Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Through the Eyes of a Child ( with Tamara Buzyna Adams) | Episode 62

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Through the Eyes of a Child ( with Tamara Buzyna Adams) | Episode 62 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:02
  Tamara Adams: I mean it's like you say this all the time and it's so true.
• 0:05
  Tamara Adams: It helps you know your ancestor so much better.
• 0:10
  Tamara Adams: It makes them more real, almost Like it's a real person.
• 0:14
  Tamara Adams: Even though I didn't know my grandmother at this point in her life, I mean, I feel like I'm closer to her now than I was when she was alive closer to her now than I was when she was alive.
• 0:29
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family past, present and future.
• 0:32
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:36
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:44
  Crista Cowan: History and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:47
  Crista Cowan: Imagine being an 11-year-old little girl and living on a ship for two and a half years.
• 0:52
  Crista Cowan: I can't, but my guest today can, because her grandmother, Lydia, lived that experience and she's going to share that with you today.
• 1:04
  Crista Cowan: Now, the way she shared it with me was she is a listener of the podcast, just like you, and contacted me on Instagram when I was asking people about their stories, and she just shared a snippet of this story with me and I was all in.
• 1:19
  Crista Cowan: I was invested.
• 1:20
  Crista Cowan: What I didn't know was that she's also written a book about the whole story and she has her grandmother's childhood diaries that helped her discover the story.
• 1:29
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Tamara Buzyna Adams, and she is going to share the story of her grandmother, Lydia, with us.
• 1:36
  Crista Cowan: I hope you enjoy our conversation.
• 1:38
  Crista Cowan: I'm so glad you're here.
• 1:39
  Crista Cowan: This is going to be a fun conversation, I think, because the way your story came to me.
• 1:43
  Crista Cowan: I love when listeners of the podcast share their story.
• 1:47
  Crista Cowan: So before we dive into the story you came to share, I'd love to hear a little bit about your kind of journey into family history in general.
• 1:56
  Tamara Adams: Well, I grew up in Florida, in Tallahassee, florida, to Russian parents.
• 2:01
  Tamara Adams: My father was an immigrant.
• 2:02
  Tamara Adams: He came to the United States in 1950 and spoke Russian first and then learned how to speak Polish and then German.
• 2:10
  Tamara Adams: And they left when he was like six, from Poland and now it's Western Ukraine.
• 2:16
  Tamara Adams: So he came with his family in the displaced persons camp.
• 2:20
  Tamara Adams: They lived for five years in Germany.
• 2:21
  Tamara Adams: They had a very old aunt with them and they were supposed to go to Argentina or somewhere like that, but they couldn't go because she was too old or, you know, it was too complicated.
• 2:33
  Tamara Adams: Eventually she died and then they came to America in 1950 and he grew up in Chicago.
• 2:38
  Tamara Adams: How old was he at the time?
• 2:39
  Tamara Adams: He was 12 when he came over.
• 2:41
  Tamara Adams: Okay, yes, and then my mother was born in New York City, but her mother is the one that came from Odessa, in Southern what is today Ukraine.
• 2:51
  Tamara Adams: And then her father came from St Petersburg and her first language was Russian.
• 2:56
  Tamara Adams: She went, she attended kindergarten without knowing any English.
• 2:59
  Tamara Adams: Wow.
• 3:00
  Tamara Adams: So I grew up with a very strong Russian cultural background, with the religion, with the culture, with the cooking.
• 3:08
  Tamara Adams: My father's grandmother in Chicago was the typical babushka that you would imagine.
• 3:14
  Tamara Adams: You know, the kitchen smelled so good.
• 3:17
  Tamara Adams: She'd make vareniki, which is like a pierogi, and oh so good.
• 3:21
  Tamara Adams: I just I miss her cooking.
• 3:22
  Tamara Adams: I was very close to her and she was, she was great.
• 3:26
  Tamara Adams: So, anyways, I grew up, you know, with a strong sense of who I was as far as my cultural background, and I just, you know, my father and my uncle made a point of writing down family trees.
• 3:39
  Tamara Adams: Of course, it would only fit on one piece of paper and there was only like one generation, you know, or maybe two if you add us, you know, the children, and there was a lot of question marks.
• 3:50
  Tamara Adams: So I just never really, you know, I was kind of OK with, well, I'm never going to know, because we were the only people that came to the United States.
• 3:58
  Tamara Adams: The rest of the family is all in Europe, somewhere Eastern Europe.
• 4:01
  Tamara Adams: So how, how did your parents meet Europe, somewhere Eastern Europe?
• 4:06
  Tamara Adams: So how, how did your parents meet, so, um, my father?
• 4:08
  Tamara Adams: Well, they met at, actually, at Yale graduate school.
• 4:13
  Tamara Adams: My father was getting his PhD for mechanical engineering and my mother was going to, um, graphic arts design school, school there and, um, they met at a.
• 4:21
  Tamara Adams: There was a priest, father Shmaimon, I believe, is his name and they were sitting next to each other.
• 4:28
  Tamara Adams: It was a Russian Orthodox priest.
• 4:29
  Tamara Adams: He was giving a lecture on Russian Orthodoxy and my father was smoking and my mother was sitting next to him and she kind of went like this like you know, just kind of that, get that smoke out of my face.
• 4:44
  Tamara Adams: And so then, you know, just kind of that, get that smoke out of my face.
• 4:49
  Tamara Adams: And so then, you know, it all went from there.
• 4:53
  Tamara Adams: He never smoked again because it was bothering her contacts.
• 4:54
  Tamara Adams: And it's like nine months later I think they were married.
• 4:56
  Crista Cowan: Okay, and so were you raised knowing all four grandparents, or had some already passed by the time you came.
• 5:02
  Tamara Adams: So I knew three of them.
• 5:04
  Tamara Adams: So my father's parents were, um, I knew them all growing up.
