Last week marked the sad anniversary of the murder of Russia’s Imperial Family; Tsar Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra and their five children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei. They, together with a handful of their loyal servants, were brutally executed by the Bolsheviks, in the basement of the
A couple of weeks ago I made a video about the wedding of my maternal grandparents, Olga and Paul Woronoff, for the YouTube channel “In the Steps of the Romanovs” created by Helen Azar. Helen has translated and published the diaries of the Grand Duchesses, and has found a few
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
My grandmother did not spend her last Easter in Russia at the beautiful Assumption Cathedral in Novorossiysk (pic above) but she did help decorate it on the Saturday afternoon before Easter, as described in her book, Upheaval. She was in Novorossiysk in the spring of 1919 waiting for my grandfather
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