Blogs which describe moments in my life, or the lives of my family.
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
In this picture my maternal grandfather, Pavel Voronov (Paul Woronoff), is 13 years old. He is a naval cadet in Russia. Years later he would be an officer on Tsar Nicholas II’s imperial yacht, Standart and the love interest of Grand Duchess Olga, eldest daughter of the Tsar. I know
With the 100th anniversary of the death of the Romanovs approaching next month, my thoughts have been more and more on the Russian side of my family; my mother’s family. My grandmother’s family were Russian aristocrats. As a young lady, she became a Maid of Honour to the Empress Alexandra
We are all stories. Our stories are woven from the stories of our parents, our grandparents and so on through our ancestral trail. Some of our stories are more complex than others, their narratives ducking and weaving across and around war and trauma and flight. Some of our stories are