FOUNDING FATHERS’ DAY  

         By Grandpa Gerald D’Arcy Klee

Where did the Klees come from?

         The Klee Coat of Arms

Factoid—did you know that the name Klee means clover in German? Do you see the clover leaf on the Coat of Arms?

                                                      Waldemar G Klee, (1853-1891)

                                        Founding Father of our American Klee family

Fathers Day seems like a good time to go back in time and think about Founding Fathers.

In school you learned about the founding fathers of our country. People like George Washington, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson come to mind. But who were the founding fathers of our family? Somewhere in the past there must have been fathers and mothers who started it all. You could say that it takes us back to Adam and Eve, but I don’t think their name was Klee. We don’t know who the original Klee was, but we know who our first Klee ancestor in America was. His name was Waldemar G. Klee and he came to this country from Denmark in about 1872 when he was around nineteen years old. He must have been close to that age in the photo below.

If you go back four generations you will get to Waldemar Klee, who, as I mentioned,  is the ancestor that founded the Klee family in the US. Waldemar was my Grandfather and he is a Great, Great Grandfather for you if you are my Grandchild.

Waldemar first went to Chicago, which was then a rough, tough, booming frontier town that was on its way to becoming one of America’s great cities. The houses were built of wood and easily caught fire. In a letter to his sister Elise in Denmark he described a huge fire that burned down most of the city. At the time of his letter it was already being rebuilt. Waldemar started a nursery to grow plants there, but conditions were not too good for what he wanted to do so he moved on.

Before long he went all the way west to California, which was and still is one of the best places in the world for growing things. When he started out there, probably in the 1870s, California was still the Wild West and agriculture was only beginning. He eventually became a research scientist in the Agriculture Experimental Station at the University of California (UC) in Berkeley. His agricultural research there created much of the foundation for the huge fruit growing industry for which California is now world famous.  He showed which fruits to grow, as well as where and how to grow them. Much of the fruit now sold all over the country and beyond is grown in California. That means that a lot of the fruit you eat is grown there. When you eat California fruit, think of him. He was also a world pioneer in finding ways to protect the fruit from insects that attack it. In place of poisonous chemicals he found “good” insects to eat the “bad” ones that destroy the fruit. He was famous for that.

Waldemar and his wife Jenny also owned a ranch in nearby Santa Cruz where they lived with their children. They called it Gravenstein Ranch after the name of a type of apple. That was an appropriate name, because Waldemar grew fruit there for the family and he probably did some experimentation on ways to grow fruit as well. They also had horses. I used to enjoy hearing my father talk about riding the horses on the ranch when he was a child. That would have been after his father died in 1891 and before his mother's death in 1898.

It is sad to say that my father Bertel didn’t get to know his father because Waldemar died when Bertel was only a few months old. It is a pleasant and interesting fact that my father was a kind and gentle man like his father. My Dad even had a love of Nature and knew a lot about plants like his Dad before him. I don’t know how these things happened, since he couldn’t have learned it from his father. Unlike his father, my Dad’s career was in business, which was a poor choice for him. I think he would have been much happier if he had a chance to follow in his father’s footsteps. 

For Waldemar to be capable of performing the high level scientific research he did he would have needed an advanced education. Where did he get it? By the time he left Denmark at age 19 he had been trained in botany, horticulture and entomology. It is safe to assume that he informally continued his studies at UC while working in the Agriculture Experimental Station at Berkeley in charge of the Agricultural Grounds. 

UCA, Berkeley was founded in the early 1870s and the Agricultural school became famous while Waldemar was there. Based on what I have discovered about his research and the scientific work he published,  I’m confident that he helped make it famous.

In order to become a Founding Father Waldemar needed a Founding Mother. The woman who was to become the Founding Mother was Jane “Jenny” Barry, whose parents had come over from Ireland in about 1849. Jenny and Waldemar probably met at UC, Berkeley while she was a student. She graduated from the University in 1881, at the age of 28. Jenny seems to have trained to be a teacher. While she was an undergraduate she wrote some beautiful poetry, which you can read on our Klee Family Website. Her poems are also contained in a book published in 1882 and in a booklet called Grandmother’s Poems that I prepared and sent to you several years ago.

                                                Jane “Jenny” Barry, (1853-1898)

                            Photo from 1879, while she was a student at UC, Berkeley

Waldemar and Jenny were married in 1884. They had three children, Caroline “Cara” born in 1895, Frederick, born in 1888 and my father, Bertel, born in 1890.

Cara is in the rear. Your Great, Great Grandfather Bertel is left front and Frederick is

 on right front

                                              The photo is from about 1900.

The lives of both Waldemar and Jenny ended far too soon. Waldemar died in 1891 at the age of 38 and Jenny died in 1898, when she was 45 years old. Waldemar’s death was caused by tuberculosis, which, unlike now, was an untreatable illness that killed a lot of people. I don’t know the cause of Jenny’s death. Cara, Fred and Bertel were left as orphans and were sent to Denmark to be raised by Waldemar’s family.

When the Klee children went to Denmark after their parents died it looked like the Klee line in America had come to an early end, but that was not to be so. Of the three children who were sent to Denmark, Fred remained in Denmark, but after reaching adulthood Cara and Bertel returned to the US, where each of them married and raised children. Each of them has so many descendants now that I have lost count of them, but most of them are listed in the genealogy tables on the Klee website. You can find your name there if you look. You can also find the names of plenty of your Aunts and Uncles, first, second and third cousins and so on.

Another time I will tell you about Waldemar’s father and his father’s father as part of the entire set of Founding Father’s stories. One was a military hero. The other was a Danish Statesman and a famous writer.

If you want to learn more about the people in this story and about other Klees you can find a whole lot on Gerry Klee’s Website at     http://letreb.com/historyandgenealogy/

Don’t forget that there are a lot more Founding Fathers and Mothers stories from both sides of your family. Ask your Mom and Dad about them.