The last surviving member of the Trapp Family Singers, the group whose story inspired The Sound of Music, has died at the age of 99, her family say.

Maria Franziska von Trapp died at her home in Vermont last Tuesday, her brother, Johannes von Trapp, told the Associated Press.

“She was a lovely woman who was one of the few truly good people,” he said.

“There wasn’t a mean or miserable bone in her body. I think everyone who knew her would agree with that.”

Maria Agatha Franziska Gobertina von Trapp (28 September 1914 – 18 February 2014) was the second-oldest daughter of Georg and Agatha (née Whitehead) von Trapp. She was a member of the Trapp Family Singers, whose lives inspired the musical play and film The Sound of Music. She was portrayed as the character “Louisa”.

Maria’s mother was Agatha Whitehead, who died in 1922. Her father Georg subsequently married Maria Augusta Kutschera, was born on 26th January 1905 aboard a train heading from her parents’ village in Tyrol to a hospital in Vienna, Austria.

She was an orphan by her seventh birthday and graduated from the State Teachers College for Progressive Education in Vienna at the age of 18, in 1923.

She entered Nonnberg Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Salzburg, as a postulant intending to become a nun. In her 1949 book, she described herself as a fifth-grade school teacher and a postulant.

While still a school teacher there, she was asked to teach one of the seven children of widowed naval commander Georg Johannes von Trapp after his first wife, Agatha, had died from scarlet fever.

Eventually, Maria Augusta began to look after the other children as well. The Captain, seeing how much she cared about the children, asked her to marry him.

Scared, she fled back to Nonnberg to ask guidance from the Mother Abbess. She told Maria that it was God’s will that she should marry the Captain; since she was taught always to follow God’s will, she returned to the family and told the Captain she would marry him.

She later wrote in her autobiography that on her wedding day she was blazing mad, both at God and at her husband, because what she really wanted was to be a nun: “I really and truly was not in love. I liked him but didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children. I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after.”

Maria Augusta and Georg married on 26 November 1927. They had three children together: Rosemarie (born 1928), Eleanor (born 1931) and Johannes (born 1939), who were the others’ half-sisters and half-brother.

In 1935, the Trapp family found itself financially ruined. To survive, the Trapps sent away most of their servants, moved into the top floor of their home, and rented the empty rooms to students of the Catholic University. The Archbishop sent Father Franz Wasner to stay with them as their chaplain and they started singing.

Soprano Lotte Lehmann heard the family sing, and she suggested they perform at concerts. When the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg heard them on the radio, he invited them to perform in Vienna.

After performing at a festival in 1935, they became a popular touring act. They experienced life under the Nazis after the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938.

Life became increasingly difficult as they witnessed hostility towards Jewish children by their classmates, the use of children against their parents, the advocacy of abortion by both the family doctor and the local school, and finally by the induction of Georg into the German Navy.

They visited Munich in the summer and encountered Hitler at a restaurant. In September the family fled Austria and travelled to Italy and then to the United States. Their home was confiscated by the Nazis.

Initially calling themselves the “Trapp Family Choir”, the von Trapps began to perform in the United States and Canada. They performed in New York City at The Town Hall on 10th December 1938.

The New York Times wrote: “There was something unusually lovable and appealing about the modest, serious singers of this little family aggregation as they formed a close semicircle about their self-effacing director for their initial offering, the handsome Mme. von Trapp in simple black, and the youthful sisters garbed in black and white Austrian folk costumes enlivened with red ribbons. It was only natural to expect work of exceeding refinement from them, and one was not disappointed in this’”

After the war, they founded the Trapp Family Austrian Relief fund, which sent food and clothing to people impoverished in Austria.

In the 1940s, the family moved to Stowe, Vermont, where they ran a music camp when they were not touring. In 1944, Maria and her stepdaughters Johanna, Martina, Maria, Hedwig, and Agathe applied for U.S. citizenship. Georg never applied to become a citizen. Rupert and Werner became citizens by serving during World War II.

Rosmarie and Eleonore became citizens by virtue of their mother’s citizenship. Johannes was born in the United States in September 1939 during a concert tour in Philadelphia.

Georg von Trapp died in 1947 in Vermont from lung cancer.

In 1949 Pope Pius XII awarded Maria Augusta a Benemerenti medal, and in 1952 he made her a Dame of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. In 1956 she received the Catholic Mother of the Year in the United States award.

The Trapp family made a series of 78 rpm discs for RCA Victor in the 1950s, some of which were later issued on RCA Camden LPs. There were also a few later recordings released on LPs, including some stereo sessions. The family also made an appearance on an Elvis Presley Christmas record.

In 1957, the Trapp Family Singers disbanded and went their separate ways, at which time Maria von Trapp and her stepmother became lay missionaries in Papua New Guinea. She became a naturalised U.S. citizen in 1948 and lived at her family’s lodge in Stowe, Vermont.

In 1965, Maria Augusta had moved back to Vermont to manage the Trapp Family Lodge, which had been named Cor Unum. She also began to turn over management of the Lodge to her only son, Johannes von Trapp, although, at first, she was reluctant to do so.

After decades as a faithful stepmother, Maria Augusta von Trapp died of heart failure on 28th March, 1987, in Morrisville, Vermont, three days after an operation. She was buried with her husband Georg, Hedwig von Trapp, and Martina von Trapp in the family cemetery at the Lodge.

Her stepdaughter Maria Franziska von Trapp, the last surviving of the siblings, died on Tuesday, 18 February 2014 in Stowe, Vermont at the age of 99.