Charles Blondin

popular name: Berrien Upshaw

date_of_death: January 12, 1949

age: 47

cause_of_death: Suicide - leaped from building

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Berrien "Red" Upshaw was a mean, nasty, ill-tempered loser and wife beater - and those were some of his good qualities. But he did have one quality that served him well - he was known as a suave and charming man to the ladies. His charm wooed a young Margaret Mitchell and she married Berrien “Red” Kinnard Upshaw, an ex-football player from a prominent Raleigh (North Carolina) family, on September 2nd 1922. But after after 4 months Upshaw took off to the mid-west and engaged in bootlegging and other illegal pursuits. He returned back to Margaret but the family wanted nothing to do with him. The marriage was annulled two years later and Margaret married John Marsh (Red's best man at the wedding). Margaret went on to write the best-selling novel Gone With The Wind while Upshaw continued to drink heavily, was institutionalized briefly in the early 1940s and leaped to his death from the 2nd story of a Salvation Army flop-house in Galveston, Texas in 1949. In the end, Berrien Upshaw was so disliked, even by his own family, that his family in the last line of his brief obituary specifically requested no flowers be sent.

popular name: Hazel Kuser

date_of_death: December 9, 1924

age: 25

cause_of_death: Radium poisoning

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Hazel May Vincent Kuser was born on August 5, 1899, in Orange, Essex County, New Jersey. At the age of 16, she began working at the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, where she painted luminous watch dials using radium-based paint. This hazardous work led to her developing radium poisoning, a condition that caused severe health issues and contributed to her early death. She married Theodore C. Kuser, and they had one child together. Hazel passed away on December 9, 1924, at the age of 25, and was laid to rest at Rosedale Cemetery in Montclair, New Jersey. Her life and tragic death became part of the broader narrative of the Radium Girls, a group of 50+ female factory workers who suffered from radium poisoning due to unsafe working conditions.

popular name: Élisabeth de Demidoff

date_of_death: March 27, 1818

age: 41

cause_of_death: Unkown

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova was a Russian aristocrat of the Stroganov family. By birth she belonged to the highest nobility of the capital. Elizabeth's father was the owner of the Taman and Kynovsky factories and more than half a million acres of land. Her mother Elizaveta Alexandrovna Zagryazhskaya was a lady in waiting and a famous beauty of Catherine II's court. At age 17 she married Count Nikolai Nikitich Demidov and they had two children - Pavel (Paul) (1798–1840) and Anatoly (Anatole) (1812–1869). They were of completely different characters and often lived apart. She was beautiful, light and witty, and her husband more introspective, and so they soon grew bored with each other and they separated and she returned to live in Paris, where she died in 1818 and was buried in the Père Lachaise where she rests in the cemetery's largest mausoleum.