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 Empress Alexandra. I recommend Hawkins’ books, as well as those cowritten with Helen Azar (and the ones she authored herself), to anyone interested in the Romanovs, and the history of Imperial Russia as seen through the eyes of the last Imperial Family.

My grandparents, Paul and Olga Woronoff (née Countess Kleinmichel) feature in several of the entries in this diary, which is easy to read and includes explanatory notes from Hawkins. Apart from being the year in which my grandparents married, 1914 also saw the beginning of World War I and Tatiana’s entry on 19 July shows the impact this has on her, “When we got back (from a walk), we found out that Germany had declared war on us. The beasts!” As the days progress she writes more about the war, focussing on her experiences nursing the wounded.

On 22 November 1914, Grand Duchess Tatiana notes in her diary, “We arrived at Vilnius at 10 ¼ in the morning.” She describes a few places they visited and then, “On the way we ran into P[avel] A[lexeievich], we were so awfully happy to see him.” Pavel Alexeievich was of course my grandfather. A couple of weeks later, Grand Duchess Tatiana writes to my grandmother, Olga Woronoff, “I was very happy to unexpectedly meet your husband in Vilna (the old name for Vilnius).” This letter, among others written by her and her sister Grand Duchess Olga, are included in the second edition of my grandmother’s memoir, Upheaval, to be published in October this year.

Any family historian will agree it is fascinating to read about their grandparents, or any of their ancestors, in the diaries, letters, or journals of others. Even newspaper articles can add flesh to skeletons. These writings often give us a different perspective of the people we might have thought we knew. It is, of course, always wonderful to read what your ancestors have written about their lives, but it adds another dimension when someone else writes about them. For example, in Upheaval my grandmother writes that her brother was “sorry for me that I did not turn out to be pretty like my sisters.” Yet, in the entry Grand Duchess Tatiana wrote on my grandparents’ wedding day, which she and her family attended, she described my grandmother as, “so awfully beautiful, and terribly lovely.”

As I begin work on the sequel to Upheaval, the more information I find on my grandparents helps me to better piece together their personalities, likes, and dislikes, and the more I can appreciate the times they lived through, and understand the decisions they made. It doesn’t matter if what I read about them happened before or after they left Russia, every bit of information adds another layer to their story. After all, it is frequently our past which colours the way we think and the decisions we make.