Brandon, Barb & Maya too!

I always found this pretty fascinating. Back in 1924 a silent movie was made that received some very high reviews and is considered one of the better movies of the 1920's -- its title is "The Red Lily."

What is interesting about this movie is that two of the main characters were named Madame Charpied and Messieurs Charpied, a husband and wife played by Rosita Marstini and Sydney Franklin, respectively. Franklin was a highly respected actor, director and producer in the United States and Marstini was quite a Hollywood starlet of her own, for her acting and other news makings (such as murdering her fiance in order to steal the long lost crown jewels of a fallen Russian Czar...she was never convicted though).

IMDB.com lays out the movie as follows:

Jean and Marise, two young lovers, are forced from their homes by disapproving parents. To escape the oppression in their homes, the couple flees to Paris. When they arrive, Jean leaves Marise briefly to arrange their wedding when he is arrested for theft from his own father. The couple is irrevocably separated, and their lives deviate into the slums and hard labor of low-class French society. All the while, the two desperately search for their lost love.

A Paris-based silent film with the surname 'Charpied'? Sounds quite odd considering the Charpied's left the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1685 upon King Louis XIV of France authorizing the Edict of Fontainebleu which set out to destroy all French Huguenots and protestants.

Frederik Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, put forth the Edict of Potsdam in response...

To make a several hundred year long story short, the Charpied's were protestants and had to move to save their lives. They took up the offer from Frederik Wilhelm, which included land, money, labor, food and materials in Berlin for any French citizens that fell under the French "Sun King's" disgusting edict.

The Charpied's resided in Berlin until the early 1800's at which time they moved to Bonn, Germany. From Bonn, three brothers left for Hamburg to come to America -- Herman, Wilhelm and Johann Adolf. Upon reaching Hamburg in approximately 1900, Wilhelm and Johann Adolf (my direct relative -- and yes, Adolf WAS the family name...) came to the States while Herman remained in Hamburg not wanting to leave. Herman's son, also named Herman is the last remaining Charpied in all of Europe.

The point of this is that the Charpied's had not been anywhere near Paris in hundreds of years, making this name of French-origin an odd one to choose. And at this point in 1924 when the name was selected out of Hollywood, there were no Charpied's in California. It seems a bit more than a random coincidence considering that 1) there are only a handful of Charpied's in the world, and 2) through research it is thought that the name has altered over time anyway, being translated perhaps from a French/Latin-based root of "Carpete" to the German pronunciation that is now "Charpied".

Anyway -- here is a snippet from the movie that I found on Google Video. Enjoy!