You would think it would be easy to pinpoint the important dates in your ancestor’s life if they had written a memoir. Unless, of course, your ancestor was a minimalist with dates – like my grandmother. My grandmother wrote a memoir, Upheaval, but instead of using dates or years to
Searching for information on my maternal grandfather, Pavel Voronov (Paul Woronoff) uncovered more material than I ever thought possible and I have written quite a few posts about him. However, moving one generation up the tree and the information is more difficult to come by. Naturally, if I could read
For the most part it has been easy for me to find family documents. I am lucky to have inherited birth certificates, school reports, identification documents and death certificates, amongst others, for both sides of my family. Documents I haven’t inherited, I have found online. The difficult part is trying
I have set myself a task for the first half of 2020. I would like to find the places my grandparents lived and worked in France, after their escape from Russia. This much I know: My grandparents were evacuated in March 1920 from the Port of Novorossiysk on the Black
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