Wordless Wednesday – Francis Family Portrait

I was at a cemetery this weekend, visiting and photographing the grave of my great-grandfather’s sister, and happened to meet a relative I had never met before! This relative was an elderly lady who was the daughter of one of my great-grandfather’s other sisters. We met again on Monday, and she gave me all of her photos of the family, including this one! I had never seen photos of my great-great-grandparents Roberts and Doroteja before.

Photo is c. 1910. There is a 21 year age difference between the oldest child (Alise) and the youngest (Margrieta).

Standing along the back, left to right: Alise (born 1885, died 1984, owner of the diary that I’ve been posting), ArvÄ«ds (my great-grandfather, born 1894, died 1941), Bruno (born 1891, killed in action during WW1), Vera (born 1890, died 1970s-1980s), Jānis (born 1898, died 1941).

Seated: The patriarch Roberts Jūlijs Francis (born 1859, died 1922), matriarch Doroteja Matilde (maiden name Plūme, born 1865, died 1918 of the Spanish flu).

Standing in front: Margrieta (born 1906, died 1980s), Velta (born 1903, died 1930s of tuberculosis).

(Click to enlarge)

S is for Social Estate

As promised during M is for Manorial Estate, now we have S is for Social Estate for the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge!

While Manorial Estate was all about the countryside, Social Estate is primarily about the cities. Technically, social estate existed in the countryside as well, but there the division was quite clear – landowners and peasants. The cities are a bit more complicated than that, and that is what this post will focus on.

With the rise of industrialization, as well as the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of freer movement for the lower classes, many landless peasants began to migrate to the cities of the Baltic provinces in the second half of the 19th century. Movement was still not completely free, mind you, just easier now that peasants were not tied to the manorial estates. Most of these peasants would have been Latvians, who previously were a minority in the cities. As an example, RÄ«ga – in 1867, only 23.6% of residents were Latvians, while in 1897 45% of residents were Latvians.

The records that are most useful for people tracing their Latvian ancestry in Latvian cities are the RÄ«ga tax records for 1896/1897. However, being that RÄ«ga had over 100,000 inhabitants at the time, looking through all of those records hoping for a glimpse of your family would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, these records have alphabetical indexes!

Now, unfortunately, the indexes are not digitized yet (hopefully they, and their corresponding records, will be eventually). But they are available at the archives, in great big volumes, divided by gender and social estate. The alphabetical index will then provide a record number, and you will then need to order the corresponding record book to consult the actual record, which will include both genders. Social estate can be complicated, and different sources I’ve consulted say different things about who constitutes each estate, so I’ll outline all of what I’ve read here.

So, the different social estate categories….

  • Служилые люди – literally, this translates as “service people”. By some accounts, they are the lowest class in the cities, consisting of servants. This theory is supported by the index books – the index for women of this class is much larger than that of men, and women were more commonly found as house servants than men. Other sources (mostly Russian language ones) state that this class refers to “servitors”, such as political functionaries, clerks and members of military ranks, including people discharged from service or on leave. This part could fit with the first definition, since even the men of the lowest classes had to register for military service upon the age of 21.
  • Мещан – urban commoners. Sometimes they are also termed the “petty bourgeois”. From my experience looking at these records, most Latvians will be filed under this category or the служилые люди above.
  • Рабочие люди – workers. Strangely, this estate is quite small, and I’m not sure why. It would appear that most workers at this time period were instead registered in one of the previously mentioned estates.
  • Цеховые – craftspeople. This would include people who were in craftsmen or artisans’ guilds. In German, these guilds were called Zunfts. The Zunfts then made up the “Little Guild” in RÄ«ga.
  • Купечество – merchants. The merchant guilds made up the “Big Guild” in RÄ«ga. They had to pay to be included in this estate.
  • Разночинцы – “miscellaneous”. The intelligentsia were often included in this estate, if they had not yet advanced to the honorary citizen rank.
  • Граждане – honorary citizens. This was an even harder estate to achieve than the merchant estate. This was the estate directly below nobility.

