Time for Week 17 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge! As noted in my first post of this challenge, I am starting with my most ancient known ancestors.

This week’s ancestor is Kārlis Radziņš, born c. 1816 and died after 1877. He is my great-great-great-grandfather by way of my paternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother, Marija Radziņa.

Kārlis is an ancestor I do not have much information on. He lived on Lugaži estate in northern Latvia, on what is now the border between Latvia and Estonia, but at the time period would have been little more than a linguistic border (and even then, it was somewhat porous – Latvians and Estonians co-mingled across this boundary). According to the 1857 revision list, he was 41 years old at the time, making his birthdate c. 1816. According to this document, his father’s name was Jānis. He was married to a woman name Marija, whose surname may have been Kaukulis (this guess is made based on the families found at the farm she is alleged to be from according to her death record). They would have been married in 1840 or 1841, but the marriage records for Lugaži parish are missing for that year.

Kārlis and Marija had six known children who lived past infancy: Liene (c. 1841), PÄ“teris (c. 1844), Ieva (c. 1847), Kārlis (c. 1851), Jānis (c. 1854) and Marija (1856, my great-great-grandmother). Their seventh known child was a stillborn daughter in January of 1864, which also resulted in Marija’s death from complications due to the birth. I don’t see any sign of Kārlis remarrying in Lugaži in the years immediately following her death, but it is possible that he did later, or in a different congregation from Lugaži. He may not have remarried if his older children could be counted on to care for the younger ones.

I’m not certain yet when Kārlis died, but according to my great-great-grandmother Marija’s marriage record, he was still alive when she married PÄ“teris Celmiņš in Lugaži Lutheran Church on October 23, 1877.

After seventeen weeks, we are almost at the end of my “most ancient known ancestors” – just a few more to go, and then we will be moving on to more recent ancestors!