Eve Einstein (pictured in 1960) has died.

Albert Einstein, 1921.

Albert Einstein’s granddaughter by adoption, Evelyn Einstein, always said she believed she actually was biologically related to the discoverer of the theory of general relativity Albert Einstein of Princeton University. The word “Einstein” today is synonymous with genius.

Few have realized that Evelyn Einstein was once married to the man who would be the discoverer of Sasquatch/Bigfoot, Grover Krantz.

Evelyn Einstein died on April 13, 2011, at her home in Albany, California, at the age of 70.

Douglas Martin at the New York Times noted the following in his obituary on Evelyn Einstein:

Ms. Einstein spoke four or five languages and earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, including a master’s in medieval literature. But she worked as a dogcatcher, a cult deprogrammer and a police officer. After a bitter divorce, she lived in poverty for three months, sleeping in cars and eating discarded food as a self-described “Dumpster diver.”

And,

Evelyn Einstein was born in Chicago in 1941 and soon adopted by Hans Albert Einstein, Einstein’s son, and his wife, Frieda. For years she said in interviews that she had been told as a child that she was actually the child of Albert Einstein and a ballet dancer, though she acknowledged that she had no proof. Ms. Einstein saw her grandfather infrequently as a child, because he lived in Princeton, N.J., and her family was in California.

In 1960, when she was a college student, she was one of dozens of people arrested in San Francisco while protesting hearings there of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Evelyn Einstein at the Anti-HUAC demonstration in 1960.

As to her marriage to Grover Krantz (above), Martin writes (with a link to my own obituary of Krantz, embedded in his article):

During the 1960s and ’70s, Ms. Einstein was married for 13 years to Grover Krantz, an anthropology professor at Washington State University who became known for trying to prove the existence of Bigfoot. When their marriage broke up, she moved in with her father, but he soon died. A period of homelessness followed, ending when she got a job as a store clerk and moved in with three women in Berkeley.

Whereas, earlier in the Martin-authored obit, it appears the divorce from Krantz was responsible for Einstein’s homelessness, one must assume that the death of her father, the limbo she felt within her own family, and her own personality contributed to such a state of being.

In 2006, when the Smithsonian installed Krantz’s skeleton and that of his beloved dog Clyde in an exhibit, Peter Carlson of the Washington Post wrote:

Working at the Berkeley museum, Krantz broke his big toe in a particularly memorable manner: He dropped the Dead Sea Scrolls on it. During his recuperation, a woman named Eve Einstein took him and Clyde in. She became his third wife.

In the mid-’60s, Grover and Eve and Clyde moved to the University of Minnesota, where Krantz finally got his Ph.D. In 1968, he began teaching at Washington State University.

Tip of the hat to Richard D. Smith at Princeton, for the sad news of Evelyn Einstein’s death.