ROOTS=SAKNES has a good in-depth outline on urban estates. You can also take a look at this Wikipedia article for more. If you do go to the archives in RÄ«ga to look at these records, be warned – the index books are very big, and very heavy!

Tombstone Tuesday – Kārlis Rozenbergs, 1856-1909

In this series, I am providing pictures of tombstones from Latvian cemeteries, all with death dates prior to 1945. I do not have any further information on the people mentioned.

Photo taken by me, September 2012. Click to enlarge.

Name: Kārlis Rozenbergs, born January 6, 1856, died March 28, 1909

Bottom Inscription: “Esi uzticÄ«gs lÄ«dz nāvei, tad es tevÄ«m doÅ¡u to dzÄ«vÄ«bas kroni” (“Be faithful until death, then I will give you the crown of life”)

Location: Torņakalns cemetery, Rīga

Words on the tombstone are in old Latvian orthography, my transcription is in modern orthography.

R is for Raduraksti

But wait, what about Q? Well, the Latvian alphabet doesn’t have a Q, so R is the next letter of the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge! This is only the first letter I’m skipping, and being as I’ve done a lot of extra ones for the extra letters in the Latvian alphabet, I think we’re even – more than even, actually, since there are 33 letters in the Latvian alphabet, and only 26 in the English one.

But anyways… R is for Raduraksti!

At its most basic, “raduraksti” (literally, “radi” [relatives] + “raksti” [writing]) simply means “lineage” or “genealogy”. But when people in the Latvian genealogical community talk about Raduraksti, they are referring to the Latvian State Historical Archives’ “Raduraksti” project – which is the best thing to ever happen to people of Latvian descent trying to trace their genealogy!

The purpose of the Raduraksti project is the digitization of Latvian genealogical records. Now, this is only digitization – not transcription or indexing. But it does mean that people all over the world can begin to trace their Latvian heritage from the comfort of their own home.

Included in the Raduraksti project, at the time of writing, are three sections – 1) religious records of births, marriages and deaths; 2) revision lists; and 3) the 1897 All-Russia Census. Whether this collection is going to be expanded in the future, I don’t know. The Estonian digitization project Saaga has a much wider collection available online, so maybe one day Raduraksti will get there as well.

It might seem intimidating, to have to look through page after page of old records written predominantly in Russian or German, but unlike before, where you had to do this in the archives, now you can do it from the comfort of your own home. Through practice and dedication you will learn how to decipher the key elements of the records – I also have a number of blog posts to help you with that (click on the tags “records” or “tips” in the sidebar). So don’t be afraid!

Now, work to index the records is taking place by a committed group of volunteers. Their efforts can be found here. However, the website is only in Latvian (I tried putting it through Google Translate, to see how it would work in English, but the page does not function correctly so you can’t get to the indexes). I have been in talks with the website owner to make an English translation, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet. But if you want to use the Latvian version, you will need to register, and then follow these menu links: “RADURAKSTI” ->”BaznÄ«cu gramatas” -> “KLM saraksti”. Then choose the parish you would like to look at. At the time of writing, there are 6 Catholic parishes, 57 Lutheran parishes and 6 Orthodox parishes indexed. So you may get lucky and find that the one you need is indexed! Though be aware that for the vast majority of these parishes, only birth records are available so far. I don’t know if they plan to index the revision lists or the 1897 census, but I think the religious BMD records are the priority right now.

Now, Raduraksti will not tell you everything you need to know about your Latvian ancestors – there will still be some information that can only be found on-site in the archives. But the BMD records, as well as the revision lists, are the best tools to use to create the basic outline of your family tree.

So get searching! What kind of useful information have you found using Raduraksti recently?

Tombstone Tuesday – Kristaps Piens, ?-1917

In this series, I am providing pictures of tombstones from Latvian cemeteries, all with death dates prior to 1945. I do not have any further information on the people mentioned.