• 5:08
  Tamara Adams: My mother's father died in 1960.
• 5:11
  Tamara Adams: So I never met him.
• 5:12
  Tamara Adams: He died suddenly and when she was 18, she was a freshman in college and her brother was 14.
• 5:18
  Tamara Adams: So that was.
• 5:19
  Tamara Adams: That was pretty traumatic.
• 5:21
  Tamara Adams: Um, she was in college, her, her mom called her, said her dad had a stroke, and my mom's like should I come home?
• 5:27
  Tamara Adams: She's like no, no, no, it's okay, it's okay.
• 5:29
  Tamara Adams: And then he passed away, sadly, but so sadly.
• 5:33
  Tamara Adams: I didn't get to know him, but I've always seen, you know, there's always pictures of him, they would talk about him and just a lot of you know.
• 5:42
  Tamara Adams: Just, there was a lot of Russian around us, friends, and because they grew up my mother grew up in Schenectady, new York, and her father had worked for General Electric and there was a big community of Russian immigrants that came over in the 20s, the first white emigre diaspora, and so they all knew each other diaspora, and so they all knew each other.
• 6:07
  Tamara Adams: And so New Year's Eve I have such such fond memories because there was all these mixed, interesting mixture of family friends that they had known and it would just be a wonderful time and you know it was great.
• 6:18
  Crista Cowan: It's so interesting to be raised with such strong cultural and religious and language and food, like all of that identity as this.
• 6:27
  Crista Cowan: You know this Russian culture, but to be disconnected from, like even your grandmother's, your grandparents', parents or their parents like to like it feels like those things should go together.
• 6:39
  Crista Cowan: Yes, but the fact that they were living in a community and working in communities of other Russian immigrants makes sense.
• 6:46
  Tamara Adams: Yes, yes, and you know it's funny, you talk about the fan club.
• 6:50
  Tamara Adams: Well, I've got now I think I've had to branch out to two notebooks that are like three or four inches wide, of friends, these friends that would show up on New Year's Eve or would go.
• 7:02
  Tamara Adams: You know my mother would be like, oh yeah, I remember this person did that and I would look it up on ancestry.
• 7:08
  Tamara Adams: I'm like, oh, I'm gonna say, oh, they died in this year.
• 7:11
  Tamara Adams: Here's the obituary, or you know, this person wrote a book or this.
• 7:14
  Tamara Adams: You know it's, it's just fascinating and we're just all so, so excited about just learning about, about them, and my mom's like I never knew that about this person.
• 7:25
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, those friends become such an important part of the network the community of it does.
• 7:29
  Crista Cowan: Wow, I love that.
• 7:31
  Crista Cowan: So what was it that like triggered your interest in family history specifically?
• 7:35
  Tamara Adams: So what really?
• 7:36
  Tamara Adams: I mean, I've always kind of been interested in it.
• 7:39
  Tamara Adams: You know, when we would go to my grandmother's house every Christmas.
• 7:41
  Tamara Adams: We'd go to Chicago, we would drive in our 1973 Volkswagen camper van, but I'd be excited we were not camping in the winter because it was too cold and we got to stay in a hotel.
• 7:51
  Tamara Adams: And then we would go to New York, to upstate New York, for New Year's Eve.
• 7:57
  Tamara Adams: So my father would get out the old tape recorder and he'd press the button and we'd listen to my grandmother speak about her time in Russia.
• 8:06
  Tamara Adams: And she would do it in Russian.
• 8:09
  Tamara Adams: I'm not fluent in Russian.
• 8:10
  Tamara Adams: I can read.
• 8:11
  Tamara Adams: I've taught myself how to read records and I can.
• 8:14
  Tamara Adams: I feel like I should understand it more than I do because I've been surrounded by it.
• 8:18
  Tamara Adams: But I don't.
• 8:19
  Tamara Adams: Unfortunately I don't speak it.
• 8:20
  Tamara Adams: So my father would kind of translate as we would go.
• 8:22
  Tamara Adams: And thankfully we have these tapes and later on, when once I really delved into family history, I had them translated.
• 8:33
  Tamara Adams: But what really got me interested in is I was at the funeral of my husband's grandfather and I think it was 2004.
• 8:40
  Tamara Adams: And I was talking to my father in law'slaw's brothers and they said well, you know Adams wasn't our original name and you know my parents, meaning my husband's grandparents, came from South Poland, which is the Karpatho-Rusyn Mountains, so they were Lemko and Karpatho-Rusyn, and you know they're telling us that.
• 9:02
  Tamara Adams: You know their, their last name was Adamcho or it was Adamchick.
• 9:06
  Tamara Adams: They, you know, they didn't really know exactly how or it wasn't spelled exactly, so they just changed it to Adams.
• 9:12
  Tamara Adams: So you know, I came home all excited I'm, so I'm researching that family.
• 9:17
  Tamara Adams: I was joined a bunch of Facebook genealogy groups.
• 9:20
  Tamara Adams: I met a bunch of my husband's fifth cousins.
• 9:23
  Tamara Adams: You know I'm like this is really exciting because I've always loved puzzles and it was just so satisfying and I would report to my mother oh, I found this, this relative today or that one.
• 9:35
  Tamara Adams: And so one day she's like well, tomorrow, when are you going to start researching our family?
• 9:41
  Tamara Adams: And you know I just didn't expect to be able to find my great grandparents or heaven forbid my second great grandparents or even, you know.
• 9:51
  Tamara Adams: And now, more, the more information I find, the more I want to know.
• 9:54
  Tamara Adams: It's just not enough.
• 9:57
  Crista Cowan: It's interesting that you were drawn to your husband's family first, but I love that your mother kind of pushed you towards your family.
• 10:04
  Crista Cowan: By the time that happened, was your grandmother still living or had she passed.
• 10:08
  Tamara Adams: She had literally just passed, like the year before, in 2003.
