The Regameys established in Switzerland in the 17th century: the great-grandfather left the country when his shoe making business collapsed. He moved to Vilnius (known at the time as "Wilno"), then in the Russian Empire. His son Louis, Ludwik grandfather, married there a Polish girl: he worked as a French teacher. In the wake of the Polish Uprising of 1863, the family left Polish-Lithuania territory to Russian Kyiv. As a Swiss citizen, he officially became in 1883, a Tsarist civil servant. Louis fathered two sons, Casimir Ludwigovitch (1859-1907) and Rudolf Felix Gabriel Ludwigovitch (1852-1891), Ludwik's father.