he musical, and then the movie, were both based on a book published by von Trapp in 1949 titled The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. That book told the story of how Maria Augusta Kutschera grew up as an orphan raised by a court-appointed guardian before entering a convent as a novitiate and being sent by its abbess to tutor one of the children of Baron Georg von Trapp. (In the version you're probably familiar with, she becomes governess to all the children.)
The baron was “a highly decorated submarine commander during World War I,” wrote Peter Kerr for the New York Times in Maria von Trapp’s 1987 obituary, “who had retired with his seven children after his first wife’s death. The young woman quickly won the affection of the children and, when the baron proposed marriage, she was torn between her devotion to the church and the family.”
In the end, the family won out, and she married the baron in November 1927, Kerr wrote.
