Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s mother, Maria, née Yumasheva, was born in 1829. She descended from a retired captain’s family, a small nobleman of Pronsky County of Ryazan Governorate, Ivan Yumashev. Maria’s parents had about a dozen of serfs. Tsiolkovsky’s mother was an educated woman: she graduated from gymnasium, knew Latin, mathematics and other sciences.

In his autobiography, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky recalled that his mother was above average height, a brown hair, ‘with correct, though slightly Tatar features of the face’. She laughed and joked a lot, had different talents: Mother, as the father said, had a spark of divinity… From my mother I inherited a passion for practical activity, because there was a lot of talented people in her family’. Tsiolkovsky wrote that his mother had strong health, and he and he had never seen her lie down in bed because of ill health.

About the parents, Tsiolkovsky wrote: “Both mother and father were still prone to cosmopolitanism: they recognized individuality, but not the states, governments, or confessions. The parents had a disregard for clothes, for appearances, and appreciated integrity and modesty. Especially the father. In winter we would wear cheap fur coats, and in the summer and when at home -- just shirts. I don”t think we even had other clothes. Even when I was on my way to start a teaching job, I was wearing a fur coat covered with a cheap cloak. <…> I think I got a mix of strong will of my father and talent from my mother”.

Maria Ivanovna Tsiolkovskaya died in 1870, when she was 41 years old. It is possible that the death of her eldest son – Dmitri -- brought her down. After the death of mother, her sister Yekaterina took over the household of the Tsiolkovsky family. Tsiolkovsky recalled: “…She was very gentle and never treated us wrong: neither by shouting, nor by shoving”. The connection with her did not break even when he became an adult: Yekaterina was one of the godparents at the baptism of his son Ivan.