 He married Margaret Ellis, daughter of Edward Austin Dixon, a dental surgeon in Colchester.They had three sons, Peter (who became a diplomat), Andrew (who became a soldier) and Richard (a historian), and two daughters, Elizabeth, who was Head of the Foreign Research and Press Service, Baltic Section at Chatham House during WWII and Ursula (Susan), who married Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, the landscape architect, becoming an eminent plantswoman and photographer in her own right.Pares first visited Russia in 1898; at about the same time as he was appointed a university extension lecturer in Cambridge.