Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Karloff                                       

Could I have a connection to Frankenstein's monster? Does that venerable old monster have even the remotest place in my family tree? I'm not related to Mary Shelley, the Wollstonecrafts, or even the good doctor himself... Besides that, it would be way too cool and nothing short of impossible to prove. Nah, what I'm talking about is the slightest of connections to the man who brought the old monster to life. The absolute coolest monster in anybody's family tree. Read on brother, you be the judge.

And as always, unapologetically unedited...

                               *****

My mother was a lonely kid.

SHE GREW UP isolated, the only child of a single mother. She loved books and movies and all the imaginary places any latchkey kid from the 1940s might have escaped to. She also loved a mystery, but she especially loved the mysterious, and it wasn't uncommon for her to project her own feelings onto any particular heroine or movie character, or even some misunderstood cinematic villain along the way. Nah, My mother thought that everybody deserved a second chance. She believed that the softer side of any monster was worth getting to know. Mom taught her kids to read the credits too; she said you never knew what you might find at the end of any story. She taught us to invest our appreciation in the work of the actors and the storytellers no matter how minor or nefarious the role. 

By the time she was married and her kids came along, learning about the credits of cinematic heroines, and yes, even those of "The Monsters," was a part of our learning experience. 

So the other day, and now many years after Mom's death, I came across a picture of the famous "monster" himself, the actor Boris Karloff. I realized I was looking at the face of one of those very misunderstood "actor protagonists" that Mom (along with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Bela Lugosi) had taught us to revere so well. You see, Mom liked her monsters. She believed that all creatures are inherently good regardless. Because of this, I decided that I wanted to know a little bit more about Mr. Karloff, a very English actor whose multifaceted life and ancestry I realized I had nothing in common with. Still, it would be wise to stay in Mom's good graces and "to look through those credits," and to discover just what I could about the actor and his life.

               

I quickly discovered Boris's likely six marriages.  (There seems to be some dispute as to whether he was actually married to one of his wives) And while all of his wives were interesting, the name of one really stood out. She was wife number "two, three, or four," (depending on how you count) and her name was Helen Vivian Soule. She was born in Massachusetts in 1896, although some place her birth in Maine. However, as I read through the accounts of her life there appeared to be no mention of her demise, and one source even said she was deported out of Panama and had "disappeared from the records" seemingly never to be heard from again. Aside from her surname "Soule" I wanted to know more. I wondered what had happened to this Mrs. Karloff, and while I doubted that I could solve the mystery of her demise or her eventual whereabouts, I figured the least I could do was to take a look at her ancestry and see just who the heck she was.

       

Often referred to as Polly or Pauline Karloff. Helene Vivian aka Pauline/Polly Soule was married to William Henry "Billy" Pratt, aka Boris Karloff from 1924 to 1928. I was drawn into looking at her ancestry as the Soule surname is often one of Mayflower descent. And yes, if cursory family trees submitted to the Mormons are to be believed, Polly Karloff's ancestry does trace back to several Mayflower passengers. As I looked at this I thought cool. I might actually have a very indirect way of including Boris Karloff in my own family tree - if only by marriage. Unfortunately, I'm not a Soule descendant, however, I am a descendant of passenger Richard Warren and it appears that Polly Karloff just might be one too. Indeed, Mrs. Karloff looks to have a possible descent from four Mayflower passengers, Soule, Warren, Alden, and Brewster although I haven't attempted "to vet" any of these lines. So as I like to say, "Score one for the home team." However, this time it wasn't those ties to Plymouth Rock that caught my eye. It was the name of another one of my ancestors, a woman hung for witchcraft in 1692, a woman by the name of Rebecca Towne Nurse. 

                                

Could it be that Helen Vivian Soule, aka the "ex-Mrs. Boris Karloff" was a descendant of the same accused witch as me?

Awe, don't leave me hanging.....(Okay, enough with the gallows humor, Jeff)

                              

As I have worked my way through the lines it appears that this just might be the case. Now I'll take it easy on you as far as the lineage stuff goes, but suffice it to say that the former Mrs. Karloff's great-great-great-great grandmother was a woman named Thamazin (Nurse) Bigelow and a descendant of "the witch in question" Rebecca (Towne) Nurse who is also is my own eighth great-grandmother. Outside of a few knots in the rope, it hasn't been too tough to at least anecdotally fill in the blanks. And while this doesn't give me any permission to re-run The Bride of Frankenstein on family movie night for the fifth time in a row it does allow me to connect some of my the dots back to the monster himself, and place (granted very tenuously) the actor Boris Karloff in my family tree. Boris Karloff then becomes the "husband of my eighth cousin twice removed." Not exactly kissing cousins, but heck, I'll take it. Oh, yeah, and that means I'm on an almost first-name basis with, you guessed it, Frankenstein's monster.

 So be nice to me.

While all of this is well and good, it really doesn't answer or settle the question of whatever happened to our heroine Pauline.  As I mentioned, Mom loved a mystery and so do I. The family trees I looked at were "mum" on what had happened to Pauline. All of them only wanted to assign her that dangling death date we so often see of "Yeah, she's no doubt dead by now."  I had to wonder though, was it really that hard to find out what had happened to the ex-wife of possibly one of cinema's greatest monsters?? 

As Mom might have said, check the credits.

And there she was - with enough Google searches and as many name possibilities running against the name of "Boris Karloff" (and alongside her propensity to mis-state her actual age in vital records) I found her. There she was on the back pages of a 1975 San Francisco obituary. 

                       

I think the obit is pretty cool. It certainly settles the issue of what became of Polly Karloff. I think it's interesting that it refers to her as "a second wife of Boris Karloff" which seems to be a very clever way of saying that maybe even Polly wasn't sure what number she was. 

There remained only one thing left for me to do and that was to make sure our heroine Polly had a proper mention on FindAGrave.com. It seemed to me that Old Polly deserved to be mentioned adjacent to the memorial to Boris and to his other wives. So I've made extra sure that Polly gets her long overdue attention from the notoriety that she doesn't appear to have profited from and kept modestly to herself. Whatever you might think of my weird self or of Old Boris, or green scary monsters, I hope you will set it all aside and take a moment to remember "Cousin Polly" and her somewhat tumultuous life. It sort of makes me wonder if she and Boris ever shared a phone call in later years where they "remembered when" and maybe some better times, or if they talked about the good old days before some green monster came and tore it all down.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/257102372/helen-vivian-jones

Anyway... Please to meet you, Mrs. Karloff.     

And finally, a note from the daughter of the monster himself, Miss Sara Karloff regarding my findings...

P.S. -  Per her obituary above: "She willed her remains to the University..." Well, what else was any respectable Mrs. Frankenstein going to do?