When I first approached writing this story about the family left in England by Esper Serebriakoff I thought it would be fairly straight forward recording the few facts known to the grandchildren of Esper. I had no idea of the extent of the story that would be uncovered. The story of the family takes place against the background of three wars, a regicide, a revolution and a coup, it involves spies and double agents.
The story takes place between the late 1870s and the 1940s and the characters are moved by the events that occurred during that period and sometimes they influenced them.
Much of the source material for this story is written in Russian and some in Bulgarian. Some of the Russian material uses an old alphabet making translation more difficult. Most of the translation had been done using Google translate and while this has become increasingly good it still leaves something to be desired. This means that where direct quotes are used the language can seem stilted and very formal. I have left it as near to the language produced by the translation process for fear of losing something. At the end of this document I have explained my sources.
There are occasional background pieces which are not essential to the story are there to try and give the historical context against which the main story is taking place. These background pieces can be ignored. The information that they contain has been sourced from relevant books and online sources such as Wikipedia.