that depresses him so I fear almost, the consequences.  He is very much depressed indeed.  If we had the good fortune to have some friend who could lend us a few hundred, I think my poor depressed Waldemar would have such a load lifted from his mind that he would soon be better.

            It has been on my mind to write and ask if you would learn from Bernard and Emil what their opinion is of the possibility of contagion in cases of consumption.  You know Waldemar stood by Peter’s bedside and waited upon him in all the details of that dreadful and trying sickness.  I am almost afraid such a thing as contagion may be possible.  However it may be, I have a very sad heart over Waldemar’s present condition.  I sit here writing with eyes full of tears, almost blinded from the page where I am trying to tell you a little.  Indeed that was a sad day when he went to Nordhoff, if it has been conducive to serious results.  It has at least greatly prostrated him, and you know dear Elise, sister, that he is the very dearest soul on earth to me, my children not excepted.  These years of marriage have but deepened our love.  It is just as I wrote your mother, only the years would prove how much I loved him.  I wonder if he was as a boy, what he is as a man, unselfish, unassuming, loyal, and just to the last degree.  Pray with me sister, that he may be spared to see his pretty baby boy a man, and to cheer his wife through all the intervening years.

            Another day soon I shall write again on other things.

                                    Most affectionately your sister,

                                    Jenny Klee

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1891 – Jenny Klee to Elise:

                         Gravenstein Ranch, Nov. 5, 1891

My dear Elise,

            Just a line to let you know we are well, with the exception of Cara.

            Eight months ago she fell off a porch 7 ft. high and sprained her left knee and right elbow, these places pained considerably.  Finally the knee became swollen.  The doctor in Santa Cruz said all that was needed was rest and application of iodine, hot water and rubbing.  This treatment was applied and seemed to have succeeded.  When I went to the hospital, I left her in charge of friends nearby.  There, she ran up and down stairs, and leaped about greatly during my absence, and brought on the swelling again.  The doctor at the hospital aspirated the poor little knee, drew off some fluid that had accumulated, (not in the cap, but outside a little below the cap in one place and a little above in the other).  They pierced it as I said just in a section and rolled a plaster cast about the leg.  There it remained for ten days.  But when the cast was taken off and the (section?) pulled out the poor knee joint became inflamed and took on water too.  Thereupon, they put the cast on for a whole month and after that time it was examined, found to have yet a slight suffusion, and poor, poor little girl had the cast put on for another month.  Nov. the 16^th I must go up again to the city, (this will be the second time since my release myself) and let them examine the knee.  There is yet no stiffness, but of course the leg is very weak, and will be, the doctor says, for a year to come.  They want to make out that it is an inherited tendency to white swelling.  They say “Maybe it is not, may be it is.  We cannot tell until we see how it turns out.”

            Will you ask Bernard and Emil what they think.  I fear it is all a horrible mistake.  You know the doctors and indeed all professional ranks are notoriously easily attained here in the U.S.  I could go out tomorrow and begin studying and in two years hang out my shingle for an M.D. and then I’d be better prepared than many.  Still some of the hospital medical people are fair.  The last letter I wrote you was prompted by this dreadful experience but I did not want to say anything until I could see how things were to come on.  Now I should like to have your opinion from Bernard and Frederick Emil.  The arm had almost recovered.  An elbow having so much more chance than a knee, for rest after injury but walking on crutches with the poor little well leg tilted up on an iron shoe lift brings stress on the elbow and the old sprain shows itself there again tho’ not badly but the tendon at the elbow is swollen and painful.

Whatever shall I do?  It is grievous to distress you with all this, but really I do not trust the physicians here, greatly.

 Be pleased to hear that my health is very good indeed, as is also baby’s and Fred’s.  I have never been better in my life.

            Soon again a letter from me.  Possibly I shall rent the farm and move into town to some rented place whence perhaps a school may be secured and some little money earned.  The harvest is about, but fruit has brought such low prices that my returns therefrom are very small.

            How busy you must be with your translation, and how much company you have.  It seems to me a great undertaking to do all that you do.  But then life here with me is full too, tho’  in an intensely different way.

