About Lawrence Gellert
Lawrence Gellert (1898-1979?), was a music collector, who in the 1920s and 1930s amassed a significant collection of field-recorded African-American blues and spirituals and also claimed to have documented black protest traditions in the South of the United States. == Background == Lawrence Gellert was born László Grünbaum on September 14, 1898, in Budapest, Hungary. He came to America at the age of seven and grew up in New York City. His mother was Katica Schwartz, while his father was Ábrahám Grünbaum, was a skilled craftsman (tailor) by trade. Both parents were ethnically Jewish, but Lawrence's mother had converted to Catholicism while in Hungary and remained devoutly Christian all her life. The Grünbaum family had left Hungary in part to keep their five sons from being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Lawrence's oldest brother, Hugo Gellert, was accepted into Cooper Union as an art student, won a scholarship to study in Paris, and was soon doing illustrations for The New York Times and later, The New Yorker. When Hugo adopted the surname "Gellert" after a Hungarian Catholic saint who had championed the poor, the family followed suit. When the United States entered World War I, another brother, Ernest (a pacifist and conscientious objector) received a 10-years sentence to a military prison in New Jersey. One morning in March 1918, Ernest was found dead in his cell of a gunshot wound to the head.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.