Cosmopolitan Recluse: Cornel's Woolrich's Globe Spanning Ancestry Part One: Oh, Canada!

For someone who spent over thirty-five years living in New York apartment hotels and increasingly not getting out much (in his last years he seldom ventured beyond the hotel lobby), Cornell Woolrich had a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry. His father Jorge Rodolfo Genaro Hopley Woolrich Sandoval was half-Mexican and half-Canadian; his mother Claire Attalie Tarler was, on her father's side, half-Judeo-Russian. (Her mother Sarah "Sadie" Viola Cornell's supposed old New York Dutch Cornell ancestry has never really been established.) Cornell's dynamic grandfathers, native Canadian Thomas Hopley Woolrich and native Judeo-Russian George Abraham (Gyorgi Avraam) Tarler, traveled all over the world in the import/export business and accumulated heaps of money. Cornell was born in New York City, in 1903 but his native Mexican father Genaro, a civil and mining engineer who hated life in New York at his father-in-law's house, which was packed to the rafters with members of the Tarler clan,…