Family history

It is rumoured Empress Alexandra never smiled but my grandmother definitely saw her smiling more than once

The first time my grandmother, Countess Olga Kleinmichel, saw Empress Alexandra the Empress wasn’t smiling. In fact, according to my grandmother’s memoir in which she describes the celebration of Grand Duchess Olga’s sixteenth birthday, Empress Alexandra “wore an expression of weariness and sadness which ‘society’ took for coldness and haughtiness.”

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The Grand Duchess wrote about my grandparents in her diary

I’m always interested in reading about my grandparents and my latest purchase doesn’t disappoint. George Hawkins, who has translated the diaries and letters of members of the last Imperial Family of Russia, has translated the 1914 diary of Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna, second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and the

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An Upheaval leads to a memoir which made me wonder why…

Several years ago I reread the book my grandmother had written in the early 1930’s, her memoir Upheaval. I have always been curious. From the moment I could formulate a question, I wanted to know “why”; why some things happened and others didn’t, why people made the decisions they made,

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