            With affectionate regards to all, with the hope that Ida and the others are out of all danger now.  I am lovingly your sister,

                                                Jenny Klee

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1900 Fred Klee to Aunt Kate,

The author, Fredrik Klee (son of Waldemar and Jenny) was about 12 or 13 at the time of this touching letter. (Original misspellings retained)

Jenny died in 1898 and the children had been in Denmark for two years at most. As far as I can make out, after their mother’s death, they were cared for by her friends Millicent Shinn and Kate Wertz until arrangements could be made for them to go to Denmark. I don’t have any precise dates. GDK

Dec. 28, 1900 – Fred Klee to Aunt Kate:

Landbohójskolen          28^th December ’00

Dear Aunt Kate,

I will write a few lines to you because I have not written to you for such a long time.

Now I have vacation for forteen days.  I have some Guinea pigs who have got eight young ones that are so sweet and pretty, but they cost money and we expect to get some again for them.  I have had a merey xmas and I hope you have had the same.  I got two books to Christmas.  One was about six hundred pages, the other about three hundred pages, and then I got a knife and pens.  I got a pencil box and a play of dominoes.  I have been out in the country in the summer vacation.  I went out rowing sometimes.  Once I caught an eel and two (Abbore)=the Danish name for that fish.  When I had caught the eel I ran home with it to give it to the cook to fry, but on the way home I steped in some mud as I was going through the woods so that I lost one of my shoes in the mud but I took my other shoe and ran barefooted home with the eel.  I got the farmer to dig it up again for I couldn’t have found it if I didn’t know exactly the spot where I had lost it.  I went the water and I have learned to swim.  Once I rode on a horse about two miles.  It was such fun when I and the boy who watched the cow who was at my age drove the calves home.  We took hold of their tales because it does not hurt them and they ran straight home for they knew the way.  I wish you a happy new year.  Goodbye.

                                                                        Yours truly,

                                                                        Fred Klee

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1901 – K. M. Wertz to Mrs. Bang:

                                                March 21, 1901

My dear Mrs. Bang,

            In Cara’s letter I have said that this is the first letter I have written for some weeks and I wish, now, I were in better writing condition for I should like to answer your last letter about the children in my very best mood.  Your letter told me so plainly of the failings of the children and I can see them myself so plainly, that I know.  Though every line you write breathes of love and kindness for them, you must many times be sorely tried to know just what to do to bring about the best results.  I had hoped that less time than this would be required to make them feel quite at home with you.  I know they disliked the thought of going to another country very much indeed.  Could you live here for a time, you could easily see how that might be.  Whereas we are a people exceedingly heterogeneous as to nationality, among the young people that the children knew there was no question whatever as to the American superiority over all other classes.  The inferior positions are held by the foreigner, as a rule.  The many exceptions, the children did not see, and they had not reached the age, nor had they lived the kind of life to make them see the European as the equal of the American.  Though their father was a Dane, I suppose they took it as a matter of course that he was what their mother liked.  The children of foreign parents living here, except in the better classes, do all they can to conceal their non-Americanism.  It is a constant struggle for parents speaking any other language but the English to make the children speak it, and it is an infrequent thing to find a young man or woman born of foreign-born parents with much more than a half-understanding of the language of the spoken language of his parents.  He simply will not speak it himself.  Now, whereas this is not true among the educated classes, it certainly is true of all that the children knew anything about, for in the years following Mr. Klee’s death, Mrs. Klee had almost no social life.  Fred said to me before going away, “Oh, I don’t want toys.  The boys will call us Dutchies when we come back.”  You can see we are a continent by ourselves.  The people that come to us are mostly assimilated and in most cases, the first generation can scarcely be told from the bluest blood of old Virginia, except as lines of culture will always tell; but in the business world and largely in the social world, our powers of assimilation are marvelous.  The foreigner strives to lose his national identity, and soon does it completely.  Nevertheless, until he has done it, he is a target for the American youth.  Of course, I am speaking of the more illiterate, and they so far outnumber the others, that to such children as ours are they were the “foreigner.”  We tried to overcome this feeling in the boys as much as we could, but I could see our efforts were wholly unavailing, and though they did not say it, it was plainly to be seen.  They thought they were going to a place somewhat humiliating to an American.  I have no hope of making you see our conditions.  Your people must move freely from country to country.  You must, from the very nature of things, feel differently about the French, Germans and English from what we do about any of them.  I wonder if there is any country which is as glorified at the expense of others by the lads of the land as is the United States.  You see we say America, forgetting that we are not in truth the whole continent.  So much for the discontentment.  I have no doubt you did so much for the children in the goodness of your hearts trying to make them feel at home that without their knowing it, they came to feel that you too, thought Americans the only people worthy to tread the earth without apologizing for it.  I really gave them credit for being quicker to see their mistakes and adapting themselves to their new surroundings.

