Hi everyone . This is my first post in the forums. I'd greatly appreciate if you could help me with this. I have a great-great-grandfather who was, according to the family story, "colonel of the Czar's personal guard". I assume this may mean the Imperial Guard. Here's the only photo I have from him. He's wearing some uniform but I don't know the exact time it was taken, so this may well not reflect his final rank:
The facts that I know for sure was that the family was Polish or from Polish origin --his surname must have been some variant of Kozlowski, for my great-grandmother was Kozlowska-- and that he was already active when my great-grandmother was born, in 1905, and served until the October Revolution. They lived near the imperial family in Saint Petersburg, from what I recall in the same complex (now, I don't know what does that mean in that context). My great-grandmother mentioned that she usually sat just behind Rasputin when they went to the church for mass, and she remembered Rasputin's look as troubling and tantalizing. She also mentioned going to school in a carruage.
After the Bolsheviks took power the family (my great-great-grandfather, his wife, my great-grandmother and her older sister) had to escape to Poland hidden under a wheat wagon. However, at some point (presumably before that) my great-great-grandfather was called to recognize the bodies of the Romanovs after they had been shot. My great-grandmother said her father had seen Anastasia's dead body himself and was mad at all the fuzz about the "lost princess". They relocated near Warsaw and he lived until the mid-1950s to early 60s. As for my great-grandmother, she married a Polish lawyer and they moved to Argentina via Italy after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She died in 2001.
I acknowledge there is not visual nor written evidence of all of this before they relocated to Poland, just oral comments from her --I don't want to sound like I'm inventing the story. This is what she lived and what she told (including to me; I got to know her). I just mention this as some context that might be useful to help identifying the image .
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