Sue sent us an e mail recently saying she's made the next big step in the publication of her book about her cousin Silent Screen Actress Alice Calhoun: Alice in Hollywoodland The Life and Times of a Silent Screen Star Sue was also featured in an article in her local newspaper recently:
"What if you could watch a 1920s video of your grandmother or other relative and see the way she was, but at 25?
Susann Gilbert can, almost. One of her relatives lives on in silent films, and her voice is in some clips.
Tracing her family roots, Gilbert found some interesting sparks in hunks of tedious research. But a member of her family tree who especially caught her attention was a first cousin of her grandfather: actress Alice Calhoun. Naturally, Gilbert, a former performer, was interested in learning more about the silent star born in 1900. But she couldn't find much. "In Hollywood, people come and go. People get very forgotten," Gilbert said.
When the Mount Pleasant resident searched for information on the Web, she kept finding the same biography repeated on different sites and with mistakes, including eight different birth dates.
To set the story straight, Gilbert launched her own Web site to tell her relative's story.
The site is part of a larger movement to preserve America's 20th-century film and theater history here in the Lowcountry. Gilbert and three other Mount Pleasant residents maintain Web sites dedicated to the history of motion pictures and the state's single-screen theaters.
If our family trees tell us who we are, then maybe films tell us what America was. You can see how people dressed, how they lived and what they thought was funny, Gilbert said. "
Posts
