3.7 cm of textual records1 title25 photographs : black and white1 album1 print2 death books1 family chronicle1 autograph book2 ledgers6 published books1 chocolate box
Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre
von Baiersdorf, Reif family fonds
Finding aid and inventory is available.
No further accruals are expected.
Records were in the possession of an anonymous donor prior to their donation to the VHEC in accessions in 2009 and 2014.
Fonds was arranged by Jennifer Zilm between July 2016 and April 2017.
The von Baiersdorf, Reif family were a noble family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, primarily based in Vienna. Members of the family include Adolf von Baiersdorf von Erdos (1822–1890), a wood industrialist; his son Carl Adolf von Baiersdorf von Erdos (1857–1915), a wood industrialist; and his wife Clara (née Redlich) (1868–1927); their daughter Erna von Engel Baiersdorf (1889–1970), a noted anthropologist and sculptor; their daughter Margit Reif (1894–1965) and her husband Otto Reif ([188-?]–1955), as well as Otto Reif’s mother Elise Reif (1845–1926).Adolf von Baiersdorf von Erdos was born on May 1, 1826, in Nové Mesto nad Váhom in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and died in Vienna on February 24, 1890. He was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1885. His wife Helene Baiersdorf von Erdos (née Biach) was born on November 1, 1832 in Pressburg and died June 15, 1892, in Vienna.Carl Adolf von Baiersdorf von Erdos was born on July 10, 1857, in Pressburg and died September 15, 1938, in Vienna. He was an official in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His wife Clara von Baiersdorf (née Redlich) was born in Goding on August 15, 1868, and died on February 16, 1927, in Vienna.Erna Clara von Engel-Baiersdorf (née Baiersdorf von Erdos) was born on September 24, 1889, in Vienna and died July 30, 1970, in Vancouver. She worked as an anthropologist at the National History Museum of Budapest and Vienna and was curator at the National History Museum in Pecs, Hungary. In 1944, she was interned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, then later in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the Second World War, she immigrated to Canada, where she was Director of Anthropology and Palaeontology at the Museum of Vancouver. She was particularly noted for her work reconstructing a Neanderthal skeleton.Margit Reif (née von Baiersdorf von Erdos) was born on June 3, 1894, in Vienna and died in 1965 in Vancouver.Otto Reif was born approximately 1894 and died around 1955. Margit and Otto Reif left Austria for England after the Nazi invasion of Austria and immigrated to Canada in 1939.
Fonds consists of records relating to the ennobling of the von Baiersdorf family in 1884, the family’s personal financial record keeping, marriages, Otto Reif’s assistance to a displaced person, Erna von Engel-Baiersdorf’s work as a museum curator and artist, the deaths of Clara Baiersdorf Erdos and Elise Reif and the family’s religious and liturgical life.Records include correspondence; an illuminated document conferring a noble title on the von Baiersdorf family from the nineteenth century; personal photographs; two death books; an autograph book; two ledgers; a small collection of rare published books—including a nineteenth-century German-language Bible illustrated by Gustav Doré—and several ephemeral items including post cards and newspaper clippings. Fonds is arranged into the following series: 1884 title (1884); Correspondence (1884–[196-?]); Photographs (1884–[196-?]) and Publications and Ephemera ([189-]–[194-]).
As there was no discernible original order, fonds has been arranged into four series based primarily on record type.