• 10:12
  Tamara Adams: So, unfortunately, the questions that I would have asked I didn't ask, you know.
• 10:20
  Tamara Adams: And I guess another thing I should mention about my husband's grandparents is they were also Russian Orthodox, or they were really Greek Catholic, which is slightly different, but they attended the same Orthodox church as us and when I first met her she says, oh, you're one of us, so, and she did a lot of the ethnic cooking.
• 10:39
  Tamara Adams: So I felt a connection with her and I felt a connection with researching his family because it was a similar, very similar background.
• 10:46
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and yet still it didn't occur to you that you could find your family.
• 10:50
  Tamara Adams: No, I really.
• 10:51
  Tamara Adams: I.
• 10:51
  Tamara Adams: You know.
• 10:52
  Tamara Adams: My parents said my, my father had a little piece of paper with names written down because they did ask his.
• 10:57
  Tamara Adams: His father and actually his grandparents came over also, but they died before I was born.
• 11:03
  Tamara Adams: I think they died in the fifties, but they they came into ants.
• 11:09
  Tamara Adams: So that's, that's all we have here.
• 11:11
  Crista Cowan: Right, yeah, and it's interesting to feel like, oh, we have such a small family, yes, until you start digging into it and realize there are more of us.
• 11:19
  Tamara Adams: Yeah, and my mother, she, she, you know, once I started this project, she's like I always she never had any first cousins, she never knew any cousins, she always wanted to have a bigger family.
• 11:31
  Tamara Adams: And now we have, we found I mean not close, but we found fifth cousins, six cousins living in Sweden and Finland and Europe and they're like come visit us, you know, so it's, it's amazing, it's that instant connection when you find someone.
• 11:47
  Tamara Adams: It's hard to explain, but it's, it's a really neat feeling.
• 11:50
  Crista Cowan: It really is so, um so 2004 ish.
• 11:53
  Crista Cowan: You're researching your husband's family for a few years and then you decide at some point, based on your mother's prodding, to start researching your own family.
• 12:03
  Crista Cowan: What were some of the early successes or barriers that you came up against?
• 12:09
  Tamara Adams: Well, the barriers would be that there were no records online and I didn't really know where to look.
• 12:16
  Tamara Adams: But we did connect with a distant relative that was able to go to archives and do some research for us and so and my mother had, my parents had gone to Russia several times met some of our distant cousins that we had known about.
• 12:36
  Tamara Adams: There was a couple of cousins that didn't even know we existed, which was kind of interesting.
• 12:41
  Tamara Adams: So we had someone that would go to the archives for us.
• 12:46
  Tamara Adams: And you know my dream one day this is getting off a little subject, but my dream one day is to go to the Russian, the St Petersburg archives and like open up a book and like look at a metric book with my relatives, my ancestors, on it.
• 13:02
  Tamara Adams: So, hopefully, about those original records.
• 13:06
  Tamara Adams: Yes, I don't know what it is, it's amazing.
• 13:09
  Crista Cowan: So your early days of research were really like the early days of research that a lot of us went through yes, you know, even here in the United States, before records came online.
• 13:18
  Tamara Adams: Right.
• 13:18
  Tamara Adams: And the other thing was I, which I tell people when people ask me how to get started in researching your family, and I'm like, well, I just review what I have first, because oftentimes, no matter how many times I've looked at a certain record, when I go back something else jumps out at me and I'm like, how did I not see that before?
• 13:40
  Tamara Adams: So I was constantly and I was organizing.
• 13:43
  Tamara Adams: I love to.
• 13:44
  Tamara Adams: You know, my house is a mess, but my photographs and my genealogy is very organized, that they're all in notebooks by surname.
• 13:51
  Tamara Adams: They have a little page protector.
• 13:54
  Tamara Adams: So you know, I write notes.
• 13:55
  Tamara Adams: I have little documents, I don't have spreadsheets yet, but I pretty much organized all the information.
• 14:04
  Tamara Adams: I entered it onto the family tree, onto Ancestry, and I think way back when I had Family Tree Maker at some point one of the girls there I found my father's father's birth record.
• 14:14
  Tamara Adams: What that was just scanned in January of this year.
• 14:33
  Tamara Adams: That's amazing.
• 14:35
  Tamara Adams: I mean we were all like crying, we were so excited, I literally yelled out, I was like library.
• 14:41
  Tamara Adams: But and then we found my grandfather's parents marriage record.
• 14:48
  Tamara Adams: So that was.
• 14:50
  Tamara Adams: That was pretty incredible.
• 14:51
  Crista Cowan: So was this new information that you'd been looking for, or just the first time you'd seen the record?
• 14:56
  Tamara Adams: There was some new information in the marriage record.
• 14:59
  Tamara Adams: We had a transcribed.
• 15:02
  Tamara Adams: They must have traveled with.
• 15:06
  Tamara Adams: They traveled with my father's birth record because I've seen that, and they must have traveled with my grandfather's, my paternal grandfather's record, Because when they were in Germany they had a transcribed version of it typed out.
• 15:20
  Tamara Adams: It was in Latin letters, but it was in Ukrainian.
• 15:24
  Crista Cowan: So they had to travel with paper.
• 15:26
  Tamara Adams: They literally left on the last train from Colville, which is where they're from, to go to Germany, and they just grabbed whatever they had.
• 15:35
  Tamara Adams: It had the name of the church on it, so she was able to find which church it was.
• 15:40
  Tamara Adams: I mean, she was working her magic and then all of a sudden it was there and I was just amazed.
• 15:45
  Tamara Adams: I never thought I'd see that.
• 15:47
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that that, oh, just that thrill of like seeing it in print and knowing that you've been chasing the right group of people, the right family, that's so important.
• 15:56
  Crista Cowan: I'd love to dive into your grandmother's story.
• 15:59
  Crista Cowan: I know a little bit of it, but let's start with.
