Biographical Sketch

(Eliza) Gertrude Wesselhoeft Hoffmann (1871-1968) was born on 17 May 1871 in Heidelberg, Germany, the daughter of Walter Wesselhoeft and Mary Sarah Fraser Wesselhoeft. She grew up in Cambridge, Mass. and attended Radcliffe College. On 23 June 1894, she married Ralph Hoffmann (1870-1932), a noted ornithologist, and the couple moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., where Ralph became the director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and Gertrude became active in civic and cultural affairs. Their children were Eleanor Hoffmann (1895-1990), Walter W. Hoffmann (1897-1977), and Gertrude "Trudy" Hoffmann Bliss (1904-2008). Upon her husband's death in 1932, Gertrude established a career in films, lecturing, and television, including a regular role as Mrs. Odetts in the television series My Little Margie. She retired in 1957 at the age of 86 and died on 12 February 1968 in Santa Barbara.

Eleanor Hoffmann (1895-1990) was born in Belmont, Mass., on 21 December 1895, the daughter of Ralph Hoffmann and Gertrude Wesselhoeft Hoffmann. After attending boarding school in Germany, she graduated from Radcliffe College with an A.B. in German Literature and History in 1917. She worked in farming in Vermont, as a landscape designer in North Carolina, and taught biology and Latin at Hampton Institute in Virginia, before studying art in Paris in 1924. She spent much of the rest of her life traveling and writing about Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and in particular Morocco, where she became a merchant of Moroccan rugs and artwork to help finance her travels. She was the author of numerous children's articles and seventeen books, notably Mischief in Fez (1941), as well as many adult travel and culture articles and books including Realm of the Evening Star: A History of Morocco and the Lands of the Moors (1965). She died in Santa Barbara on 20 Dec. 1990.