Photo taken by me, September 2012. Click to enlarge.

Name: Kristaps Piens, died August 21, 1917

Bottom Inscription: “Tas pļaujas kungs zin lauku, lauz vārpu gatavu” (The man of the harvest knows the fields, breaks the ready sheaf”)

Location: Mārtiņi cemetery, Rīga

P is for Parish

Let’s continue the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge!

The important word of the day is “parish” – and in Latvian, it has a name with a P too – “pagasts”. Now, this refers to civil parishes, rather than religious ones. A religious parish or congregation in Latvian would be called a “draudze”.

There are hundreds of parishes in Latvia – as of 2010, there are 494. In 1937, there were 519. This might seem excessive for such a small country, but it is what it is. Most of them are based on the boundaries of old manorial estates. Many also take their names from the Latvian names for these same estates. Smaller estate territories would have been added to larger ones to create the civil parishes.

These parishes started to take official form in the 1860s, with the formation of parish courts (“pagasta tiesa”) to adjudicate matters between peasants. These parish courts, and their corresponding parish councils (“pagasta valde”), left many documents in parish fonds that are available at the Latvian State Historical Archives. Availability of records varies from parish to parish, but many have parish registers of inhabitants from the 1870s to the 1890s, passport registers, council minutes, and so on. All of these goodies are hidden under the names of the specific parish, so when looking for the fond number, enter the parish name (though entering a partial name is best, due to the different declensions of the names, you want to make sure to catch all instances!) and see what you can find.

Keep in mind also the name changes that parishes underwent throughout the years – most are linked in that archives database, but not all are. Some parishes that changed their names after 1920 include Briņķi (became NÄ«krāce), Emburga (became Salgale), Nurmuiža (became Lauciene) and Mežmuiža (became Augstkalne).

Along with name changes, there are of course name variations between the different languages used – Latvian, German and Russian. These are too numerous to reproduce here, but if you have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

O is for Orthography

I know, I know, it has been a long time since I updated on the Family History through the Alphabet challenge. I was already behind when I joined, now I’m even further behind! But no matter. I will catch up by the end of it!

So, without further ado, Here we have O is for Orthography!

When it comes to Latvian genealogy, orthography can be the trickiest thing for people new to Latvian research, but also the most important. Many people think it is the language, if they don’t know Latvian, German or Russian, then they’re in trouble. But no – I say it is orthography. Why? Well, because if you don’t know how your ancestor’s name is written according to different writing styles, then you won’t even be able to pick them out of a list, never mind be able to read the other information. This is why orthography is most important!

There are at least four different ways that most Latvian surnames can be written. They can sometimes overlap, making only two or three different variations, and sometimes each way can have multiple variations, expanding the number to six or seven. The basic ways are (in rough chronological order): German, Russian, Early Latvian and Modern Latvian. A short chart follows the descriptions.

The earliest records for Latvian genealogical research are predominantly in German. As a result, Latvian names are also written according to German spelling and pronunciation rules. German orthography varies quite substantially from Latvian, since many Latvian sounds are not found in German. German Z would usually stand in for Latvian C, while German S would take the place of Latvian Z. Those are the most common, and also with the potential to be the most confusing – for example, would Zahliht be rendered as Latvian ZālÄ«te, preserving the Z, or as CālÄ«te, going by usual German-Latvian conversions? Both ZālÄ«te and CālÄ«te are common Latvian surnames. Another convention of the German era of orthography was the use of “h” after vowels if they were a long vowel – ah would be Latvian ā, ih for Ä«, and so on. Diacritic marks for sounds not appearing in German – most commonly Ä· and ņ – did start to make an appearance.

