Princess Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani - First Marriage

First Marriage

In France, Princess Leonida met Sumner Moore Kirby (1895–1945), a wealthy "Pennsylvanian Protestant". They were married in Nice, France, on 6 November 1934. Sumner Moore Kirby had been born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, the younger of two sons of Fred Morgan Kirby, a business partner of one of the F. W. Woolworth Company heirs and his wife Jessie Amelie Owen. Leonida was his third wife, he having been married from 1925 to 1931 to Doris Landy Wayland, with whom he had a daughter, Gloria Price Kirby (born 1928). Kirby's second marriage, to Valentine Wagner, lasted from 20 January 1932 to 19 July 1934. Valentine Wagner's mother was born Princess Elisabeth Bagration, a member of the same family as Princess Leonida. Her father was Conrad Wagner. Kirby had no children of this marriage which, like his first and third marriages, was contracted civilly in Nice and dissolved there. Leonida and Sumner Kirby had one daughter, Helen Louise Kirby, born in Geneva, Switzerland, on 26 January 1935. Their marriage was short-lived, they divorced after three years on 18 November 1937. Kirby died in a hospital at Leau, near the Buchenwald Concentration Camp to which he had been deported from France after being arrested along with other U.S. and British civilians by the Vichy regime in 1944.

As war intensified, Leonida and her daughter relocated to officially neutral Spain. In 1944, Leonida's brother, Prince Irakli, also moved to Spain.