Betty Jean (Davis) Wolfe

Betty Jean (Davis) Wolfe was the younger sister of Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth — Chuck’s grandmother — making her Chuck’s great-aunt on the maternal Wildermuth-Davis side.

The Davis sisters

Born 16 March 1926 in McConnelsville, Morgan County, Ohio — about thirty miles north of Marietta — she was the third of four children of Homer Edward Davis (1900–1982) and Bessie Marie (“Marie”) Hill Davis (c. 1906–1950). Her siblings:

• Mary Louise Davis Murdock (b. 1924) — eldest sister, married name Murdock per Betty’s own 2015 obituary.
• Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth (b. 24 February 1925) — Chuck’s grandmother, just thirteen months Betty’s senior.
• Betty Jean Davis Wolfe (b. 16 March 1926) — this page.
• William Harvey Davis Sr. (b. 20 August 1941, d. 22 April 2022) — their much-younger brother. Married Becky Angel in 1963; later lived in Gap Mills, West Virginia; buried in Ronceverte, West Virginia.

Betty and Dorothy were nearly the same age — just over a year apart — and grew up together through the Marietta-area 1930s.

A late-teens portrait, c. 1944-1946

The earliest photograph of Betty in this archive arrived in June 2026 from Chuck’s keeping. She stands on a residential sidewalk — late teens or just twenty, dark hair brushed back, a dark long coat-dress with three large buttons down the front and a white-collared blouse showing at the neck, white gloves clasped in her hands, dark heels. Two clapboard houses behind her on what reads as a Marietta side street; bare branches and dry grass put the season at late winter or very early spring.

The frame is before her marriage to Norm in 1945 — possibly her high-school senior year, possibly the dating years just after. The composition reads as a date-night or church-bound snapshot taken by family. This is Aunt Betty at the start of the long arc the rest of this page traces: at the age she met Norm, at the age she began caring for her mother, at the age she was about to become the matriarch the Hillcrest house would later carry.

Caring for Marie

The central biographical fact of Betty’s young adulthood is laid out plainly in her own 2015 obituary: “Her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 40 and Betty cared for her until her death at 44.” Marie Davis was diagnosed when Betty was a teenager, and Betty cared for her through to her death in 1950. Betty would have been 20 to 24 during the caregiving years — the same span she got married, her elder sister Dorothy moved out to California with Robert Earl, and the war ended. Betty stayed in Ohio caring for their dying mother through the final years of Marie’s life, while Dorothy was building a new household far away on the West Coast. The lung-cancer caregiving is the first and quietest of Betty’s lifetime-of-caring-for-family arcs — an arc the rest of her life kept rhyming with.

Marietta High School — the quarterback and the head majorette

Betty and Norm met in study hall at Marietta High School. Norm was the quarterback of the football team and team captain his senior year. Betty was the head majorette of the high school band — the lead twirler at the front of the band at football games and parades, a high-school-leadership role of her own. The football quarterback and the head majorette is among the most classic small-town American high-school courtship pairings of the 1940s; that the marriage held 69 years suggests it was always more than the surface that pairing implies.

The post-war marriages

Betty married Norman Graham Wolfe in 1945 in Washington County, Ohio, when both were nineteen — just over four months after V-J Day. “Betty and Norm met in study hall at Marietta High School and married in 1945 prior to Norm’s departure to Germany where he served in the Army.” Norm was a Marietta-born hometown boy of the same 1926 birth year. The marriage came just before the war shipped him out, in the wave of war-time-and-post-war marriages of the high-school-sweetheart kind that small-town America produced through 1944–46.

Four months later, on Easter Sunday 20 April 1946, her older sister Dorothy married Robert Earl Wildermuth at the preacher’s home in Marietta. The Davis sisters were both married into the Marietta community within a single five-month span, in the wave of post-war weddings that closed out the war years across small-town America. Their mother Marie was alive for both weddings (she would die in 1950).

Three daughters

Betty and Norm had three daughters, with names that carry the family forward:

• Victoria Ann Schwartz (married Geoffrey Schwartz), Topton, North Carolina
• Norma Jean Grundset (married Kenneth Grundset), Largo, Florida — Norma Jean carries her mother Betty Jean’s middle name.
• Peggy Sue Wolfe, St. Petersburg, Florida

Through her granddaughter Emily Marie Schwartz Crouch (Louisville, Kentucky) and her great-granddaughter Charlotte Victoria Crouch (carrying her great-grandmother Victoria Ann’s name and her mother’s), the Davis-Wolfe line continues. Betty was preceded in death by her grandson Geoffrey B. Schwartz II in 2009.

The late-life Florida move

Betty and Norm spent the final two years of their lives in Largo, Pinellas County, Florida — the move came c. 2013, near their daughters Norma and Peggy. As Betty’s own obituary frames it: “While they left Marietta physically, their hearts remained in Marietta with their many friends. They were not forgotten by those friends who continued to phone and send cards, flowers, and gifts.”