Russian orthography presents a completely different challenge from German. The Latvian language has more in common with Russian than it does with German, so the transliteration of sounds isn’t the difficult part, but rather, the different alphabet, since Russian is written in Cyrillic. If you can read the Cyrillic alphabet (don’t be intimidated by it, it really is the easiest part of learning Russian!), then the Latvian names will be relatively easy to pick out more-or-less intact in terms of pronunciation.

“Early Latvian” is what I call the spelling that was used just before independence and right at the beginning of the independent Latvian Republic, before spelling was completely standardized. This was a time of transition, when people were moving from writing and spelling in the old Germanized ways to writing in the new Latvian standardized alphabet, which was adapted from Czech. The most common differences between the Early and Modern Latvian spellings are word endings (the ending “-iņš” would still often be rendered as “-iņ” – though again, not always) and the use of letters not found in the Modern Latvian alphabet (most commonly “w”, which is replaced by “v” in Modern Latvian).

Modern Latvian is what was established during the Latvian Republic between 1918 and 1940, though many newspapers continued to publish in the old Germanized style (complete with blackletter type). If your ancestors emigrated from Latvia in the post-war era, their names are most likely rendered in the Modern spelling. Anytime before the Second World War, however, the name might be written in Early Latvian or German.

For comparison purposes, the ten most common Latvian surnames, in the respective styles… though keep in mind that there might also be more variations in the different categories, I’m only including a few.

German Russian Early Latvian Modern Latvian
Behrsin, Behrsiņ, Behrsiņsch Берзин, Берзиньш Berziņ, Bersiņ Bērziņš
Kalnin, Kalniņ, Kalniņsch Калнин, Калниньш Kalniņ Kalniņš
Ohsolin, Osolin, Ohsoliņsch Озолин, Озолиньш Ozoliņ, Ohsoliņ Ozoliņš
Jannsohn, Jansohn Янсон Janson Jansons
Ohsol, Osol Озолс Ozol Ozols
Leepin, Leepiņ, Leepiņsch Лѣпин*, Лѣпиньш*, Лиепиньш Liepiņ Liepiņš
Kruhmin, Kruhmiņ, Kruhmiņsch Крумин, Круминьш Krūmiņ Krūmiņš
Balod, Ballohd Балод, Балодис Balods, Balodis Balodis
Egliht, Eglit Еглит, Еглитис Eglīts Eglītis
Sarin, Sariņ, Sariņsch Зарин, Зариньш Zariņ Zariņš

*These variations use the old Russian letter “Ñ£” which is no longer in use, but is commonly found in old records. It corresponds to the Latvian “ie”.

So, some rough sound conversions, representing modern Latvian letters/diphthongs… I’ve omitted letters that don’t significantly change.

German Russian Early Latvian Modern Latvian
ah а ah, ā ā
z, ts ц c, ts, tz c
eh е, э eh, ē ē
h, ch Ñ… h, ch h
ih и ih, ī ī
ee ѣ, ие ee, ie ie
ja, ya я ja ja
sch, sh ш sh, š š
uh у uh, ū ū
w в v, w v
s, z з z z
zh ж zh, ž ž

So there you have it! If you have any questions on surnames, don’t be afraid to ask! If you’re not sure from which era your family’s name is from, I can also try to help there!

WW1 Diary – October 10, 1915

Eleventh installment from the diary of my great-grandfather’s sister Alise, written during the First World War. When the diary starts, she is living just a few miles from the front lines of the Eastern Front, and is then forced to flee with her husband and two young daughters to her family’s house near Limbaži as the war moves even closer. For the background, see here.

October 10

We are still living with my father. Life is good when it comes to nutrition and day to day living, but the future is still so unclear, always waiting – what is to come? I wish I had my own hearth again, but hopes and longings disappear when we hear the close cannon-fire. The heart sorrows… the dreary autumn is at our door. The wind rustles big leaves across the meadows, until they find their resting place. Like the leaves, we see other refugees wandering along the road, not knowing where they will find their winter refuge. Behind them the open country of their homeland, ahead the unknown distance. All has been taken away by the storm of war. Left is only the walking stick. Will this terrible era never end? Soon we will also be left in darkness, because we cannot get oil anywhere. Some are still selling it for 50 kopecks a quart. What a terrible trying time for all humanity – when will it all end?

