A Guilty Conscience or A ‘Mysterious Daughter’

The document that an author creates can tell a lot about their thinking process and can reveal hidden truths that bothered them while putting it together.

The author of the document titled ‘Généalogie ascendante de Seraphina Bogomolova’ is certainly a person with guilty conscience. The mentioned document was presented as two files in PDF and DOC formats which on, 6 September 2023, among other 101 documents were passed to me by a certain Michel CANTON.

Michel’s appearance in my life happened two months after I had published the Family Tree of my biological mother – Sophie de PRITTWITZ (married name DRUON). Michel, as it recently turned out, was not just any random person or genealogist. He is directly linked to me and my mother, Sophie. His relationship to both of us and how I discovered it is described in my article: Твой ход! Или ПЕРВАЯ-второй-третья (Your Move! or the FIRST-Second-Third)

As it appears, the above mentioned document should have been sent just in PDF format, for it was the final version of what was intended to be presented to me in the Family Tree created by Michel CANTON. However, be it by pure accident or negligence, Michel sent me the same document in the DOC format too. Only the DOC file was a draft of the same document which contained information that was omitted or changed in the final version.

A close look at both files and their comparison revealed several discrepancies and strategic differences in regards to specific people mentioned in the document. The revelation helped unveil Michel’s way of thinking and his concerns in regards to certain family secrets. Michel’s concerns also pointed at the fact that he was not just any helpful genealogist but was closely associated with the secrets he worried about. In other words, he was my close relative – a twin brother who presented himself in the document as DRUON X (DOC file), and DRUON 1 (PDF file).

In addition to concealing himself as DRUON 1 and meddling with our birth order, he also tried to conceal the information about our sister - Aurélia Micheline Evelyn (DRUON) whom he reduced in the PDF file to just a name ‘DRUON 2’, stripping her of her full name, date and place of birth as well as the date and place of her death.

And here comes an interesting twist. In contrast to the PDF file, in the DOC one our sister was properly recorded. The discrepancy was a glaring one. In the PDF file she was reduced to DRUON 2 and in the DOC file she was Aurélia Micheline Evelyn (DRUON).

But this was not all. Most of the people presented in the document 'Généalogie ascendante de Seraphina Bogomolova’ had their birth, marriage, and death certificates present among the 101 files passed to me. Yet, Aurélia Micheline Evelyn had only her death certificate and no birth certificate which was suspicious. Considering a possibility that even the death certificate was not supposed to be among the documents, it becomes obvious that Michel did not even want me to know anything about our sister, permanently keeping her as ‘DRUON 2’ – the second to him with no traces of being alive or dead.

Based on the way of his thinking, which is proved by the discrepancies in the two files, DOC and PDF, his initial intention was not to send even her death certificate but for whatever reason he slipped and accidentally included it into 101 files.

So, what information Aurélia’s death certificate revealed?

It revealed even more discrepancies. My attention caught a certain fact. In contrast to what Michel was presenting in the PDF version of the Family Tree, in the death certificate our sister’s parents were not Georges DRUON and Sophie de PRITTWITZ, but a certain Fred, Roland, Michel DRUON, conveniently dead at the moment of creating the death certificate e.g. 2009, and a care taker whose name was recorded as Brigitte Sam Thomas, 53 years old.

Now, if I had not seen the draft file which Michel accidently sent to me, but only the death certificate and the final version of the Family Tree where Aurélia was marked as ‘DRUON 2’, I would have thought that ‘DRUON 2’ was an adopted child. But additional facts prove otherwise.

Both, the death certificate and the record in the draft DOC document of the Family Tree, have the same birth place for Aurélia - Montmorency (Val-d'Oise), a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, about 15 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Montmorancy was the fief of the Montmorency family, one of the oldest and most distinguished families of the French nobility. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris.

Aurélia’s birth place is also a place where, on 24 July 1978, our mother Sophie de PRITTWITZ married Georges DRUON. The fact that is recorded in their marriage certificate which Michel provided among other 101 documents.

Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the care taker, Brigitte Sam Thomas, who lived in Clohars-Carnoet (Finistère), a commune on the Atlantic coast in Brittany, would give birth to Aurélia in the wealthy suburb of Paris, which, in fact, was the residence of Sophie de PRITTWITZ and her husband, Georges DRUON, with a title of Financial Director.

