Family Stories
Family Stories
9 storiesThe archival searches this site was built from. Each story is carried as far as the evidence went, and says plainly what is still unknown.
The vanished consul
The trail of the painter’s brother went cold in Italy in 1919. Finding out where and when he died took four years, three archives and a phone call from a stranger in France.
Cadet Weasel
A group photograph of soldiers lay in the family album, and the painter’s son was recognized in it: an orientalist who spoke twelve languages. Nobody knew what he was doing in uniform.
The empress who went to Denmark
A forgotten Wiesel painting surfaced online during the four hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Locating it took a monarchist forum, a museum and a letter to the keeper of paintings.
A grave in Menton
A walk through the old town on the French Riviera ended at a cemetery with an Orthodox chapel. The first headstone carried the surname whose letters the family had been working on for three years.
Meddum on glass plates
The summer settlement on the border of Latvia and Lithuania where the Wiesels spent their summers was wiped out by the First World War. It survives in stereo photographs taken by the painter himself.
Three generations with the Vyshnegradskys
A friendship between two families began in the finance ministry under Alexander III and ended only in 1974, when the grandchildren stopped writing to each other.
Piles and the critical point
Emil and Fanny Strauss had two inventors among their sons. One invented a way of placing piles that Gorodetsky and his contemporaries built on in Kyiv; the other solved a problem Mendeleev had attempted before him.
Doctor Eberman and the Friedental colony
Family papers kept mentioning years the Wiesels spent in a German colony. It made no sense: the colonists were farmers, and the Wiesels had nothing to do with them.
Two graves
The grave of the painter’s daughter, who worked to save Leningrad’s heritage through the siege, was found and cared for by local historians in St. Petersburg. His own grave has not been found.