Talk:Elyse Knox

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Go to the Internet Movie Database and look up the actress Elyse Knox (b. 1917). In the biography section of her entry, you'll find two stories as to her origin.

Her birth name is given as "Elsie Kornbrath." You can almost see a Hollywood publicist creating "Elyse Knox" from it: shift a vowel in the first name--we can't have her using the same name as Borden's spokescow--then find a nice, one syllable surname from the British Isles to take the place of the--too Germanic after World War I--original. And, hey! It even has three of the letters used in "Kornbrath"!

Then, side-by-side with her birth name is the additional information that she was the daughter of FDR's Secretary of the Navy, William Franklin "Frank" Knox (1874-1944).

Well, no, not if "The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography" has anything to say about it. In Volume 37, Frank Knox's biography is given on pp. 12-14. The last two sentences of the article read "Knox was married in Alma, Mich., Dec. 28, 1898, to Annie, daughter of Darius Reid, of that place. Frank Knox died without issue in Washington, D.C., Apr. 28, 1944."

Turning to the existence of the Kornbrath family, Ancestry.com has the following information in the U.S. Census of 1920:

Name: K J Kornbrath [R J Kornbrath] Home in 1920: West Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut Age: 32 years Estimated birth year: abt 1888 Birthplace: Austria Relation to Head of House: Head Spouse's name: Anna Father's Birth Place: Austria Mother's Birth Place: Austria Marital Status: Married Race: White Sex: Male Home owned: Rent Year of Immigration: 1912 Able to read: Yes Able to Write: Yes Image: 207 Neighbors: View others on page Household Members: Name Age K J Kornbrath 32 Anna Kornbrath 24 Lillian Kornbrath 3 John Kornbrath 1

This is the only Kornbrath family resident in the United States at the time the 1920 Census was taken. A search for "Kornbrath" yields nothing in the 1910 Census. Likewise, the 1930 Census has no listing for "Kornbrath," although that may depend on how well Ancestry.com's readers can read census entries.

Lillian Kornbrath was born the same year and probably in the same general area as Elsie Kornbrath/Elyse Knox. They may be one and the same--perhaps Elsie is Lillian's unrecorded middle name--but further research is required.

Daniel MacGregor —Preceding unsigned comment added by Daniel MacGregor (talk • contribs)

I have replaced the middle name "Lillian" with the middle initial "M." in the lead and infobox. Numerous back issues of her hometown newspaper give her name as "Elsie M. Kornbrath", but I have found none that have "Lillian" as her middle name. If someone has a reliable source for that form of her name, please make it available for discussion. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:39, 8 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]