Mention in Family Tree Magazine!

A few weeks ago, I was looking at my blog statistics, and I found that people had clicked on links from the Family Tree Magazine website to get to my blog. I’d never seen links from there before, so I went over to investigate… and discovered that I’d been named one of the Top 40 Genealogy Blogs for International Research! This article is also appearing in the July/August 2012 issue of the print version of Family Tree Magazine, which is very exciting. I’m mentioned in print!

I’m honoured to appear in that list with a number of other bloggers that I read and respect. When I started this blog two and a half years ago, I didn’t think that there were that many people interested in Latvian genealogy. I’ve been proven wrong! I’ve had people writing to me from all over the world, asking questions, sharing their stories, providing new information. I’ve even connected with some distant relatives.

It’s been a great journey, and I can’t wait to see where the future takes me. Thanks to the networking that I’ve been able to do as a result of this blog, I am able to spend more and more of my time working with genealogy, pursuing research in the archives, and developing my skills. This also means that I can spend more time with this blog, sharing what I learn with all of you, my readers.

I am leaving tomorrow for a three-week holiday, but don’t worry, I have a number of posts queued up to keep you busy while I am away, including more posts from my new series – translations of my great-great-aunt’s First World War diary. After I get back, I promise I’ll have a long-awaited update to the Latvian Surname Project. It has been two years since I updated it online, but I have been adding my personal database, so I have plenty of content to add to the site.

In closing for this post, I want to ask: What do you want to see here? What do you want me to write about? I’m also considering writing an ebook series, which would become my first “premium content” on this website. If you were to purchase an ebook regarding Latvian genealogy (wouldn’t be expensive, only $2-$5 each), what would you want to read about? Deciphering handwriting? Case studies? Common problems in Latvian research and how to overcome them? Something else? Let me know!

WW1 Diary – June 24, 1915

When visiting a great-aunt of mine (my maternal grandfather’s sister) in Latvia, she shared with me a real family treasure – the wartime diary of her aunt, written during the First World War. I photographed all of the pages, and am now slowly transcribing and then translating the content. It provides a fascinating view into civilian life in Latvia, almost right on the front lines of the war. I’m going to share these entries with you.

First, some background – the writer’s name is Alise TeÅ¡s, maiden name Francis. She was my great-grandfather ArvÄ«ds’ older sister. By the start of this diary, she was married and had two young children (and soon, a third on the way). The diary starts in 1915, when the family had moved to Lieljumprava, right on the Daugava river, from their earlier home in the Limbaži area, about 120km away. Only a few months after the young family moved to Lieljumprava, the First World War came to Latvia and threw their world into chaos.

This is their story. I will be posting the entries on the same days as they were written 97 years ago. So without further ado…

June 24, 1915

Midsummer’s day. Earlier and now! Everything is so quiet – there is nature, there are people. No Ligo songs, no crowns of flowers. Earlier everyone was dancing, now the men are somber. We are far from our relatives and friends, now only our little group. My thoughts go to our homeland and my heart longs for it!

Ē is for Ērģeles

So what does the third Latvian letter of the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge get us? Ērģeles!

I’ll admit, this one is a bit of a stretch. But there aren’t many Latvian words that start with Ä’ (a long E sound – not like the “ee” in “feet”, but rather an elongation of the “e” in “elephant”), so I had to be creative. “Ä’rÄ£eles” means “organ” – as in, the type of instrument.

I bring them up because they were very important to the churches that our ancestors worshiped in. Latvia has a number of organs that are of global historical note, rather than just Latvian historical note.

The most prominent of these is the organ found in the Holy Trinity Lutheran Cathedral in Liepāja, on the west coast of Latvia. The organ was originally built in 1758, and then expanded in 1774 and 1885. After this last expansion, it was the biggest mechanical organ in the world until 1912, when it was surpassed by an organ in Hamburg, Germany. Now, the Liepāja Cathedral organ is the biggest non-reconstructed mechanical organ in the world, but it seems like reconstruction and restoration work might be starting on it relatively soon. See it in its original state while you still can!

