Gertrude W. Hoffmann - Marriage

Marriage

On June 23, 1894, in Cambridge, Gertrude married Ralph Hoffmann (1870–1932), a native of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, whose family had come from Germany a generation earlier. He was a teacher of natural history and had a keen interest in ornithology. He helped start the Alstead School of Natural History in Alstead, New Hampshire and taught there for several summers while the rest of his year was spent teaching at Buckingham Browne and Nichols in Cambridge. He later was named director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in California. Ralph Hoffmann died from a fall while on a scientific expedition to California's Channel Islands in 1932.

The couple had two daughters and a son. Eleanor Hoffmann was born on December 21, 1895, in Belmont, Massachusetts, and died on December 20, 1990, in Santa Barbara, California. Walter Wesselhoeft Hoffmann was born on December 20, 1897, in Belmont, Massachusetts, and died on May 7, 1977, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And their youngest child, Gertrude "Trude" Hoffmann, was born on April 2, 1904, in Belmont, Massachusetts. She might have been the actress who appeared in a number of films made in Germany between 1918 and 1923 that have been frequently accredited to her mother. Trude married British composer Sir Arthur Bliss on June 1, 1925, in Santa Barbara, California, and relocated to London, England, where she lived until her death in 2008.