Fact or Fiction - can you help confirm the existence of a US family of bankers and railroad tycoons

Question

An Australian vaudeville dancer and actress, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Brackenreg-72, travelled to the USA in 1913, presumably to seek a new life on the stage and in films.  On her return to Australia she was lauded by various newspapers, providing exquisit detail of her successful life overseas, the advantageous marriage to the son of a rich US banking and railroad family and her career in silent movies...

Except we can't find a trace of evidence for the individuals or to try and corroborate some of the information provided.

I'm not familiar with research in the US, so CAN YOU HELP?

Here are some of her claims to fame:

1) Appeared in a number of 1914 Lubin Company silent movies including: The Man from the West, The Eternal Duel, The Pale of Prejudice, The Moth, and In Mysterious Ways.

(Her name does not appear in IMDB database as cast, but maybe she played a subsidiary role?  Anyone have access to the actual films to check the minor credits or the Lubin Company Archives in Philadelphia?)

2) She supposedly married Denis Warren K. Fitz-Stubbs on 23 Dec 1915.  He was formerly an American operatic star, and "a  son of the late Gregory Thomas Guelph Fitz-Stubbs, the wealthy American Banker, and figure-head of the New York, Boston and Chicago dry goods stores, which are known as the Fitz-Stubbs, Roswell and Blackwell (late Mathieson Corporation, Ltd.).  His eldest son, Richard Guelph Fitz-Stubbs is prominent in New York Society, and is a President of one of the American railroads."

(We can't find reference to any Fitz-Stubbs in the 1910 or 1920 US Census or other databases [Ancestry].  Who were these people, if they existed?  Is there a way to check if such a company actually existed in the companies' register and who ran it?

Any help clarifying whether these stories are the creative fiction of a fame-seeking actress or perhaps a distortion of the truth would be much appreciated.

Fact is that Una Brackenreg Maxwell returned to Australia as Una Brackenreg Fitz-Stubbs and her daughter born before she travelled to the USA also took on the surname Fitz-Stubbs, so presumably at some point Una would have to have had some kind of documentation to show a marriage to Denis Warren...?

Any help from our American friends would be much appreciated

Answer 1

Hi M. Have you seen these?

• DENIS FITZ-STUBBS, OF THE LUBIN COMPANY. (1916, February 12). ''Queensland Figaro (Brisbane, Qld. : 1901 - 1936)'', p. 10. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/84399756
• Thomas Stubbs and his descendents ... https://www.sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/stubbs-thomas-and-descendents.php

Oddly the second article does not mention Denis as a son of Napoleon Fitz-Stubbs.

Comments

Jim:

      The first link is very telling.

                                 Roger

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Thank you Roger!

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Yes - it's an unusual marriage announcement - including a reference to a prior engagement to someone else.  All quite weird.  Have read EVERY mention of Una on Trove in order to pierce together her life.  Only time she could have travelled to USA is in 1913 (to appear in Lubin films released in Jan 1914) and in late 1915 (perhaps to marry Fitz-Stubbs overseas).  There is no readily identifiable marriage record in Australia that would match the marriage.

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Have you tried looking for just Stubbs as the last name?

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Yep - the article is interesting for all of the detail it supposedly provides - like his exact birthday and the shows he's supposedly been in... Except whilst supposedly a star with Lubin Films, he does not appear in the IMDB database in ANY movie - six-reeler or otherwise...

A 'confection' to provide 'background' on her supposed husband??  Who after all was supposed to be the son of American bankers, so why is he being born in AU?

Answer 2

We don't have a companies house or a companies register in the sense that the Australia and/or the United Kingdom do.   Corporations are generally formed (and generally have been formed) under the laws of the states and the information on ownership of non-public corporations is much less available.

If you just run a google search on those entities, you don't turn up any of those entity names.

When you run "Fitz-Stubbs" through newspapers.com, there are no matches in Illinois or Massachusetts.  There are only two matches in New York, one of which is Maude herself and the other of which is a Colonel Fitz-Stubbs.  You'd think that well-known bankers, operatic stars and railroad presidents would pop all over the place.

Same for Fitzstubbs without a hyphen.

I also searched the database maintained by the Massachusetts Secretary of State for corporations for "Fitz-Stubbs" - nothing found.

Same with the Illinois Secretary of State.

Comments

Agreed - Don't have a sub to Newspapers.com, but have flogged Google to try and find something...

Any hits on Mathieson?  That company name turns up a few times in different places in her potentially "creative" bio.  Could Fitz-Stubbs actually be Mathieson?

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I didn't find an entity of the same name on google and, while there are Mathieson entities listed at of the Office of the Secretary of State of Illinois and the Office of the Secretary of State of Massachusetts, none of that name.

In candor, I worry about the online records given the age of these corporations (I am assuming that they pick up the old entities, maybe without the documents being available online as they do where I live).