            But my dear Mrs. Bang, though I must say this is a fault common to our American children, in other aspects I think they are not over-demanding to the extent that you might expect from your own experience with them nor are they lacking in truth and honesty.  I do not doubt that they get out from under parental control quicker than your children do.  The genial climate takes them out of doors , and makes it easy for them to congregate out of school hours; there are many ways for them to earn a little money, and they are not slow in finding them, thus giving them a feeling of independence.  But, as I told you before, Jenny’s life was a busy and harassed one, and she did not give the judgment to the children’s discipline that she thought she was giving, though how lax it had been, I did not know until after her death.  Her own life was not methodically regulated as to her personal habits, and many a thing that would have distressed another past peaceful endurance, passed unnoticed by her.  In disposition, she had one serious fault.  She was, in the days before her marriage, irrationally moody, and many a time I have been hurt sadly by her, to me, unreasoning and unreasonable seasons of depression, in perhaps violent bitterness.  I have no doubt Cara has heard many a bitter speech from her.  In fact, I often wondered that she could allow herself to express herself as she did before Cara.  While Mr. Klee lived, I never saw this.  Her cheer, for she was nonetheless capable of a high ebullition of spirits because of her periods of despondency, lightened him, while his equable temper served to restrain her from the depression she might otherwise have shown.  I write you this about her, thinking possibly Cara may have inherited her mother’s disposition in this particular, though I never saw it in Cara.  In fact, I looked in vain, in all three children, for the brilliant wit and cheer that Mrs. Klee possessed, though they may develop it.  But if they do, I trust it will not be accompanied by the obverse side.  So far as I know, Jenny considered the children truthful, though I soon found that Bertel could not always be believed.  Sometimes, I found it, what, I feared, was willful deception, but more often a running away of his imagination.  The latter I thought might develop into something desirable.  Perhaps I was mistaken.  Cara, during the last year, got into very bad favor with her teachers at school, and I knew of one instance of sad dishonesty, and so far as I knew, little if any sincere repentance for it, but that is all the [?] I knew of.  While the boys were with us, we found Bertel could not be trusted to pass anything that he wanted without putting his fingers on it, and twice he took money, but I hoped the agony that he underwent as he confessed it to me would be a lesson to him.  He said he had done so only once before he came here. Of course, I don’t know as to its truth.  As to fruit and other things to eat, I thought perhaps they were more abundant and more openly displayed here than they had been at home and were too much of a temptation for his childish appetite.  I should think it an exceedingly necessary thing to deprive him of as good a thing as a vacation with the family, if he can be safely left at home during their stay away.  I wish now I had told you more of the children, but as I said in my former letter, I hoped the new language, the new people, and the new customs would make them forget their faults, and cause them to be like the people they were with, learning the virtues of the people while learning their language and ways.  I see I was mistaken.  But I surely feel that they will come to be good people in the end; with the good inheritances from their father and mother, with their exceptionally good environment it seems impossible that it should be otherwise.  All three children seemed to possess many interesting and desirable ways.  I am dwelling on their failings at the expense of these, I see.  I felt grieved to read that Cara is not affectionate with her uncle.  I have written something in my letter about him, but I have no great hope of making any impression at this distance.