Another interesting detail concerns the name of Aurélia’s ‘deceased’ father. At the first glance, one might come to a conclusion that the ‘DRUON’ mentioned in the death certificate is one of the DRUONs related to Sophie’s husband Georges DRUON. Perhaps, it might be so, yet what draws attention is the name ‘Fred’ which is of English-German origin – a shortened form of the names Alfred, Frederick, or Wilfred. It means ‘peaceful ruler’ and somehow does not fit the rest of the Frankich names in the sequence – Roland, and Michel. What is more, there is an interesting correlation between Aurélia’s second name ‘Micheline’ and the last name of her ‘deceased’ father Michel. Micheline literally means the daughter of Michel. All of the above points at the possibility that Aurélia’s biological father was not the husband of Sophie, but the one who was called Michel, Michael, or Mikhail.

Aurélia’s own name is also not a random one, as it has a profound meaning. Aurélia stands for golden one, Micheline - for the daughter of Michel, and Evelyn means the desired, wished for. So, the name of the sister literally reads as the wished for golden daughter of Michel. This proves that the full name of Aurélia was given to her by her mother with a specific meaning.

Another odd detail in the death certificate is separate domiciles of Aurélia , and the ‘mother, Brigitte Sam THOMAS, who happened to be also a care taker. Brigitte lived in a house at the address 17, rue Beaufrère, Clohars-Carnoet (Finistère), and Aurélia in a house at 2, place du 19 mars 1962, Lorient. Rather ‘chic’ arrangement for a simple care taker’s daughter who does not work and is not married.

But most perplexing detail in the death certificate of Aurélia is the time of her death which is recorded precisely to the minute – 2.21am. The death was reported by Brigitte based on a death certificate which is normally issued by the doctor. A standard procedure in France. There is no way any doctor could have established so precisely the time of death unless he was present at the death bed of Aurélia. This indicates that her death was either expected or was a consequence of a childbirth. The latter is a very plausible scenario, given the circumstances.

Aurélia died on 7th April 2009 at 2:21am. Her ‘mother’ had 24 hours to declare the death yet the death was declared only at 2:46pm on 8th April 2009, exceeding the 24 hours deadline. This means the death was not that straightforward and perhaps needed extra arrangements. But even so, the time is way too precise. There, of course, can be legitimate reasons for that, but in combinations with other glaring facts of the death certificate it all points to some sort of fabrication.

The discrepancies in the death certificate as well as differences in inputted information in the files provided by Michel-DRUON 1 suggest that he was torn between presenting the truth and masking it. His guilty conscience of knowing more, but wishing to present less transformed into a grotesque situation where our sister became ‘DRUON 2’ with no background in the family tree yet mentioned as the third daughter of our mother, Sophie de PRITTWITZ, in both files and, at the same time, being a ‘mysterious daughter’ of the care taker from Brittany and the ‘deceased’ father whose name really looks like a pure fabrication. At the same time, her own exquisite full name, Aurélia Michelinee Evelyn, commemorates the biological father whose daughter she was.

The Final Note:

Aurélia Micheline Evelyn (DRUON), born on 20 August 1983, lived a short life and died when she was just 25 years old, on 7 April 2009 at 2:21am. Reasons for her death can be speculated, citing health problems, drug abuse, mental illness, or perhaps even more sinister scenario, an incest relationship and its consequences, or even a murder.

Not having any profession or work, single and perhaps, to some extent troubled, whether by her mental state, her health, or her indulgent habits, she died a suspicious death alone, far from Paris, where she was born and raised by the family who, later, wanted to disassociate themselves from her, her death, and herself as a family member.

I sympathise with her, as she was treated as I had been, but for different reasons. We both were ‘erased’ by our family, namely by our mother. I was erased from the French records by simply not being registered. Right after my birth, I was separated from my twin brother and given to Soviet intelligence service operatives to be taken to the USSR, and later placed into a foster family in Leningrad. The cruel and calculated decision that Sophie took, since she had had a clandestine affair with my father, a Soviet undercover agent working in diplomatic services in Paris. And Aurélia was exiled due to ambiguous circumstances and then, as soon as she died, erased in an official document by fabricated information about her parents, – her own death certificate.

Taking this into consideration, if I were Michel CANTON who posed as an amateur genealogist but, in fact, was my twin brother who approached me wanting to connect, share, yet, at the same time, mislead me, I would certainly have a guilty conscience. But it is for him to carry this guilt and live with it. He made his choice.

Seraphina Bogomolova