Alex Shoumatoff - Ethnicity and Ancestry

Ethnicity and Ancestry

Shoumatoff is the son of Nina Tatiana (née Adamovitch) and Nicholas Shoumatoff. Shoumatoff descends from a family of the Russian nobility which may be traced back dozens of generations. He relates the family history, particularly of his grandparents' generation (White emigres) in his 1982 book, Russian Blood (see part 1 and part 2 of the original New Yorker magazine excerpts from 1978). His paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, became a prominent portrait artist who was most notably painting President Franklin Roosevelt when he collapsed before her with a massive cerebral hemorrhage ending his life and famously escorted his mistress, Lucy Rutherford, away from the scene before the media arrived. Her brother, Andrey Avinoff, a "gentleman-in-waiting" to the Tsar at the time of the February Revolution, and an artist and renowned lepidopterist, became the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945. His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of fellow-Russian-emigre Igor Sikorsky's aircraft company, which developed the helicopter and the first passenger airplane at the time. His other grandfather was a Colonel in the Empress's cavalry guard. His father, Nicholas Shoumatoff, was an industrial and mechanical engineer who designed paper mills around the world, an entomologist, and alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe's Mountain Center and Around the Roof of the World.