Blogs which describe moments in my life, or the lives of my family.
There is something about reading the personal letters of my ancestors which is very addictive. Recently my friend Sveta, who lives in Russia, sent me transcripts of letters which my great grandfather, Konstantin Petrovich Kleinmichel, wrote to his sister Olga Petrovna Volkonskaya in the late 1800s. You can follow Sveta
My great grandmother – my maternal grandmother Olga Kleinmichel’s mother – Countess Catherine Nicolaievna Kleinmichel, neé Bogdanov was born in Riga on 2 November 1865, when Latvia was part of the Russian Federation. Her father, Nicholas Bogdanov, was Marshal of Nobility of the government of Kursk, Russia, an area which
As I have mentioned before, my father learnt Latvian, English, German and French at high school and also knew a smattering of Russian. As a Baltic-German who did his schooling in Latvia, it is not a great leap to presume he spoke German at home and Latvian within the wider
A couple of years before he died, my father told me that my parent’s marriage was “never a love match”. I found his statement difficult to believe because I knew my mother loved him very much. But I had no way of asking her, she had died several years before
Researching family history, for me, is more than drawing connecting lines on a family tree. I always want to know more about my ancestor’s stories, how they lived their lives, what their thoughts were. Often this information can be gleaned from the letters they wrote or the memories they jotted
My great-great grandfather, Count Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmichel is apparently still quite well known in Russia (one might say infamous rather than famous), despite being dead for over 150 years. He is not an ancestor I am proud of but, as the saying goes, you cannot choose your family… Pyotr Andreevich