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,
I have a question! My regular readers will know that I’ve been researching my maternal family for quite awhile now. My maternal grandparents, Paul and Olga Woronoff, escaped Russia in January 1920, during the Civil War in which my grandfather had volunteered for the White Army. As the Red Army
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
Wow! I have certainly been “missing in action” for awhile now. But I have not stopped researching my family history or writing about it. In fact this year I started working on a Master of Research in Literature and Creative Writing, focussing on the history of my grandparents. It has
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
It is 1918 and Russia is in the last stages of World War II. On the 3rd of March of that year the newly formed Russian government, under the leadership of Lenin, signed a peace treaty with Germany called the Brest-Litovsk treaty, ending Russia’s involvement in the war. For the