Recently one of Olga’s distant cousins discovered an old photo of her ancestors.

Here is the photograph taken at the Silver Wedding of Nestor Grootten and Olga von Klemm. The celebration took place in 1899 in Riga, where Nestor worked at the time.

We are working on identifying everyone in the photograph.  Maximillian, Orest’s father is the boy standing on the extreme right, with a smudge over his face.

Orest’s father – Maximillian Grootten had thirteen siblings (four of them died in infancy according the best information I have which needs to be double checked).  The youngest sister of Maximillian, i.e. one of Orest’s aunts was called Adelaide (“Adia”).  She was married (since 1912) to a well known expert on hydrobiology Professor Dimitry Beling who headed a research institution in Kiev.  Germans made him to continue in this position after they occupied Kiev during WW2.  When the Soviet troops were close to liberating Kiev, Germans evacuated Beling to Germany.  After the war he and Adia worked at the Goettingen University and lived in West Germany. Their daughter Helena Beling remained in Leningrad amd married Vadim Regel of famous St. Petersburg German family. They had two children – a son and a daughter. In 1960 Adia started to commute between Goettingen and Leningrad often staying with her grandchildren . Although a West German citizen – she died in Leningrad in 1989.

Her ashes were buried in Goettingen.  A large part of Adia’s archive is preserved by the Regel family now in St. Petersburg.