>Mini family tree (high-confidence nodes)
>Parents: Valentin Karl Heinrich von Holst (Baltic German official/landed family) & Marie Lenz.

>Hermann Eduard von Holst (1841–1904) — historian.

>Son: Hermann Valentin von Holst (1874–1955) — architect; worked in Chicago; interacted with the Frank Lloyd Wright circle.

>Russian, German, and American political ties (what we can actually document)
>Russian Empire: As a Livonian (Baltic German) subject who criticized imperial policy, he left under threat in 1866; there is no credible scholarly record of clandestine activity—his politics are visible in print, lectures, and journalism.

>German states/Empire: Held a German professorship (Freiburg) and published in German scholarly presses; positioned in liberal constitutional historiography of the Gründerzeit/Wilhelmine era.

>United States: High-profile Chicago appointment; American intellectual networks (journal editors, historians, university presidents) via correspondence and society memberships.

>What I mapped (and what we know)
>Hermann Eduard von Holst (1841–1904) — Baltic-German/American historian; studied at Heidelberg; professor at Freiburg; first chair of >History at the University of Chicago (1892); wrote the multi-volume Constitutional History of the United States and a Calhoun biography; briefly in St. Petersburg where he wrote on James Buchanan and was expelled soon after (1866–67).

>Family core

>Parents often cited in reference works: Valentin Karl Heinrich von Holst and Marie Lenz.

>Son: Hermann Valentin von Holst (1874–1955) — an architect in Chicago who operated in the Frank Lloyd Wright orbit (he helped manage Wright’s practice while Wright was abroad).

>Civic/learned affiliations

>Grand Duchy of Baden First Chamber (Herrenhaus) — member in the 1870s/80s.

>American Antiquarian Society (AAS) — listed as elected (19th-c. proceedings note his name); a standard honor for scholars of American history.