Maurice Wolfe (1837–1917)

Maurice Wolfe was born in May 1837, near Listowel, County Kerry, the son of John Wolfe and Bridget Foley Wolfe. He had six full siblings: Katherine Marie (b. 1832), Daniel, Johanna (b. ca. 1841), Anna (b. 1845), Bridget (b. ca. 1846), and Julia (b. ca. 1848). From his father’s earlier marriage, he also had four half siblings: Margaret (b. ca. 1821), Eleanor (b. ca. 1821), Mary (b. 1826), and Ellen (b. 1827).

In 1849, Wolfe, his parents, and his siblings immigrated to the United States, sailing aboard the Mary Ann Henry and arriving in New York on July 9. Numerous members of the Wolfe family immigrated around the same time, nearly all of them settling in LaSalle County, Illinois. A few moved from there to Clinton County, Iowa.

Maurice Wolfe and his parents were living in Deer Park Township, LaSalle County, by 1850. He drove cattle to Chicago in 1855–1856 and moved to Kansas in September 1857. He worked for an Indian agency hauling goods and then for a ranch, driving cattle to New Mexico. He hauled freight to Oklahoma when U.S. government moved the Sac and Fox Indians there, but eventually returned to Kansas and bought 160 acres of land in Franklin County.

In 1877 he married Mary Fitzgerald, an Illinois native and the daughter of Irish immigrants. The couple had four children: John, Edward,, William, and Annie. John died before he was two.

Wolfe farmed in Franklin County the rest of his life. His wife, Mary, died sometime between 1898 and 1900. In a remarkable obituary that he wrote himself, Wolfe explains that he sent his youngest, Annie, to Carroll, Iowa, to live with her aunts, Anna Wolfe Collison and Julia Wolfe. “They took and raised her,” he wrote. “She was only six months old when her mother died. She is 14 years old [now], is getting a good education and has a fine home, better than I could give her.”

In the federal census of 1910, Wolfe was described as living in the home of Amos Cook in Osage, Kansas. Five years later, a state census identified him as residing in Garden City Township, Finney County, Kansas, with his son Edward.

He died in Garden City on November 26, 1917.

Selected Sources

“Wrote His Own Obituary,” The Evening Herald (Ottawa, Kansas), December 18, 1917, 8.

Top of the page: from the Plat Book of Franklin County, Kansas (1903)