Another well-known organ is the one in the Dom Cathedral in Rīga. It is the second-largest organ in Latvia, after that in Liepāja. It was originally inaugurated in 1884 and reconstructed in 1983. The first organ in the Dom Cathedral was actually the largest one of its time, but it was lost in a fire in 1547.

Have you experienced any organ music in Latvia? Do tell!

E is for Emancipation

On to letter E of the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge!

E is for Emancipation

To many Westerners, particularly Americans, “Emancipation” means the freeing of slaves from slavery, more specifically black slaves in the American South, during the Civil War. But this is not the Emancipation we are discussing today, though this Emancipation takes place around the same time. Our discussion is on the Emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire in the 19th century. This took place in several steps, depending on the place or the type of serf, starting in 1816 and ending in 1866.

First, a definition of serfdom. Serfdom is essentially a form of slavery, with a few extra rights. With the manorial estate system, serfs were bound to the piece of land that they farmed and the lord or baron who owned the land. Some of the land could be farmed for their own subsistence, while the rest of it was for the lord or baron. The serfs would also be required to undertake other work for the lord/baron as required – forestry, building roads, etc. They also paid taxes (usually in goods rather than money). The lords and barons dictated whether serfs were allowed to move or get married. Serfs could not be sold like slaves were, but if the land that they farmed was sold, they were transferred to the new owner along with the land.

The are three guberniyas to discuss when it comes to modern-day Latvian territory – almost the entirety of Kurland guberniya (bar a few small parcels of land), the southern part of Livland guberniya, and the western part of Vitebsk guberniya make up modern-day Latvia. These three guberniyas had different experiences of emancipation.

Some experiences were the same – this is when peasants gained surnames, for example. Instead of performing work for the lords and barons (though these corvees persisted in some places as well), the peasants now had to pay rents. Peasants were also allowed to buy their land from the lords/barons, though in practical terms, this was often difficult due to the high price of the land and the low income of the peasants (though this did get better over time). These high rents and high prices to buy land were the prime motivators for Latvians to set up colonies in Inner Russia in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but that I will get to another day.

In Kurland, emancipation from serfdom started in 1817, one year later than the guberniya of Estonia (modern-day northern Estonia, southern Estonia was the northern part of the Livland guberniya). Despite this earlier emancipation, surnames did not appear to penetrate as quickly as they did in Livland. Often, the first sources for surname research on Kurland estates is the 1834 revision list.

Livland guberniya emancipated its serfs in 1819. Surnames were adopted quickly, and already made their appearance in most 1826 revision lists. Along with having the earlier collection of surnames, there is also a better survival rate of revision lists from Livland than from Kurland, though it is possible that this is due to the First World War and the widespread devastation that it caused in Kurland.

The Vitebsk guberniya was the last Latvian guberniya to gain emancipation from serfdom, at the time of the general Russian Empire decree in 1861 by Czar Alexander II. Surnames were still only beginning to make inroads in 1874 when my great-grandmother was born – I’m not even certain that I have her birth record, only a speculation based on the first names of her parents, her date of birth and her father’s occupation (which eventually became his surname). A rough estimation of the 1874 births would be that only 15% have surnames listed. By 1885, however, virtually all births have surnames listed.

Land ownership among the peasants began to grow as the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth century. Then upon independence, the new Latvian government expropriated the majority of the remaining estates, and made the land available for purchase to those who were willing to farm and didn’t already have land. Some documents that I’ve seen make mention of preference or first dibs given to soldiers who fought for Latvian independence during the War of Independence from 1918 to 1920.

Do you know when your ancestors bought out their farms? Where? Share your stories!

D is for Denmark

It is time for the letter “D” in the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge!

D is for Denmark

After the Second World War, there were thousands of Displaced Persons (DPs) across Western Europe, having escaped the Soviet takeovers of their homes. A large number of these DP camps were in Germany, and they get the most attention. But there were DP camps in other countries as well, with their own stories to tell, that barely get any attention.