• 16:02
  Crista Cowan: What was the impetus Like?
• 16:05
  Crista Cowan: Is this a story you heard growing up?
• 16:07
  Crista Cowan: Is this a story you uncovered as you went?
• 16:09
  Crista Cowan: And then when did you make some decisions about, like wanting to know more?
• 16:15
  Tamara Adams: So during COVID the beginnings of COVID my parents had just moved up to Atlanta, where I live.
• 16:21
  Tamara Adams: We you know something about my mom and I we always have a project.
• 16:25
  Tamara Adams: Whether we finish it or not is another story.
• 16:27
  Tamara Adams: But she said I'm going to translate these diaries because we had all this time.
• 16:31
  Tamara Adams: She's fluent, of course, in Russian.
• 16:33
  Tamara Adams: So she's determined and I'm like I, you know, I'm like I'm all for it.
• 16:38
  Tamara Adams: You know I have the time.
• 16:40
  Tamara Adams: So literally I was photographing the five volumes of those little composition books.
• 16:46
  Tamara Adams: These yellow old pages smells like her house.
• 16:49
  Tamara Adams: So I photographed them.
• 16:51
  Tamara Adams: Didn't like how it came out.
• 16:52
  Tamara Adams: So then I scan them.
• 16:53
  Tamara Adams: You know, probably spending way too much time on them.
• 16:55
  Tamara Adams: A little bit of a perfectionist.
• 16:57
  Tamara Adams: But she would translate it.
• 16:59
  Tamara Adams: I would send her the copy, the photograph or the scan of the pages.
• 17:05
  Tamara Adams: She would blow it up on her computer screen and she would type it out, the English version she figured.
• 17:10
  Tamara Adams: Well, her mother was 11 years old at the time of writing these diaries.
• 17:14
  Tamara Adams: Her first entry was January 29th 1921.
• 17:18
  Tamara Adams: And you know her penmanship was absolutely beautiful.
• 17:24
  Tamara Adams: I mean, the handwriting is better than probably anyone's today and you don't need to know Russian to be able to tell that her handwriting was just meticulous and just beautiful, so she was able to translate them.
• 17:37
  Tamara Adams: And then I would take it and I would kind of rearrange it.
• 17:41
  Tamara Adams: I mean, it was still, you know, word for word, but I would, you know, add periods or whatever, and research different places.
• 17:48
  Tamara Adams: And so my grandmother would talk about her friend Zhenya, which is like Yevgenia is the the original name, and then Zhenya is what they call the pet name or her nickname, and we're like, who is this Zhenya?
• 18:03
  Tamara Adams: And she would talk about Katya.
• 18:05
  Tamara Adams: So this is 11-year-old girl.
• 18:07
  Tamara Adams: You know they had just escaped Russia.
• 18:09
  Tamara Adams: She had lived on this at this point when she started her diary.
• 18:12
  Tamara Adams: She had already lived on the ship for a whole year and she talked about these kids.
• 18:18
  Tamara Adams: You know there was no sign of anything horrible going on in the world.
• 18:22
  Tamara Adams: You know it was basically through the eyes of a child, like she was excited if the weather was good and she got to play outside on the deck of the ship or whatever.
• 18:31
  Crista Cowan: But so so the diaries start when she's 11, in 1921.
• 18:36
  Tamara Adams: And they go through when 1924, september 1st.
• 18:39
  Tamara Adams: Okay, so, so we've got four years four years.
• 18:43
  Crista Cowan: Yes, okay, and give us the backstory right.
• 18:47
  Crista Cowan: So so you mentioned the ship she's living on and escaping Russia and I assume it came out.
• 18:53
  Crista Cowan: Did it come out in the diaries or is that information you had to research?
• 18:57
  Tamara Adams: So the diary started january 1921, but she moved on to the ship.
• 19:03
  Tamara Adams: I was.
• 19:04
  Tamara Adams: I had to do a bunch of research to figure out that whole year beforehand.
• 19:08
  Tamara Adams: You know, when I first started this project I was like how in the world am I going to get the information from when she boarded the ship, where she boarded the ship, where she boarded the ship, all this information?
• 19:18
  Tamara Adams: But we discovered she boarded the ship in January of 1920, like end of December, beginning of January.
• 19:25
  Tamara Adams: We've got a few evidence pieces that that helped us come up with those dates.
• 19:29
  Tamara Adams: And then we have we know that they just went all over the Black Sea so that she was on the steamship Kershon, which there's also a name.
• 19:38
  Tamara Adams: So that she was on the steamship Kershon, which there's also a name, a city in Ukraine called Kershon, and they would.
• 19:46
  Tamara Adams: During war times it was a military ship.
• 19:47
  Tamara Adams: During peaceful times it would.
• 19:47
  Tamara Adams: It would take people here and there and her father worked on one of the ships.
• 19:53
  Tamara Adams: We don't know if it was that particular one or he worked on a bunch of other ships.
• 19:56
  Tamara Adams: So he was basically a purser.
• 19:59
  Tamara Adams: So think of gopher, like from the love boat.
• 20:01
  Tamara Adams: That's who I think of.
• 20:04
  Crista Cowan: And so was the whole family living on the ship at this point.
• 20:07
  Tamara Adams: So in January, yes, but he would be gone, for, like I have a postcard from him to her in 1912, when he was, he would go on the on the Odessa line, from Odessa all the way to Vladivostok.
• 20:19
  Tamara Adams: He would go on the Odessa line, from Odessa all the way to Vladivostok, which I don't know it's way on the east side of Russia, and it would take about 40 days to go there.
• 20:25
  Tamara Adams: And they would go to Egypt.
• 20:26
  Tamara Adams: They'd stop in, you know, all these different ports, japan, and would send back postcards to the family.
• 20:33
  Tamara Adams: So the family would stay at home, family would stay at home.
