I looked into Raduraksti this morning, and what did I see…. a new document section for house registers!

These are the “house books” that I have mentioned a number of times before. They provide information about everyone living in a given building at a given time period. They may also offer information such as birthdate, birthplace, religion, occupation and previous address/next address.

Right now, they only appear to have house registers from RÄ«ga from before the First World War, and I know that this must still be a work in progress, because a number of major RÄ«ga streets are missing, for which I know they have books in the collection. But it is definitely a good start! Be aware, most of the records are in Russian.

Now, even when they do get the whole collection scanned in, you may be disappointed. House registers do not survive for all addresses or all time periods. House registers for towns and cities outside RÄ«ga do exist, but this collection is even smaller than the RÄ«ga collection.

Hopefully the rest of the pre-First World War RÄ«ga books will be scanned in soon, and then perhaps they will move to the inter-war period housing registers – while also not complete, I’ve seen the survival rate of books to be somewhat better than that of the pre-war books.

Have you found an ancestor in the house registers? Do you need to know what a street name was in the pre-war period? I can help with that. Let me know!