Blogs which describe moments in my life, or the lives of my family.
Some of the most difficult decisions I had to make in my life were made in the couple of months after my father died, when I had to sort through the house that he, my mother, my grandmother and I had lived in. If you have read through some of
My father loved ships. Twice in his life his dream of crossing the rolling seas on an ocean liner was realised. Once when he left Europe and immigrated to America and the last time when our family left America and immigrated to Australia. My father’s first voyage was from Cherbourg,
I have a vague childhood memory of the evenings between Christmas on the 25December and Russian Christmas on the 7 January spent curled up on the sofa next to my mother, who was reading to me from The Nutcracker and The Mouse King. Opposite us was the Christmas tree we
On 1 January 1946 my great-grandmother, Catherine Nicolaievna Jakowzoff (formerly Countess Kleinmichel), sent a Christmas / New Year greeting to her granddaughter, my mother. The images of the card and the photo she sent are above. At the time of writing my great-grandmother was 81 and living in France, and
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolayevna as a nurse in WWI – postcard from the author’s personal collection
Rasputin, friend to Empress Alexandra of Russia and enemy of so many more, was murdered on 30 December 1916 – (17 December in the old calendar). As a follow up to my post a couple of weeks ago, here is how the Empress expressed her fears in a letter, the