• 20:42
  Tamara Adams: But in January of 1920, her father had said well, you know things, politically, things are, the Russian revolution had already, you know, taken place.
• 20:46
  Tamara Adams: The Bolsheviks had taken over most of Russia, except for the Crimea and that area.
• 20:51
  Tamara Adams: He's like, you know, let's, let's go on the, let's go on the ship, let's live on the ship for a little bit and then, when things calm down, we'll, we'll come back home.
• 21:00
  Tamara Adams: And how many were in the family?
• 21:01
  Tamara Adams: So it was just my grandmother lydia, her mother daria and her father dimitri, no siblings so they get on the ship in january of 20?
• 21:11
  Crista Cowan: yes, it is not like.
• 21:13
  Crista Cowan: It's not an immigrant ship, it's a.
• 21:14
  Crista Cowan: No, it's a travel ship, it's a cruising ship basically yeah and they're living on the ship because her father's working on the ship and because they don't feel safe at home, correct, separated now from the rest of their family.
• 21:26
  Crista Cowan: Yes, and she starts.
• 21:27
  Crista Cowan: Actually never heard of this before I started doing the research.
• 21:42
  Tamara Adams: It was the big Crimean evacuation.
• 21:44
  Tamara Adams: General Peter Wrangel headed it up.
• 21:48
  Tamara Adams: He orchestrated it because that was the last hold of the White Army.
• 21:52
  Tamara Adams: The White Army was in the Crimea and, like I said, the Bolsheviks were coming in and it was inevitable that they had to evacuate.
• 22:00
  Tamara Adams: So he wanted to protect his people and he organized, in five different ports on the Crimea, 126 ships with 150,000 people on whatever floats got on their ships and left on November 14th 1920 got on their ships and left on November 14th 1920.
• 22:22
  Crista Cowan: So in November of 1920, you know, most of the population, or a lot of the population, ends up on various ships in the Black Sea.
• 22:27
  Crista Cowan: What happens to those ships?
• 22:29
  Tamara Adams: So those ships all left.
• 22:31
  Tamara Adams: I believe it was like a two day journey to go to Constantinople, which is today's Istanbul, and that's the only outlet of the Black Sea.
• 22:40
  Tamara Adams: So they all, you know, if you can imagine everyone, with all these refugees descending upon Constantinople and all the docks, and General Wrangel is trying to figure out, you know who's going to take all these people, because you know they're now safe from the Bolsheviks.
• 22:56
  Tamara Adams: But now what are they going to do?
• 22:58
  Tamara Adams: These people literally just grabbed what they could and lived on the ship, and my grandmother made a point of saying that she and her family had a cabin because her father worked on the ship and that was so.
• 23:15
  Tamara Adams: They were living, you know, comfortably in a very small, I'm sure a very small cabin, and I wish she had described it.
• 23:23
  Tamara Adams: She didn't, or took a picture, because we do have pictures on the ship, but you know, maybe they'll surface someday.
• 23:32
  Crista Cowan: But you think about that, you know.
• 23:33
  Crista Cowan: I mean, we're just not even two years out of the World War.
• 23:36
  Crista Cowan: Right, there was an influenza pandemic that was winding down around that time.
• 23:41
  Crista Cowan: Like now you have all these refugees, you know, who are probably another wave of refugees, because the war created refugees as well.
• 23:49
  Crista Cowan: And yeah, like, where in the world did those people go and who?
• 23:53
  Crista Cowan: You know?
• 23:54
  Crista Cowan: Who decides?
• 23:54
  Tamara Adams: that who took them in?
• 23:56
  Tamara Adams: Yes, so so they the.
• 23:58
  Tamara Adams: The next part of the story is serbia.
• 24:01
  Tamara Adams: Serbia accepted all these refugees.
• 24:05
  Tamara Adams: However, um, my grandmother's ship went into the bay of couture, which is in montenegro.
• 24:10
  Tamara Adams: I've been there, I have to.
• 24:12
  Tamara Adams: It's beautiful, oh my god, it's gorgeous, gorgeous.
• 24:16
  Tamara Adams: Yes, so she was.
• 24:18
  Tamara Adams: They went into the bay of couture.
• 24:19
  Tamara Adams: There was a ton of ships, you know, and a lot of people had typhus.
• 24:24
  Tamara Adams: So the ships that had a lot of typhus on it had to quarantine.
• 24:29
  Tamara Adams: They weren't allowed to, you know, dock and have the people come off the ship.
• 24:33
  Tamara Adams: So they were up there, and that's when the diaries start she talks about.
• 24:38
  Tamara Adams: Oh, I wonder if Ivan Iosifovich has is came to bid me farewell and that was her tutor that she talked about, and we have some postcards that he had written her.
• 24:49
  Tamara Adams: Obviously, you know he was, you know she thought the world of him and you know she caught up with him a couple you know, spoiler alert.
• 24:58
  Tamara Adams: And you know she caught up with him a couple, you know, spoiler alert on their way to the United.
• 25:06
  Crista Cowan: States, but you know his last name never came up.
• 25:09
  Crista Cowan: Well, so it's interesting because you know we're following along with this story of your grandmother, but you're it's unfolding as you're reading the diaries but then also doing the research into who all these people are.
• 25:17
  Crista Cowan: Yes, and what is it about?
• 25:20
  Crista Cowan: Like you see a name on a piece of paper that makes you want to know who this person is and more about them.
• 25:26
  Tamara Adams: Because I feel like if I know who this Ivan Iosifovich is, I'll know more about my grandmother, about the people in her life, like it gives more of a whole person and it's I mean, it's like you say this all the time and it's so true, it's, it helps.
• 25:43
  Tamara Adams: It helps you know your ancestor so much better, it makes them more real, almost like it's a real person, even though you know, you didn't know, I didn't know my grandmother at this point in her life.
• 25:54
  Tamara Adams: I mean, I feel like I'm closer to her now than I was when she was alive.
