Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrova spent the last 12 years of her life until her death in 1960 in a couple of locations in and around Toronto.

The Grand Duchess, whose brother was Czar Nicholas II, was born in St. Petersburg on June 14, 1882. She was the youngest daughter of Czar Alexander III. Like all of Russian royalty, she lived the imperial lifestyle for the years leading up to World War I and became the favourite aunt and confidante of Czar Nicholas's daughters. Her first marriage, in 1901, to Prince Peter of Oldenburg was arranged by the family.

The marriage was annulled in 1916 so she could marry Col. Nikolai Kulikovsky (also spelled Koulikovsky) and she became a nurse. Because she was away in Kiev tending to the wounded, she managed to escape the fate of many of Russian's royals who were killed after the Russian Revolution.

She and her husband had a narrow escape when they were arrested by Communist troops in the Crimea. Two bureaucrats argued for so long about how the Grand Duchess and her husband should be executed that they managed to get away and were later saved by German soldiers who invaded the area.

From the Crimea, Olga, her husband and Olga's mother eventually made their way to Denmark where they lived in exile. Olga's older sister Xenia later joined them but moved to England some years afterward. The Grand Duchess and her husband had two children and lived peacefully in Denmark, even after the Nazis occupied that country in 1941. Later, however, communists in Russia accused her of subversive activities, and it was decided that she should move elsewhere.

A friend of King George V of England, who was a relative of the Grand Duchess, made arrangements for her and her family to move to Canada. They came here in 1948 and settled on a 200-acre farm in Ontario, between Milton and Guelph.

"I immediately felt at home in Canada," she once said. "The vast open spaces reminded me of Russia."

When her husband became too ill to run the farm they moved to a cottage in Cooksville (now Mississauga) west of Toronto. Olga gained some renown as a painter and had a showing of her work in Toronto in the 1950s. During the last months of her life, she lived in east Toronto with another Russian family, the Martemianovs. She died there on Nov. 24, 1960 aged 78 (shortly after her sister Xenia, who had died that summer).

The Grand Duchess is buried with her husband in York Cemetery, in Toronto's north end. The newspapers described her death as the end of Imperial Russia.