When I began my journey into my maternal family history I had practically no knowledge of my maternal ancestors. I was no different to many other family historians when I took the first step back in time by Googling my maternal grandparents. I was definitely not prepared for what I
One thing I had to consider when updating my grandmother’s memoir Upheaval, was whether or not to include a family tree. My grandmother had included a list of the important characters at the beginning of her memoir, but I thought a family tree would be better, as it would not
As some of you might know, or remember, I have been working on updating my grandmother’s memoir Upheaval to include explanatory notes and her diary from 1919. Upheaval describes my grandmother, Olga Woronoff’s life as a young aristocrat in Imperial Russia and details the impact of the Russian Revolution and
OTMA – was the acronym the daughters of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia gave themselves; it was taken from the first letters of their Christian names – Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Four Grand Duchesses, four beautiful young women whose lives were cut short some 104 years ago. Four girls
Russia pre Revolution. A fancy dress ball. My grandmother and her partner dancing with no idea of the tragedy to come…
Plagiarism is a hot topic at the moment in the Australian literary scene. Plagiarism is also the reason I have not written a blog post for a couple of months. In late April someone shared with me a Facebook post about my grandfather. Naturally I clicked on the link and