Maria Feodorovna

Nicholas I was Emperor of Russia from 1825 until his death in 1855, the third son of Paul I and younger brother of Alexander I, whom he succeeded after the Decembrist uprising. His nearly thirty-year reign was marked by military expansion, the codification of Russian law, and a conservative autocracy summarized in the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. He is the great-grandfather of Nicholas II and the founder of the branch of the Romanov dynasty covered by this tree: his son Alexander II succeeded him, beginning the direct line that ended with the last tsar.

Alexander II reigned as Emperor of Russia from 1855 until his death in 1881. Known as the 'Tsar Liberator,' he is best remembered for the Emancipation Reform of 1861, which abolished serfdom across the Russian Empire, alongside sweeping judicial, military, and local-government reforms. He was the eldest son of Nicholas I and married Maria Alexandrovna, with whom he had several children including his successor, Alexander III, and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. His reign bridged the conservative rule of his father and the more autocratic turn of his son, and his reforms reshaped Russian society in the decades before the revolution.

Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was the fifth son of Alexander II and Maria Alexandrovna, and an uncle of Nicholas II. He served as Governor-General of Moscow from 1891 to 1905, a tenure marked by strict conservatism and by the Khodynka Tragedy of 1896 during Nicholas II's coronation festivities, for which he was widely blamed. In 1884 he married Princess Elisabeth of Hesse, who took the name Elizabeth Feodorovna, though the couple had no children. He died in Moscow in 1905, during the wave of political violence and unrest that also produced the 1905 Revolution.

Maria Alexandrovna, born Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine, was Empress consort of Russia as the wife of Alexander II, whom she married in 1841. She was known for her piety and charitable work, founding hospitals and schools and supporting the Russian Red Cross movement. She and Alexander II had eight children, including Alexander III, who succeeded his father as emperor, and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Her health declined in later years, and she died in 1880, the year before her husband. She is an ancestor of Nicholas II through her son Alexander III.

Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, was the elder sister of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, whom she married in 1884. Widowed in 1905, she withdrew from court life, sold her jewels, and founded the Convent of Saints Martha and Mary in Moscow, where she lived as a nun and devoted herself to charitable and medical work among the city's poor. Widely respected for her piety and humanitarian work even amid revolutionary upheaval, she was arrested with other members of the imperial family after the revolution and died in 1918, the same year as her sister and the Romanov branch she had married into.

Alexandra Feodorovna, born Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, was Empress consort of Russia as the wife of Nicholas II, whom she married in 1894. A granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, she carried the gene for haemophilia, which affected her only son, Alexei, and shaped much of the private life of her later years. She and Nicholas II had five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. Deeply religious and increasingly reclusive, she became associated with the controversial figure Grigori Rasputin, whom the family consulted over Alexei's illness. She was the elder sister of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. She died alongside her husband and children in 1918.