Family
Born Helene-Marthe Mumm von Schwarzenstein in Reims, France, Elena Mumm was the daughter of Peter Arnold Hermann Gottlieb Mumm von Schwarzenstein and Olga de Struve. On her father’s side, she was descended from a long line of ancient Prussian nobility, traceable to 1359 in Cleves, Prussia. On March 31, 1873, Kaiser Wilhelm I renewed the Mumm patent on nobility, conferring the “Mumm von Schwarzenstein.” Elena’s branch had been famed for its champagne and white wine production, with estates founded in Reims, France, in 1827 and in the famous terroir Johannisberg, Germany (where Riesling was produced) in 1822. Her father was head of the internationally famous champagne company "Mumm Co." until the French seized the family’s French properties and brand name after World War I as spoils of war. Her father continued making wine in Germany until his death in 1937. On her paternal side, Elena was related to the Barons von Radowitz and Barons von Rotenhan, as well as the Grunelius and Passavant families, powerful industrialists and bankers. One of the family banks was a founding member of a banking consortium that would grow to become the Swiss Bank Corporation, now merged into UBS AG, the world's largest manager of private wealth assets. Her uncle, Baron Walther von Mumm, was a sportsman, Don Juan and bon vivant who enjoyed racing hot air balloons and even filled in on the German bobsled team at the 1932 Olympic Games.
Her mother was a daughter of Karl de Struve, who served at different times as the Russian Ambassador to Japan, the United States, and Holland. The de Struve family descended from a long line of famed astronomers, the first of whom moved to Russia during Czar Peter I the Great’s cultural and scientific revolution. By the fifth generation, they had married into prominent Russian imperial families and European aristocracy: most prominent of Elena's great-aunts and great-uncles were the Vicomte Eugene Melchior de Vogüé, philosopher and author; Victor, Prince Galitzine; and General Michael Nicolaivitch Annenkoff, Governor General of Trans-Caspia, 'conqueror' of Bokhara, and builder of the Transcaucasia railroad. Elena's second great-grandfather, General Nicholas Annenkov, was Comptroller General of the Russian Imperial Court. Her mother was born in Japan and with her four siblings grew up there, and in St Petersburg, The Hague, and Washington, D.C. . Her mother's siblings included Princess Vera Mestchersky, Countess Elena Orlov, and Boris de Struve, a Russian attaché to Washington who married an American, Maxine Slater. Her mother left Russia in 1904 to marry her father, whereas her aunts returned to Russia to marry. After the Russian Revolution, they ended up in Paris as part of the émigré community.
Read more about this topic: Elena Mumm Thornton Wilson
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they’ve had since time began.”
—Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)
“A poem is like a person. Though it has a family tree, it is important not because of its ancestors but because of its individuality. The poem, like any human being, is something more than its most complete analysis. Like any human being, it gives a sense of unified individuality which no summary of its qualities can reproduce; and at the same time a sense of variety which is beyond satisfactory final analysis.”
—Donald Stauffer (b. 1930)
“Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;Mthe heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)