Fact Check: The pleasures and terrors of researching family histories at genealogy Web sites

The image above is a screenshot of the search results for “Leon Krasker” at a popular genealogy Web site that I recently accessed at the State Library of New South Wales. I’ll be heading off there again soon to continue my research and fill in some of the many gaps I’ve found at all such Web sites that I have accessed so far.

The “Shark Bay Pioneer Krasker Family Tree” looks the most promising though this partly redacted preview contains some odd errors.

For example, Leon Krasker’s name according to every official document he filled in and signed has him as exactly that, Leon Krasker, as he had Australianized his first name by removing the accent acute from the e, altering Léon to Leon.

No official document has him as also being Louis or Kersker and there is the verifiable fact that he was born in 1877 in Tulcea, Romania and not Tula in Russia.

Leon’s wife, whom he married in Paris on 26 May 1904, was Mathilde Krasker née Rubel and she was born in 1880 in Chernivtsi, a town now in Ukraine although it was in Austria and named Czernowitz when she was born.

These details are subject to confirmation by official documents.

The Krasker family had two addresses in Western Australia from where they most likely lived and worked given the nature of their pearl trading business and the needs of their children: 99 Hay Street, Subiaco and 25 Knight Terrace, Denham in Shark Bay 800 kilometers to the north of Perth.

Mathilde Krasker was named simply that and not somehow also named “Macherie”: the note Leon left for her when he was dying on the track between Denham and Herald Bight in Shark Bay in 1916 addressed her as ma chérie, that is, my dear or my darling.

“I start back for the tank and failed where you will find me – the thirst killed me. I am sorry to die before (my) life time, ma chérie, I leave everything for you.”

Fact Checks

• “Louis Leon Léon Krasker Kersker” – Leon Krasker’s name after he removed the accent acute from the letter e was exactly that, Leon Krasker, and that is how he spelled it on official documents.
• “Matilde Mathilde Macherie Matilda Rubel” – Mathilde Krasker’s name after she married Leon Krasker was exactly that, Mathilde Krasker, and that is how she spelled it on official documents. Her maiden surname was Rubel though her parents appear to have changed it to Norman after moving westwards from eastern Europe.
• “Marriage: Worcestershire, England” – The weight of evidence currently points to the marriage between Mathilde and Leon Krasker having been conducted in Paris and not Worcestershire, but that can be confirmed with potential access to their marriage certificate if such a record is still in existence.
• “Birth: Tula, Russia” – Léon Krasker was born in Tulcea, Romania.

Robert Krasker’s residences: 99 Hay Street, Subiaco, Western Australia 6008 (not what it used to be)

The Krasker family had two residential and business addresses in the Australia state of Western Australia until they moved to Paris and then Ealing west of London in 1929: 99 Hay Street, Subiaco, WA 6008 and 25 Knight Terrace, Denham, Shark Bay, WA 6537.

Little is left in Subiaco of the mixed-use residential and business houses that used to be common there through much of the 20th century but there is a handful of buildings in older styles including those that would been familiar to the Kraskers.

I often walked along Hay Street then Rokeby Road, Subiaco, when I lived in East Perth and West Leederville and especially when there was an excellent Swiss-German bakery and patisserie in Rokeby Road.

These old houses were some of my favourite landmarks in those years.

The Krasker family’s address in Perth, capital of Australian state of Western Australia, was 99 Hay Street, Subiaco, WA 6008, now part of a row of office buildings. Image courtesy of Apple Maps.

The view across the road and along a little from 99 Hay Street, Subiaco, WA 6008 showing commercial buildings from various eras some of which may have been residential before renovation. Image courtesy of Apple Maps.

These mixed-use houses at 15-17 Hay Street, Subiaco, WA 6008 may have been more typical of those near number 99 where the Krasker family lived and worked when in Perth. Image courtesy of Apple Maps.

Houses in vast stretches of Hay Street and its surrounds have been demolished and replaced with office and other commercial buildings or are still empty. Image courtesy of Apple Maps.

State Records Office of Western Australia Perth Metro Maps

Much of this part of Subiaco appears to be residential or residence-plus-business buildings with the former Krasker house at 99 Hay Street constructed on two blocks, numbers 97 and 99.

Excerpt from map of part of Subiaco at State Records Office of Western Australia showing location of former Krasker Perth residence at 99 Hay Street, Subiaco, WA 6008 with tram line running down centre of the road. Image courtesy of SROWA.

Links

• State Records Office of Western Australia – Perth Metro Maps

On my research reading list for The Robert Krasker Project: ‘Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950’ by Eric Smoodin

Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950, by Eric Smoodin, Duke University Press, 27 March 2020, ISBN-10‏ :‎ 1478006927, ISBN-13: ‎ 9781478006923, ASIN: B085H7NWR4.

One of the many tasks on my research To Do List for The Robert Krasker Project is to work out what movies Robert Krasker may have had access to in his early years at Denham in Western Australia’s Shark Bay, Subiaco in WA’s capital city of Perth, in Paris during the Mathilde Krasker family ‘s two educational sojourns there in 1923 to 1926 and 1929 to 1930 or 1931 before they moved to the suburb of Ealing in London where Robert reunited with them at 13 Tudor Court before taking up a position at Alexander Korda’s nascent London Film Productions company.

In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of journalistic sources, Smoodin recounts the ways films moved through the city, the favored stars, and what it was like to go to the movies in a city with hundreds of cinemas. In a single week in the early 1930s, moviegoers might see Hollywood features like King Kong and Frankenstein, the new Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier movies, and any number of films from Italy, Germany, and Russia. Or they could frequent the city’s ciné-clubs, which were hosts to the cinéphile subcultures of Paris. At other times, a night at the movies might result in an evening of fascist violence, even before the German Occupation of Paris, while after the war the city’s cinemas formed the space for reconsolidating French film culture. In mapping the cinematic geography of Paris, Smoodin expands understandings of local film exhibition and the relationships of movies to urban space.

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22283

I have several possible locations for the Mathilde Krasker family’s Paris addresses as well as those of other members of their extended family, though currently no indication of where Robert may have lived when he worked at Les Studios Paramount in the southeastern suburban commune of Joinville-le-Pont after graduating from Professor Robert Luther’s course in photography at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden where he stayed with Uncle George in Loschwitz.

Two locations that keep coming up in my research are Les Lilas and Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, communes in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, though it is possible that other Krasker family members had residences in one of the arrondissements from which they also ran businesses, such as the 19th.

Meanwhile I’ll be reading Eric Smoodin’s Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950, noting where he did his secondary research in Paris and I will be looking for possible similar surveys of cinema-going in Paris during the 1920s as well as in Western Australia and Germany.

Links

• Amazon.com – Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950, by Eric Smoodin
• Duke University Press – Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950
• The Robert Krasker Project Filmography – The first films upon which Robert Krasker worked are listed at the top of the page.
• Wikipedia – Arrondisements of Paris