She was the granddaughter of two servicemen of the tsar of Russia. One of her grandfathers resigned being a colonel-lieutenant, another one was a major. Her father Vladimir Karpovich Debogory-Mokriyevich had been imprisoned under the tsarist government for revolutionary activities. He was a well-known Russian Revolutionary-Narodnik, who escaped from prison in Siberia and later married her mother Julie Gortynsky in Switzerland. Her mother Julie Gortynsky was from a noble family and educated at the Kiev Institute for noble girls in Kiev was the first Russian woman - professor of Paleontology and academician of Academy of Sciences of USSR, her other cousin Olga Gortynsky. Upon graduation Julie studied in Paris and Geneva. Natalie was born in Geneva on April 15, 1887 and was in Russia a few times until 1895 when her mother Julie was exiled from Russia with no permission to return due to her unreliability and close ties with emigre Vladimir Debogory-Mokrievich. After Nicholas II's amnesty of 1905 Julie returned to Russia and Natalie had never seen her mother again. Natalie married Albert Sonnichsen, a writer, had one child Eric in 1909, and was divorced from him in 1919. Eventually she moved to Paris, after losing custody of her son in a very public legal fight, and she worked as Sol Hurok's publicity person in Europe and eventually a writer for the International Herald Tribune. She died in 1939 in Paris, and her ashes are interred in vault no. 4780 in the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. She worked as the assistant of the physician and military intelligence officer in the service of the U.S. War Department, Harris Ayers Houghton, who paid for her services out of his own private funds. Houghton engaged her as his personal and investigative assistant for nine months, and subsequently claimed that no public funds were used for her services. She had obtained a Russian version of the Protocols of Zion from the notorious White Russian and extremely antisemitic tsarist officer Boris Brasol, and thereafter she requested, under her own initiative and received authorization to translate it into the English language. She did not work alone, but with close consultation with Brasol, and another former tsarist officer, General G. J. Sosnowsky.