• 26:00
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 26:01
  Tamara Adams: Yeah, I love that.
• 26:02
  Crista Cowan: So so from November, when they had to leave the Black Sea, yes, and then they go to the Dalmatian coast next.
• 26:11
  Crista Cowan: How long are they there?
• 26:13
  Tamara Adams: So they arrived in Constantinople November 17 ish.
• 26:20
  Tamara Adams: They left there around the 20th I'm trying to remember my timeline off the top of my head of November and then December 6th about they were in the Bay of Couture, got rejected there, went up to Bacar and I think they had to be.
• 26:35
  Tamara Adams: They were in Bacar for three weeks.
• 26:36
  Tamara Adams: They had a typhus epidemic on the ship.
• 26:37
  Tamara Adams: They had to be.
• 26:38
  Tamara Adams: They were in Bacar for three weeks.
• 26:38
  Tamara Adams: They had a typhus epidemic on the ship.
• 26:39
  Tamara Adams: They had to anchor.
• 26:40
  Tamara Adams: They weren't allowed to anchor in the bay, they had to anchor at the roadstead, which is even further behind.
• 26:45
  Tamara Adams: There were ships that would bring food and water to them and for a couple of days the weather was so bad they weren't able to bring food to them.
• 26:55
  Tamara Adams: These random little stories that kind of makes this whole situation so real.
• 27:00
  Crista Cowan: And are these stories you uncovered because you've researched the ship, or are these people that your grandmother's writing about?
• 27:06
  Tamara Adams: So no, so this was not what she wrote about.
• 27:10
  Tamara Adams: There are a bunch of memoirs that people have written that have said oh, I was on the Kerson evacuating Russia and this is what it was like.
• 27:19
  Tamara Adams: So we kind of took little snippets of what these people said.
• 27:23
  Tamara Adams: So it's just piecing together.
• 27:24
  Tamara Adams: It's a big puzzle piecing together all the information that we find about the ship.
• 27:31
  Crista Cowan: How long?
• 27:32
  Crista Cowan: How long, until they finally find a home?
• 27:34
  Tamara Adams: So by January 31st they were back in the Bay of Couture.
• 27:37
  Crista Cowan: OK, and that's about the time the journal started.
• 27:39
  Tamara Adams: the diary yes, that's the that's the time and she writes about how the beautiful scenery you know.
• 27:44
  Tamara Adams: She's looking outside off the deck of the ship.
• 27:47
  Tamara Adams: I guess I have no idea if she had a window in that.
• 27:50
  Tamara Adams: I think she did actually have a porthole possibly, but um, and she would talk about that.
• 27:55
  Tamara Adams: And then they arrived into the bay of Couture and they anchored there from about January 31st until about October 6th of that year Wow, for about a week before they ended up going to Novi Sad in Serbia, which was the second largest Russian community of people that General Vrangel was trying to help and support.
• 28:28
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 28:28
  Tamara Adams: So yeah.
• 28:30
  Crista Cowan: So she lives on the ship for a year and a half.
• 28:32
  Crista Cowan: Essentially, the first 10, 11 months of that is just her dad doing his job, 10-11 months of that is just her dad doing his job, and then the rest of that is illness and refugee status, and yet she still just has this childlike wonder that comes through even just in the few things you've shared.
• 28:51
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 28:53
  Tamara Adams: Yes, like her highlight of those 7 months that she lived in the Bay of Couture was, you know oh, I hope the weather doesn't ruin, you know going to shore.
• 29:03
  Tamara Adams: I counted something like 50 excursions to the shore and it was just so exciting for her.
• 29:09
  Tamara Adams: And she would, you know, run around and have picnics with her friends.
• 29:13
  Tamara Adams: And you know, there's just a handful of children there and you know, I knew them all by name because, you know, and I felt like I was living there with them.
• 29:21
  Tamara Adams: And in Russian when children address adults, they address their first name and their patronymic.
• 29:28
  Tamara Adams: So, for instance, she would talk about Anna Ivanovna.
• 29:34
  Tamara Adams: So we know Anna and her father was Ivan, so it's Anna Ivanovna, but she didn't say her last name.
• 29:39
  Tamara Adams: Anna Ivanovna invited all the children to go on a picnic and we had.
• 29:44
  Tamara Adams: You know, it's kind of funny because she would say how she would have a shot of wine or have some coffee, or you know it was.
• 29:51
  Tamara Adams: Or they go into a restaurant and you know there's a funny story where she, they were sitting in a restaurant and these sausages that were hanging on the ceiling all of a sudden fell down on them and scared them and she said they had the biggest laugh of all.
• 30:05
  Tamara Adams: So you know, it's just funny how she describes these little.
• 30:08
  Tamara Adams: You know, it's the simple things in life.
• 30:12
  Tamara Adams: They celebrated Russian Orthodox Easter and we have pictures.
• 30:15
  Tamara Adams: So she would say in the diaries oh, today the children were so excited because we got our picture taken and then we got the picture back and so it corresponds with the date.
• 30:26
  Tamara Adams: She's so detail oriented I could figure out pretty much which picture she was talking about.
• 30:33
  Tamara Adams: So, and I mean, it's just such a treasure to have these photographs and you can see them and they're just, they look like just you know, on the ship and you would have no idea what they just went through.
• 30:45
  Tamara Adams: Wow, that's amazing.
• 30:48
  Crista Cowan: So, uh, when do they finally make plans to come to the United States, or how does that all play out?
• 30:53
  Tamara Adams: So, um, lydia's mother, daria, had siblings.
• 30:57
  Tamara Adams: One sibling, constantine, had already already come to the United States, okay so, and he was living in New York City.
• 31:05
  Tamara Adams: So they were communicating, so they were able to send letters to each other.
• 31:09
  Tamara Adams: So Constantine sends a letter to wherever they were in Novi Sad saying you guys should come here, you know, because this whole time my grandmother keeps saying oh, you know, we're definitely going back to Odessa, we can't wait to go, we're gonna.