Norm died in Largo on 9 January 2015. Betty followed six months and nine days later, on 18 July 2015, age 89. “Her daughters and her favorite grand dog, Lily, were by her side during her final days reminiscing, laughing, and talking about the love and strength of family.” The closeness of the dates is the kind of long-marriage end the archive sees often; the daughters-and-the-grand-dog detail is the kind of warmth Betty’s own life ran on.

She was buried alongside Norm at East Lawn Memorial Cemetery, Reno, Washington County, Ohio — back in the Marietta-area cemetery where she had grown up, near where Earl Adam Wildermuth (Robert Earl’s father) is buried.

2015 — a heavy family year

Betty’s death in July 2015 was the second of three deaths in the immediate family that year. Norm had died in January 2015; Chuck’s father Charlie would die on 26 November 2015, four months and eight days after Betty. Eleven months from Norm’s January death to Charlie’s November death — three of Chuck’s older-generation family figures gone in a single year.

108 Hillcrest Drive — the holiday table of Chuck’s childhood

Chuck remembers: Aunt Betty and Uncle Norm lived at 108 Hillcrest Drive in Marietta, and they hosted the Eesley family for many dinners across the years — Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas were often spent at their house. The Hillcrest house was one of the two anchors of holiday family life in Chuck’s childhood, alongside Grandma Peggy’s 424 N 7th Street house.

The pattern is the kind of small-town extended-family generosity that only family memory carries. Betty’s own obituary frames it in two sentences her daughters wrote:

“She was an excellent cook and baker who loved to have people come for a meal. Everything was delicious.”

That is Chuck’s holiday-dinner memory written in his great-aunt’s own family’s words. Every Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas table set at 108 Hillcrest where Chuck and his parents sat down was “everything was delicious.”

Aunt Betty’s older sister Dorothy was Chuck’s grandmother — the family-care arc of three Davis-line generations sitting at the Hillcrest table is, in retrospect, what the archive’s place-pages and family-pages exist to record. The 2011 Thanksgiving photograph of Norm and Betty in the Hillcrest dining room is the documentary frame of that exact pattern, three years before they died.

The sick-day caregiver

Chuck remembers more specifically: when he was sick and had to stay home from school as a kid, he was often either at Aunt Betty’s house at 108 Hillcrest or at Faye Angel’s house (his godmother). The two of them — Aunt Betty Davis Wolfe and Faye Angel — were the two sick-day caregivers of his Marietta childhood. The two households together formed an extended-family-care network around young Chuck the way small-town extended families used to before institutional daycare was the default. They were also family by marriage to each other — Faye’s daughter Becky Angel married Betty’s younger brother William Harvey Davis Sr. on 16 August 1963, a structural connection laid out in the c. 1992 Davis-Angel family portrait. Faye Angel was Betty’s sister-in-law by that marriage.

For Aunt Betty, caring for her sister Dorothy’s grandson’s son — a great-grand-nephew, three generations down from her own — through his sick days at her Hillcrest house is the kind of three-generation arrangement the GEDCOM dates don’t capture but the family memory does. The pattern of care that ran through Betty’s whole life — nursing her dying mother through her teens-and-early-twenties, raising her three daughters, hosting holiday tables for her sister’s grandchildren, and helping her Sixth Street Church of Christ congregation in their losses and illnesses — is the consistent shape of her ninety years.

The Church of Christ care network

Betty’s own obituary names the Sixth Street Church of Christ care arc directly: “Betty and Norm were always ready and willing to help those in need. They were happy to take food to friends and members of their congregation, the Sixth Street Church of Christ, when any family suffered loss or sickness; to visit folks in the hospital or nursing home; and to drive them to appointments or church services.” The same Sixth Street Church of Christ where Norm was a deacon. Across decades the two of them ran a quiet, practical-care kind of Christianity — meals for the sick, hospital visits, rides to appointments. Chuck’s childhood sick-day visits at Hillcrest were one node of a much larger care-and-meal network the Wolfes ran across the Marietta congregation. The Eesley family was, in Betty and Norm’s life, one set of people among many they fed and visited and drove and showed up for.

What 108 Hillcrest meant

A holiday table set three times a year for the extended family across decades; a sister hosting her sister’s grandchildren’s branch through a generation; a congregation-care house feeding the Marietta community whenever someone got sick. The Hillcrest house was, in the Davis-Wildermuth side’s family record, the equivalent of Grandma Peggy’s 424 N 7th Street house on the Eesley side — the elder-generation house Chuck went to and was kept by.

Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Betty Jean Davis (GMLH-TT8); Marietta Times obituary, 16 September 2015; Norman Graham Wolfe obituary, Marietta Times, 21 February 2015; c. 1992 Davis-Angel family portrait; 2011 Thanksgiving at 108 Hillcrest photograph.