Although I have written about his two marriages before, I have not yet looked for more information about my paternal great grandfather, Otto von Fircks – pictured above. Despite having plenty of genealogical information about him, I have not been able to find out much about him as a person,
I thought this would be a relatively straightforward post when I began to write it. A picture of the Fircks family Coat of Arms, a description, a bit of history and the job is done. But the more I looked into it, the more I felt like Alice in Wonderland,
The geographical history of Europe often blows my mind. Areas, regions and even entire countries are seemingly juggled between various governments, with borders being drawn and redrawn at will. Both sides of my family have been impacted by the geographical history of the land which is now known as Latvia.
Dr Seuss usually knew what he was talking about, but he obviously did not know my family. Amongst a raft of other things I found in my parent’s house after their respective deaths, were an awful lot of maps, both old and new. Pictured above are three examples. Unfortunately the
I was excited when I found several books at my local library on the Russian Revolution, including a few memoirs. I recently began to write a historical novel, set during the Russian Revolution and loosely based on the last couple of years of my maternal grandmother’s life. As some of
„Gone, gone, the damage done“ are lyrics from a Neil Young song and, while the song is about drug addicts, the words could also describe the feeling my father, and I’m sure other Baltic Germans, felt when their properties were confiscated. I wrote about their estate, Nurmhusen, here and described