HEIRESS IN POVERTY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20372, 28 September 1929, Page 5 (Supplement)

HEIRESS IN POVERTY.

APPEAL FOR £200,000. PRE-NUPTIAL AGREEMENT Heiress to £200,000, and a distant relative of the Roosevelts, a mother of ten children, although a member of tho German nobility, is living at Dresden in comparative poverty. She is Mrs. Hilda C. Bruck, and she states' that she has had to pawn all the jewellery and finery that were hers in the days when her father, Baron Clemens von Zedlitz, was alive. Her husband, Gerhard Bruck, whom she married in 1913, is employed oa a civil servant by the German Government. He earns only about £8 a -week, out of which fie has to support his wife, himself and their big family. Mrs. Bruck is now asking the Supreme •Court to grant her part of the benefit of the fortune of £200,000 that will be hers on the death of her mother, Mrs. Cornelia Carnochan von Zedliti, formerly a Mis 3 Roosevelt.

Under German law, the petition states, a mother 13 bound to give her daughter an amount, sufficient to maintain lior in a position fitting to her birth. Mrs. von Zedlitz, however, though once a resident in Germany, has since, it appears, divided her time between Switzerland and Italy, and in 1928 she applied to bo reinstated as an American citizen.

She is the daughter of the late Charles Yates Roosevelt, a cousin of the former American President, and in 1889, at tho ago of 19, she married Baron Clenwrs von Zedlitz.

A pre-nuptial trust vras formed by which, on her death, her fortune should go to her children, of whom Mrs. Bruck is now the sola survivor. Ono of the arguments in Mrs. Bruck'i petition is that there is no certainty that either she or her children will outlive her mother, and for that reason she should be given n share of the fortune now.