The heart sorrows, oh how it sorrows, that even the joys created by one’s own hands, now must be destroyed for so little. Fields of corn wave in the breeze, and fall promised a good harvest, but now with your walking stick, you must leave your dear home. No turning back, there is mist everywhere. Where you are going, there is no place for you, when you stop, you don’t recognize yourself. Who survives the black terror of the night, will see the dear sun’s rays!!

Three Years!

This blog is three years old today!

As I’ve said in previous blog anniversaries, when I first started this blog, I never imagined that I would get the response that I have. I’ve had people contact me from all over the world to share their stories, ask questions and solve the riddles of their family trees.

It feels a bit overwhelming sometimes, but I am learning how to handle it. I try to respond to each email and comment personally. Sometimes it might take awhile, with all of the different projects on my plate and other demands on my time, but it does happen eventually.

I’ve accomplished a lot of things in the past year, but the biggest one had to be scoring a mention in Family Tree magazine, in their 40 Top Genealogy Blogs for International Research! I still have yet to get my hands on the print copy of the magazine though, haven’t been able to find it anywhere! I will have to order it direct from their back issues section.

I know the blog here has been a bit quieter in the past month, with mostly only Tombstone Tuesdays and diary entries, but I’ve been busy traveling and then researching here in the archives, so my primary focus has to be on that. Hopefully in the next year I’ll be making a full-time move to Latvia, so then I will be able to take research at a more leisurely pace.

There are various projects that I’ve been working on all summer that aren’t quite ready to launch yet, but I’m hoping that they will be soon. I think you’ll all be very excited about them. Here’s a bit of an idea of what all I’ve been working on:

  • An all-new system for my Latvian Surname Project database… it’s proving to be a lot of work upfront, but once it is set up, updating it is going to be a breeze!
  • An ebook on Latvian genealogy… this blog is a good starting point, but the book is going to have more details and more examples.
  • Dare I say it, also a novel? Genealogists deserve some time in the spotlight too, we can’t let professors and archaeologists and secret agents have all the fun!
  • …Plus a super-secret project that I am not sharing until it is ready to launch, so you’re just going to have to be patient waiting for that one!

Another important thing that I’ve been this past year doing is networking. I’ve been meeting historians, museum workers, archivists and other genealogy enthusiasts. My time at the Latvians Abroad Museum and Research Centre this past winter was extremely valuable, and I am continuing to volunteer my services to them from afar. Generating awareness of their work is the main job right now, to attract more interest, financial support and donations of artifacts and stories. If there is anything that you are interested in sharing with Latvians Abroad, or if you wish to volunteer your time in any way (doesn’t matter where you live, people are needed all over the world!), do let me know and I can put you in contact with the right people.

This blog and the experience of Latvian genealogy and history has been a real adventure, especially this past year. Here’s to more adventures ahead!

Tombstone Tuesday – Jānis KreiÅ¡manis, 1873-1920

In this series, I am providing pictures of tombstones from Latvian cemeteries, all with death dates prior to 1945. I do not have any further information on the people mentioned.

Photo taken by me, September 2012. Click to enlarge.

Top Inscription: “Å e dus Dieva mierā” (“Sleeping here in God’s peace”)

Name: Jānis Kreišmanis, born February 18, 1873, died May 23, 1920.

Bottom Inscription: “Kā rasa nozÅ«d dzÄ«vÄ«ba, Kā vakarÄ“jā dienā, Kad vel ir domāt nedoma, Jau labu nakti jāsaka” (“How life disappears like dew, like yesterday, when the thought has not yet been thought, that one must say good night already”)

Location: Torņakalns cemetery, Rīga

Words on the tombstone are in old Latvian orthography, my transcription is in modern orthography.