John Gilbert - You don't know Jack! Part 1

Welcome to my little blog. What you'll find here is whatever I can find about silent movie stars. I'll be looking at public records who can be found on the internet. Most of it will come from familysearch.
Here I will combine my two great passions - Silent Movies and Genealogy.
But Theda, why on earth would that be interesting?
Let me start with my favourite actor of all time, the enigmatic John Gilbert!

John Gilbert was THE heartbreaker of the silent movies (only rivaled by Rudolf Valentino). He played the leading role in the most successful silent movie of all times "The Big Parade". (Which is a marvelous film, the first anti-war movie and indeed more successful than "Ben Hur" which was only the most expensive silent movie.)

Here is a short outtake of the wonderful documentary series "Silent Hollywood" by Kevin Brownlow. The series unfortunately cannot be broadcasted or sold at the moment due to uncleared rights.

Jack, as he was called by friends and colleagues, openly spoke about his disastrous upbringing. His life story is extremely tragic. He and Clara Bow are also the two poster children for all the actors who couldn't make the transition from silent movies to "talkies". But with Clara Bow and John Gilbert it is mind-bending how these two would be uncomparably popular and then suddenly they were forgotten.
Every biography about Jack goes on and on how his upbring contributed to his demise - so let's take a look what we can find about him from public records.

Over the last weeks I spend a lot of time researching Jack's life in databases who can be accessed by anyone free of charge. I will show you my results step by step.
In the following I will address John Gilbert as "Jack".
Reason is that Jack had many names in his life, but Jack seems to always have been the name his friends knew him by. (Curiously enough, I never found the name "Jack" in documents concerning Jack.)

His Birth
There are many unsolved mysteries about Jack. This one seems to be the biggest and no one has managed to solve it by finding hard evidence about Jack's birth.
Jack's mother was stage actress Ida Adair. Ida (born Apperley) was the daughter of a mormon family in Utah. Early in life she fled her religious family and she became a stage actress with dreams of a great career. She traveled the country with many stock companies, however she never managed to land a job with a prestigious company. Jack and others later stated that this made Ida bitter and she started to drink heavily.
Jack was Ida's only child and he was anything but planned or wanted. His childhood was characterized by being dragged from one smeared hotel to the next, by being shoved from one relative who didn't want to take him in to the next. Sometimes his mother even "dumped" him with people she didn't really know. While touring with his mother, Jack had his first experience as a child actor.

Because Ida made sure that nobody would find out how old she was, she also made sure nobody found out how old her child was! The older she gets, the less likely Ida was to get hired as an actress. When you have a small child (like Ida) people will not only notice how this child grows and "ages", but they will also notice that the child's mother is getting older too.
Add to that, that occasionaly Jack worked as a child actor. Back in the day small children and toddlers even, were very much sought after in theatre productions. This of course is before all the child labour laws. (Mary Pickford spend her entire childhood as a stage actress. Her great success as a movie actress was basically her being a grown up woman playing children!)
Later in life Jack tried to make his living when he wasn't even of legal age yet. In order to find work to provide for himself, he needed to lie about his age. (This is something that he later openly discussed.)
You see ... it's complicated.

His birth certificate could solve this mystery. But until this day no one managed to find it!
Mormons are very involved in genealogy. They have their own website for it including a huge database with millions of public records that can be accessed by anyone. (You only have to sign up, they won't even send you spam mail.)
Jack not only was an offspring of a mormon family, he lived in mormon families during large parts of his formative years. So there have to be documents about Jack in mormon databases, right?

So what do we look for?
Jack knew very little about himself. For many years he didn't know the name he had been living under as a small child. It is unclear if he knew what name he was born with.
What he did know was his birthday - July 10th. (However, the birth year is "complicated".)
His mother had told him he had been born in Logan, Cache County, Utah. An aunt told him the night he was born, there was a huge rainstorm. That rainstorm made it impossible for Ida to go straight back to her stock company as she had intended (preferably without the newborn baby).
(Jack's daughter Leatrice Joy Fountain wrote a biography in 1985 "Dark Star" where she tries to solve the mystery of Jack's birth by checking local weather reports. She dated Jack's birth to the year 1899 in this book. In later interview when she learnt of a census report, she then thought the year would be 1897.)

On familysearch.org I intensively searched for Jack birth certificate. And actually chances are very good that it would be in there! One of the records collections is "Utah, Births and Christenings, 1892-1941". Not only are these files in the collection searchable but you can also look at the scans of the original documents.

https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Utah_Births_and_Christenings_%28FamilySearch_Historical_Records%29

I wondered if really ALL of the birth certificates had been published in that collection. My research came to the conclusion that yes, all the records had been put online.
However there are reasons why familysearch would hold back certain documents. However all these few reasons do not apply for Jack's birth certificate! And as you will see later on, many of Jack's records are open public as all limitations have since been lifted.

So what did I search for:

I tried to keep his birth year as "open" as possible, searching all the records from 1892 to 1900. (I searched year by year also with the same results.)

I tried all last names I could possibly link to Jack - Adair and Apperley, Pringle and Gilbert. No success.
I tried first names - Cecil/Cecile, John, Jack. No success.
I looked up all the birth certificates of people born in Logan/Utah - many results yet no result would fit Jack!
My last effort was searching for a new born child whose mother's first name was Ida ... again, no results that fit.

Dead end street.

First rule in genealogy "Don't ever assume your assumption are right! They could be wrong."

So here is what I think:
- there never was a birth certificate for Jack
Jack was probably born in 1897, certainly between 1895 and 1899. He was born to a mother who didn't want him and tried to dump him with her mormon family (who she had left behind many years before). He was told that he was born in Logan/Utah. Logan was a very mormon town, it had only been founded by mormons a couple of years before Jack's birth.
The US Census 1900 documents around 5,4000 inhabitants. Is it possible that an unwanted child wasn't "recorded"?

- Jack was born under a name which is not known yet
His mother's name at the time of his death was Adair. However Ida Adair was the stage name she would keep for her whole adult life. On later documents she will be listed by her husband's names. Ida's birth name was Apperley. Only a few years after Jack's birth Ida's legal name was Ida Pringle. Some more few years later her legal name was Ida Gilbert. It just might be possible that there is even another name that we haven't heard yet ... and that name was the name Jack was born with.

- Jack was not born in Logan/Utah
Ida was touring with a stock company right up till Jack's birth. She wanted to have the child and return to her stock company. Maybe Jack was born en route to Ida's family's home? There are reports about a heavy rainstorm the night he was born which made travelling impossible.

Next time - we meet Jack in public records for the first time ...