Tatiana

My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan. Having asserted that one eighth of her blood was Tartar and only seven eighths of it "ordinary Russian," with a panache that no one else could have pulled off she proceeded to drop a few names in the chronology of our lineage: Kublai Kahn, Tamerlane, and then the great Mogul monarch Babur, from whose favorite Kirghiz concubine my great grandmother was descended, and voilà!, our ancestry was established.

-Francine du Plessix Gray, Them