• 31:26
  Tamara Adams: When we go back to Odessa, they always expected to go back, that was just not a question.
• 31:32
  Tamara Adams: But then Constantine said oh, let's, you know, come, come, meet me in New York City.
• 31:37
  Tamara Adams: Let's, you know, come, come meet me in New York city.
• 31:42
  Tamara Adams: So, you know, at first I think Lydia's parents said no, and Lydia had remarked how she was, you know, upset that they said no, and then she was excited that they finally said yes.
• 31:50
  Tamara Adams: So they had to do all the paperwork.
• 31:53
  Tamara Adams: So her, they were in Novi Sad and her father had to travel to Belgrade, I assume on train by himself for a couple.
• 32:00
  Tamara Adams: He would be gone for a couple of days to get the paperwork and we had we actually have the document of their immigrant, or their, their paperwork.
• 32:08
  Tamara Adams: It's this huge, like I don't know, 11 by 14 paper.
• 32:12
  Tamara Adams: It's got these beautiful stamps on it, it has pictures, these signatures.
• 32:16
  Tamara Adams: It's just an absolute treasure.
• 32:19
  Tamara Adams: So then they, they went on kind of an adventure.
• 32:22
  Tamara Adams: They went on a train, basically from novi sad to zagreb, and they saw their friend ivan yusufovich, bought him some art supplies not sure what he was, must have been an artist as well and then they continued to the with the train to to Paris, and Lydia mentions how she really wanted to see the Eiffel Tower but she they didn't have time.
• 32:45
  Tamara Adams: And so then they went to Le Havre and they had to be in.
• 32:49
  Tamara Adams: I guess they stayed in like a warehouse for a week.
• 32:51
  Tamara Adams: They had to be in quarantine before coming to the United States.
• 32:55
  Tamara Adams: So at the end of May they get on, they board the ship La Savoy and they took an immigration ship took them five days or a week.
• 33:08
  Tamara Adams: She had a horrible experience.
• 33:09
  Tamara Adams: You know, everything else was great, but she's like, the food was terrible, she felt nauseous, the weather was terrible the first few days, the waves.
• 33:18
  Tamara Adams: It was very rocky, very difficult, but they made it.
• 33:23
  Tamara Adams: On June 5th, 1922 is when they landed in New York City and her uncle, constantine and wife met them at Ellis Island and of course I have that record.
• 33:36
  Tamara Adams: I think I initially had ordered it when you before it was available online.
• 33:41
  Tamara Adams: So that was exciting.
• 33:43
  Tamara Adams: So she was what.
• 33:44
  Crista Cowan: 13 by the time she got so she was.
• 33:47
  Tamara Adams: I believe her birthday is in November, so she was 12.
• 33:50
  Tamara Adams: Almost third.
• 33:52
  Tamara Adams: She was probably turning 13 that year and spent almost two years of her life on a show, right, and she wasn't in like normal school.
• 33:58
  Tamara Adams: Yeah, like she loved school and she, you know, she, if she didn't do her studies during the day one day because it was Easter or something, she would have to like justify why she didn't do her work.
• 34:11
  Tamara Adams: She was very diligent, like I think.
• 34:13
  Tamara Adams: I think she needed that structure in such a such a chaotic time in her life.
• 34:19
  Tamara Adams: You know she was going to school in Odessa when she lived there.
• 34:22
  Tamara Adams: She took a little tram or a little trolley to school and she loved it.
• 34:26
  Tamara Adams: We have pictures from it, we have a little emblem from.
• 34:29
  Crista Cowan: You know, my grandmother saved everything and my mother saved everything, and so and I wonder if maybe that's why she took to writing the diary was because that was an outlet for that like need for structure and education.
• 34:42
  Tamara Adams: Yeah, because that's an.
• 34:43
  Tamara Adams: That's a big question I get asked a lot.
• 34:45
  Tamara Adams: Also is, you know, was it her desire to write a diary, or did her parents see her struggling and think that would be a good idea?
• 34:55
  Tamara Adams: You know?
• 34:55
  Tamara Adams: I mean, I think it's a.
• 34:57
  Tamara Adams: It was probably her therapy.
• 34:59
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 35:00
  Tamara Adams: And you know she has.
• 35:01
  Tamara Adams: You know, up until old age she had a very positive outlook on how she had a great time on the ship.
• 35:07
  Crista Cowan: You know interesting, and so you have taken this and turned it into a book.
• 35:14
  Crista Cowan: Yes, that is going to be published very soon.
• 35:16
  Crista Cowan: Yes, do you want to tell us about it?
• 35:18
  Tamara Adams: So this is called Last Ship to Freedom and Uncovering my Grandmother's Tale of Fleeing Post-Imperial Russia.
• 35:26
  Tamara Adams: And this is a picture of my grandmother in her favorite sailor suit sitting on the deck of the Kerson in 1921 in the Bay of Kator and you can see she has very curly hair and there was a story she actually contracted typhus and they had to shave all the kids' heads and her hair grew back very curly.
• 35:52
  Tamara Adams: So she has.
• 35:53
  Tamara Adams: Every time I see this picture I think of I think of how she had to have a shaved head.
• 35:58
  Tamara Adams: But I I told the story of kind of a little bit about her background and then that first year living on the ship and her impressions and just interesting things that happened while she was on the ship.
• 36:12
  Tamara Adams: She told a story when she was older that she saw horses in the water swimming in the water when she was in the Black Sea and my uncle and cousin on my father's side were always fascinated by this story and anytime I heard any kind of history story when I was younger I bolted, I was like whatever, and now I wish I had listened to it.
• 36:35
  Tamara Adams: But what happened was in Novorossiysk, which is one of the ports on the Black Sea.
• 36:41
  Tamara Adams: The White Army was defeated once again in March of 1920.
