(Not So) Wordless Wednesday: Fearless Female Edith Elizabeth Wolfe Smith Murff Brown Gould Knox

Despite spending a lot of time with my Great Aunt Edith while I was growing up, I'm missing a lot of information on her timeline. She was born in Louisiana on December 9, 1910, and is the younger sister of my grandmother, Sara Melzina Wolfe Guokas Archibald.

Although she had no children, Aunt Edith was married five times. Her first husband was an Oliver Smith - they were married and living in Dallas when her father, Louis Henry Wolfe, passed away in April 1929.  In the late 30s, she was married to an M.B. Murff, for a brief period of time. She didn't talk much of these marriages that ended in divorce, and I've found no records of them so far.

Her longest marriage was to her third husband, Robert Brown, who died in 1970. He had a daughter, Bobbie Nell Brown, from a previous marriage who was quite close to Aunt Edith - they shared a home after Edith's last husband died, and Edith nursed Bobbie through her final illness.

Edith married Donald F. Gould on December 11, 1981, when she was 71 and he was 77. He died in 1990. Edith married Dee Roy Knox on June 14, 1991, when she was 80 and he was 82. He passed away on November 27, 1997, just nine days after my grandmother Sara Wolfe Guokas Archibald's death.

Edith lived for many years in Houston, Texas, where she worked for an optometrist. Between her third and fourth marriages, she and my grandmother shared a home on Beechnut in southwest Houston, only a mile or so from my family's home. I can remember staying there a few times when I was home from college (because my bedroom in the family home had been given to one of my four siblings).

Aunt Edith lived in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, for most of her fourth and fifth marriages, but moved to New Braunfels, Texas, sometime after Dee died. When I'd make my annual visit to Texas from Washington state, my parents (from Fredericksburg), my aunt (from Houston) and I would meet at Aunt Edith's for lunch, as it was pretty equidistant. Edith's stepdaughter Rowena Knox Hackfield and her husband Leon lived nearby.

Edith passed away at age 96 at her home in New Braunfels, on May 31, 2006.

© Amanda Pape - 2010