The Prince Stanislaus J. Bielski Papers, 1908-1979, are comprised of legal and personal documents, including letters and genealogical records, primarily referencing litigation between Prince Stanislaus J. Bielski and his wife, Jeannine Bielski De Ayala. Also included are photographs of Bielski, his family, and friends.
The Prince Stanislaus J. Bielski Papers, 1908-1979 are comprised of legal and personal documents, including letters and genealogical records, primarily referencing litigation between Prince Stanislaus J. Bielski and his wife, Jeannine Bielski De Ayala. Also included are black and white and color photographs of Bielski, his family, and friends.
Collection is open for research.
Materials in this collection may be protected by copyrights and other rights. See Reproductions and Use on the UNLV Special Collections and Archives website for more information about reproductions and permissions to publish.
Materials remain in original order.
Prince Stanislaus J. Bielski was born in 1908 in Bielsk, Poland, the son of Jan-Edward and Maria Bielski. He was, by his account, a Prince of one of Poland's pre-war noble families, and had inherited great wealth from his father.
In 1939, Bielski married Jeannine de Guiroye, a French citizen, in London, England. The following year, as World War II intensified in Europe, his wife convinced Bielski to transfer his fortune to the care of her mother, who was living in Cuba. Guiroye flew to Cuba to complete the financial arrangements, while Bielski flew to New York City, New York to stay with friends. She did not return to her husband, and by 1942, had obtained a divorce and remarried.
What followed was an almost forty-year battle undertaken by Bielski to recover the fortune he had given into his wife's care. Occasionally serving as scandalous fodder for the European press, the lawsuit progressed through the French courts until the early 1970s, by which point a largely destitute Bielski was surviving by living with friends in New York, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Bielski died in 1979, presumably without a final resolution to a lifetime of effort to restore his estate and reputation.
Prince Stanislaus J. Bielski Papers, 1908-1979. MS-00758. Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.
Accession number 1990-100.
In 2018, as part of an archival backlog elimination project, Melise Leech rehoused and arranged the materials, wrote the finding aid and entered the data into ArchivesSpace.