Posts about both sides of my family
On 28 June 1914, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. It was an incident which was to set a chain of events in motion, culminating in World War I. Not quite a month after the assassination, around 20-23 July 1914, the French President, Raymond Poincaré, made an
Last week marked the sad anniversary of the murder of Russia’s Imperial Family; Tsar Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra and their five children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei. They, together with a handful of their loyal servants, were brutally executed by the Bolsheviks, in the basement of the
Greta Garbo, the glamorous Swedish American motion picture star of the 1920’s and 30s, was to be one of my mother’s first customers when she began work at Saks Fifth Avenue, the high end department store in New York City. It was the 1940s and, despite the outbreak of war,
A couple of weeks ago I made a video about the wedding of my maternal grandparents, Olga and Paul Woronoff, for the YouTube channel “In the Steps of the Romanovs” created by Helen Azar. Helen has translated and published the diaries of the Grand Duchesses, and has found a few
It has been a long and slow process, but I am finally able to trace some of my father’s footsteps through World War II. There are times when I have almost regretted starting this project, and times when I feel I should end it before I learn too much, but
You would think it would be easy to pinpoint the important dates in your ancestor’s life if they had written a memoir. Unless, of course, your ancestor was a minimalist with dates – like my grandmother. My grandmother wrote a memoir, Upheaval, but instead of using dates or years to