• 36:46
  Tamara Adams: There was not enough room for the horses on the ships, so the horses would go into the water trying to follow their masters on the ship.
• 36:55
  Tamara Adams: Just heartbreaking.
• 36:57
  Tamara Adams: And I have I have found a poem of a COSAC, I believe, who wrote about this experience and it's it's heartbreaking to hear.
• 37:08
  Tamara Adams: You know you expect that you're going to die with your horse and to leave it behind is like the ultimate betrayal.
• 37:14
  Tamara Adams: And she saw this, she witnessed this.
• 37:17
  Tamara Adams: And also in the book in the back, you know, I tell the story, I go sequentially, chronologically, of what happened, the research, and then at the end I talk about how I found some of the research, or how I found some of the answers.
• 37:31
  Tamara Adams: And we actually found a crew list.
• 37:34
  Tamara Adams: So we have 101 crew members and of course I wanted to research all those and see which ones came to America.
• 37:43
  Tamara Adams: And another little interesting tidbit is so my grandmother, when she was married and raising her family in Schenectady, new York, her best friend, the husband, had also evacuated on November 14th from Sevastopol on a submarine.
• 38:01
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 38:03
  Tamara Adams: And he did not enjoy it at all.
• 38:05
  Tamara Adams: I mean, she didn't enjoy it either, obviously, but um, you know, it was a different experience for the adults she met.
• 38:12
  Tamara Adams: She met quite a few people through her life who also experienced the as adults, who experienced the departure, the evacuation, and I think it's a this is a unique glimpse into a child's eye, where you know everything is rosy and you know things aren't as rosy as she made it seem and I think as a result of this experience, she just showed so much resilience.
• 38:38
  Crista Cowan: Wow, what a treasure to have not just known her but to have those writings.
• 38:42
  Crista Cowan: From that perspective and the work you've done to discover more of the story, I think is amazing.
• 38:48
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited to read the book.
• 38:50
  Tamara Adams: So finally I get a text from my mother saying, oh my gosh, my mother finally wrote the last name of Zhenya and it's Anakeif, and I was like, literally, I got off the phone, I typed it into Ancestry and two seconds later I was, I got a hit and it was.
• 39:11
  Tamara Adams: It was a family tree and it had the same pictures that I had of the ship, of the children.
• 39:20
  Tamara Adams: It had the same pictures that I had of the ship of the children, and I saw the three children.
• 39:24
  Tamara Adams: So I knew that it was Jenya, her brother Koliya, which is Nicholas, and the brother Alexis, which is Alexi, or she called them Aloysia, koliya and Jenya.
• 39:35
  Tamara Adams: So, and I messaged them, of course, right away, because I'm like this is definitely them, and I'm thinking, oh my God, they must have more information, that they have to have more information.
• 39:46
  Tamara Adams: And like 10 days later I get a response from the daughter of the middle child and saying, well, the family historian is really Susan, which is Jenya's granddaughter.
• 39:57
  Tamara Adams: So 13 days later, susan finally responds and ever since that we've been connected like this, like I feel like Jenya and Lydia were like best friends on the ship and now I have such a connection with Susan and her family and it's just amazing.
• 40:16
  Tamara Adams: We feel like our grandmothers are up there, you know, planning this and they're so happy that we're together now.
• 40:23
  Tamara Adams: But you know, because of the family trees on there, we've, you know, and I've met her several times we actually traveled to New York City in November.
• 40:32
  Tamara Adams: My book cover was on the billboard in Times Square, and what date was it on?
• 40:39
  Tamara Adams: But November 14, 2024.
• 40:45
  Tamara Adams: The same day that they had escaped that, they left Russia, exactly 104 years later.
• 40:51
  Tamara Adams: I mean, there's got to be something to that.
• 40:54
  Tamara Adams: And 14 descendants of Zhenya, kolya and Alosha came to support me without even ever meeting me, and Susan had asked me to do a presentation to the relatives because they knew nothing.
• 41:08
  Tamara Adams: They knew nothing at all about their time on the ship.
• 41:11
  Tamara Adams: And then they had these pictures.
• 41:13
  Tamara Adams: And then here I come With this whole story.
• 41:16
  Tamara Adams: With this whole story and thanks to them I was able to fill in part of.
• 41:20
  Tamara Adams: You know, there's a there's an incredible photograph of the children and you can tell they all have shaved heads, except Virginia and the two boys, and I always wondered why were their, their heads, not shaved?
• 41:32
  Tamara Adams: Well, they, it turns out, or did not come on the ship until, I think, june of 1920.
• 41:37
  Tamara Adams: So they, their heads, were not shaved.
• 41:40
  Tamara Adams: But my point is that on the back of that picture I didn't have any names.
• 41:46
  Tamara Adams: But by the time I had contacted Susan, I already had a guess on to who they were, and so her grandmother had written the names on the back, confirming that I was correct.
• 41:57
  Tamara Adams: So that was very satisfied, confirming that I was correct.
• 41:59
  Crista Cowan: So that was very satisfying, as you kind of think about what's next or, you know, think about how this experience has taken into your own life.
• 42:06
  Crista Cowan: What is it that you hope for the future?
• 42:08
  Tamara Adams: I hope this book in particular will encourage people to look into their own family history, no matter the ethnicity.
• 42:15
  Tamara Adams: I think people can relate to my grandmother's story of leaving home with nothing and starting anew and just having to just have that resilience and push through.
• 42:28
  Tamara Adams: And you know, look at the happy things in life, look at the glass half full and I just, I hope it.
• 42:36
  Tamara Adams: I hope it gives people a reason to reflect on their own life and, you know, appreciate where they come from, no matter where they come from.
• 42:46
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, well said, thank you.
• 42:47
  Crista Cowan: And thank you so much for sharing Lydia's story with us.
• 42:50
  Crista Cowan: I appreciate it.