And Fanny?

 As I've written elsewhere Fanny, or Fanya, Stepniak is a mystery to me.

However, I used the State Library's online subscription to the Times Digital Archive to read the reports of Sergei Stepniak's death, funeral and inquest, and that sheds a little more light on the mysterious Fanny.

Close reading of the Times reports reveals that Fanny's patronymic was Markova and a suggestion that she may have been of Polish or Polish-Jewish origin. (Poles of course do not use the Russian naming convention of forename-patronymic-surname, but during the Russian occupation of Poland in the nineteenth century some upper and middle class Poles adopted it, especially when dealing with Russian officialdom.)

This lets me wave my hands in the air a bit and hypothesize that her name was not Fanny, but Franciszka, and she opted for Fanny for the same reason a friend of mine always used to introduce herself as Frankie - no one could actually spell Franciszka, and if she introduced herself using her full name, she usually ended up as Francesca.

I quite like this hypothesis as it explains why she always gave her name as Fanny and not Fanya - only Russian speaking acquaintances would have called her Fanya - and assuming that her patronymic was indeed Markov - would suggest that her father's forename was Marek - a fairly common Polish forename.

It also explains why her patronymic was not widely used and doesn't appear on official documents such as her death certificate or the probate records for her husband - it was simply something made up to keep Russian officialdom happy.

The other snippet I gleaned from the Times reports was that Sergei Stepniak had been living in Britain for roughly ten years at the time of his death.

Normally one would expect him to be in the 1891 census, especially given that he was a minor public figure which would have made dodging the census difficult for him.

However, a search of the New York Times archive shows that he was reported as giving several public lectures in New York in January 1891.

The 1891 census in the UK took place on April 5th, and while I can’t place the Stepaniaks as being in the USA on that date, my guess is that they were still overseas at the time of the census.