Gosh Janet, thank you so much for that very kind remark; it makes all of my research worth it.
I have been doing a great deal of research for Margarita for the Rasputin trial and during that time I found out so much about the Empress that is so totally different than anything I had realized before. I am going to attempt a thread with some of the information on the Empress but not until after the Rasputin trial.
Since the trial is being postponed until the summer, I took a brake from my research and decided to look up all of Alexandra's immediate German relations. I feel that I have a stronger grasp on why the Empress was so concerned about the prestige of her family and how her Uncle's morganatic marriages dogged sisters Victoria and Ella and dogger her all the way into the first year of her marriage. I can't help feeling that those morganatic marriages played a minor role with the Romanoffs concerns about the marriage between Alix and Nicky.
I think the timing of Alix' Uncle Wilhelm marriage to his mistress, Josephine Bender, Countess von Lichtenberg, that legitimized his the birth of their 7 year-old son, Gottfried, which occured just two weeks before Alexandra’s sister, Victoria married Prince Louis Battenburg and a month before her sister Ella married the Grand Duke Sergei, is quite thought provoking. I don't know if, on the one hand if Wihelm's marriage was an attempt or a demand to clean up the immediate family ties, or if on the other hand, it mislead Alexandra's father, Louis, into thinking that he could pull off his morganatic marriage to Alexandrina Hutten-Czapska, Countess von Romrod, on the day that his daughter Victoria got married.
I would so love to know if there were correspondence between Alexandra's uncles, Heinrich and Wilhelm and herself or even between her uncles and her father. Thanks again Janet for you support and encouragement. Griff
