Blogs which describe moments in my life, or the lives of my family.
I’m fighting off whatever it is which is worse than a cold but not as bad as flu, so this post might ramble a bit. It started last Friday with a sore throat, floored me on Saturday and today I’ve been feeling a bit more like myself, albeit constantly mopping
It seems as if books have always played a major role in my life. From as young as four, I remember taking books to bed with me and as I grew older, the piles of books on my bed grew higher. Enjoying books was hereditary. My parents loved to read
My mother’s family were not the only ones to have suffered the effects of history. My father’s family, who lived at the time in Courland, were also thrown into turmoil in the years after 1918. I find the history of that time in Courland, which is now Latvia, difficult to
Either late on the night of 16 July, or early in the morning of 17 July 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Empress Alexandra, their four daughters; Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, and the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei, were ordered to dress and go down to the
The day I Googled my grandfather’s name in both it’s Russian form (Pavel Voronov) and in English (Paul Woronoff) I could never have predicted what I would discover. Apparently, my grandfather, who I knew as Dadu, was one of the love interests of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, daughter of the
These were the siblings of my grandmother. In this picture her eldest sister Clair and her brother Dima are shown performing a Russian dance. Cleopatra was called Clair as she detested her given name. She was, according to my grandmother, sensitive, kind, straightforward and truthful. She acted older than her