So who exactly is Arnaud? And Gerald?

All these news citations were leaving me more confused than ever about the man named Arnaud Clerc. In our family, we knew that there was an Arnaud who was our aunt's rival for Joe's inheritance. I had sort have thought that he might have been Joe's son by a previous marriage, but wouldn't his name have been Liebman in that case?

Now, with new biographical information about the Clerc family from the Jean Jacques Richard blog, I am wondering if Arnaud might have been related to one of the original Clercs. I wrote an email to Walter and copied Jean Jacques speculating that Joe's return to the Clerc business after the war could have happened with the cooperation of a Clerc family member in the person of Arnaud Clerc.

I was also trying to figure out Gerald, the younger Clerc figure that had earlier appeared in our blog. Now I discovered a recent video of Gerald Clerc promoting his high-tech luxury Swiss watches at an Arabian jewerly convention in 2009. And I had found that Gerald had registered trademarks protecting the Clerc name and logo image in a number of countries in 1997.

From the 1997 U.S. trademark registration

I should say that Jean Jacques wrote back to quite firmly reject my theory about Arnaud as an original Clerc, as he was familiar with the original family's genealogy. He was also uncertain of the legitimacy of Gerald Clerc's current usage of the Clerc brand on his website, for which he sent along the link.

That site, overlooked by me till now, turned out to be a trove of photographic information that advances our story, along with another surprising source of photos of Arnaud Clerc. More on these in the next post.