My Mom’s Family Photos

Mom made several attempts to record her family history with various degrees of success.Since both of my mom’s parents came from peasants’ families, I do not think I will ever learn much more about them than I know now. I will start with the earliest photos I have and will record everything I remember about them.

I know that my mom’s mother, baba Ania (full name Anna Petrovna), was born in the Pskov region in October 1911. Her maiden name was Grigorieva, and I believe I have somewhere an information about her brothers in one of the recording sessions with my mom in 2018 . Unfortuntely, I didn’t even start processing them. Surprisingly, I might know more about her childhood than my mom because I spent a lot of time with her during my second and third summers, and she used to tell me stories about her being a little girl. I never herd this storied from my mom, only from baba Ania herself. Being minimally educated, she recognized the importance of reading and self-improvement. She might have attended school for just a couple of years, but liked to tell me how she “already knew everything before she came to school” because “she read books.” She told me: And the teacher said, “well, Nura, you already know everything, so go and help me check other puples work. And here I am, walking along the rows of desks and checking everybody’s work. And all because I read a lot of books, that’s why.”

She left the village and moved to Leningrad when she was forteen to become a live-in nanny. Neither me nor my mom know anything about the family where she lived, except for that appeared to be well off and educated – some books baba Ania owned presumably came from that house.

In two years, she was already looking for a more prestigious job – a store clerk. On this picture, she is sixteen or seventeen, and she works in a grocery store near Warsaw railway station in Leningrad.

Looks like it was cold both inside the store and in the Red Corner since most people stay in their coats.

I can’t decode most of the slogans from the third photo background, but I can tell what was sold in the grocery department. Th list includes tea (“natural” and “surrogate”, sugar, buckwheat, millet, oatmeal, flour, coffee (also real and surrogate), several brands of sigaretts, matches, candles, shoe polish, black pepper and mustard.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.