            You ask me in your letter to tell you about the children’s financial condition.  Some weeks ago Judge Maguire gave me a copy of the will of Mrs. Gallagher made seven or eight years ago, which he said so far as he knew was the last she had made.  He seemed not to know about her illness, and was going to let me know more particulars so that I could write to you.  He did not let me know, and though I wrote to him, I got no answers.  He is away from San Francisco a good deal, I knew, but I feared because I heard nothing further, that something was wrong.  Last Sunday I received a telegram from him saying the jury had sustained the will.  This gives the children five thousand dollars.  He hoped to sell the place for more than the mortgage, and all in all, with the money I have, exclusive of any expenses, if he sells the farm for what he hoped to, there will be somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand more.  Do not feel too sure of it.  I have written to Cara of the will, but did not express any doubt.  As for myself, I consider nothing safe until I have possession of it.  The expenses ought not to be much, it seems to me, but I don’t know.  This is more than I had any hope of, at any time.  I did not believe the children would get a cent from their grandmother, and I did not believe the farm could more than pay the mortgage.  As to the legal way of using the money for the children, I am not yet advised.  By the court, I was made guardian of the persons and estates of the three children, having to give bonds for the proper discharge of my duty, and was permitted to send them out of the state for their education.  I am still responsible for the money and as I know our laws, I must make an accounting when the youngest child comes of age.  I shall certainly feel that it is to go to you for their maintenance but just how, I do not know.  One thing seems to me clear, unless I learn something from you to change my mind:  some part of it ought to be kept for them to serve in an emergency in case they are left to their own support by your death, or to begin life with when they should no longer be at all dependent upon you.  As to the kind of education you expect to give them, that is if they take an education, you have never said, but they are certainly doing all they can now to prepare them for the best that can be had.  I really hope this will be enough to give you substantial benefit as the years go on.  The interest accruing from a portion of it, if well invested, would make quite a substantial help.  I suppose one ought to realize six or seven percent per annum on a perfectly safe investment.  Judge Maguire will be a good adviser, and I have other friends whom I see often who can advise me well.  The money that is in the bank in my name as Trustee does not belong to the estate, and if this other money comes to be sure, perhaps you feel you would like your first installment this summer.  By our laws, a girl is legally of age at eighteen, a boy at twenty-one, but either a boy or girl can choose a guardian at fourteen, of course with the consent of the court.  I am writing much at length, I see.  I want to write to both Fred and Bertel, so must [typist’s note, we are working with a Xerox copy that is cut of at the edge and largely illegible at the end.  – this is where the letter begins up the side of page 6 & ends on the side of page 1; I’ve typed only what I was able to make out so you’ll have to fill in the blanks*]  I most gladly offer but so far as I can see I am helpless.  I shall always [?] and if Cara seriously.  I often wish I could let them slip from my shoulders more lightly.  It would be better for me and perhaps for all concerned.    Very sincerely, K.M. Wertz

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1904 (approx.) – Cara to Aunt Milicent:

My dear Aunt Milicent,

            Though too late to wish you on Christmas Eve a merry merry Christmas, you know I mean it just as much if it is too late.  I can see all the dear faces, so busy with Christmas preparation now.  It must be just like it is here, only people sew Christmas presents here so much – I think more than in America, but in that way I’ve become pretty much of a Dane, so I am rather busy with sewing and school.  We have got more and more to do in school, especially mathematics now, that I don’t know what we will end with.  Fred and Bertel get on as usual in school.  They haven’t got too much to do yet, so they are out playing all the time until dinner at four o’clock from the time they come home from school at two.  But I don’t know what to do about our English.  The boys, especially Bertel, can’t speak English well at all and I’m sure I can’t either, though I learn something in school.  I wish I had some more time to read to them in.  They were delighted with “Wild Animals” and lately I’ve read some stories we read in school to them.  I’ve got so much to ask you about that I won’t get time until after Christmas but give your dear mother and them all my regards and wishes for a bright new year.

                                                            Love,

                                                            Cara

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1905 (approx.) – Fred Klee to Miss Wertz:

Dear Miss Wertz,

            Now comes the winter with ice and snow and Christmas too, so I thought I could send you a picture of a Danish peasant cottage when the first thaw snow has fallen.  Sometimes there can be much ice and snow and sometimes only rain.  This year we have had some of that kind of snow that stays upon the trees and then the garden always looks so pretty.  I am glad Bertel is going to come home for I miss him so much, and now Cara is gone too.

A merry Christmas and a happy New year; yours truly

                                                                        Fred Klee

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