One of these countries was Denmark. Just north of Germany, as well as across the strait from Sweden and with easy access to the Baltic Sea, Denmark was on the front lines of receiving Eastern refugees, among them my maternal grandparents. All in all, approximately 2000 Latvian DPs ended up in Denmark, out of a total of approximately 250,000 DPs in Denmark as a whole (most of them Germans from Eastern Europe).

There were a number of DP camps that took them in. At first, many DPs were accommodated in local palaces and halls until more long-term housing could be found – my grandmother and great-aunt recall sleeping on straw in the halls of a Copenhagen palace – I don’t recall now if it was Christiansborg or Amalienborg. A series of camps were developed, and some of the biggest ones were in Aalborg, Copenhagen, Ollerup and Sortso. The lives of Latvian DPs in Denmark are described in LatvieÅ¡u bÄ“gļi Dānijā (Latvian refugees in Denmark) by Guntars Saiva as well as Nabagi pilÄ«s (The poor in palaces) by Ivars SÄ«lis. The latter’s author was a young boy at the time, and I enjoyed it in particular because he appears to have been in the same DP camps as my grandparents.

The DP camp where my grandparents met I believe was Gurrehus – a manor house west of Helsingor owned by Prince George of Greece. How many DPs lived there I can’t say, but my grandfather Aleksandrs Francis was the leader of the DPs there. My grandmother participated in the choir. I have numerous photographs from this time period. As an example…

Click for larger photo. Residents of Gurrehus, c. 1945-1946.

After Gurrehus was closed in 1946, the DPs went to numerous places. One that my grandmother and great-aunt remembered was Pragas Boulevard in Copenhagen. A memorial to Latvian DPs, specifically those that died while living in Denmark, is in the Vestre cemetery in Copenhagen. It was designed and constructed by Latvian artist Leo Stepe. I have featured images of it here before, but I’ll include it here as well:

Memorial in Vestre cemetery. Photograph taken by me, November 2009.

Eventually most Latvian DPs in Denmark moved on to homes in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Some remained, and form the core of Denmark’s Latvian community today.

Č is for Čigāns

Continuing with the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge, we’ve come upon our second Latvian letter…. ÄŒ!

This was a tough letter! There are not many Latvian words that start with “č” (pronounced “ch”), and even fewer that could relate to genealogy in some way. But I’ve found one – “čigāns”. This is Latvian for Gypsy or Roma. The word is probably borrowed from the German “Zigeuner”. Like “Gypsy” in English being replaced by the more appropriate “Roma”, there is something of a movement to have “čigāns” replaced by “roms” in Latvian, but by and large the term used by both Roma and non-Roma in Latvia is still “čigāns”. This is also the word (though usually in its German [Zigeuner] or Russian [цыган] equivalent) that will be seen in genealogical records, which is why I’m considering it important for discussion here.

Almost 2,000 Roma lived in Latvia at the time of the 1935 Census. Despite the drastic drop in population due to the Holocaust, today the Latvian Roma population numbers over 8,000. As with Latvian society in general, there has been a shift from rural to urban residences. The Roma presence in Latvia dates back several hundred years, to when they came to Latvian territory mostly from Germany and Poland.

How can you tell in genealogical records if someone is Roma? Records will often mention it, usually in the place of the occupation. Due to their roots in Germany and Poland, many Roma will also have German or Polish surnames. I have yet to see any Roma with German surnames in the records, but surnames such as Mitrowski, Kozlowski and Burkewitz are all common. Mitrowski is the one that I see most often, particularly around Limbaži, where the family appears to have been established for most of the second half of the nineteenth century.

The reason I bring up the Roma in a genealogical context is because despite commonly being viewed as outsiders and nomads living on the fringes of society, there are numerous families that lived in the same area for years, such as the Mitrowskis mentioned above, baptizing their children in the same Lutheran churches as the Latvian peasants did, and living alongside Latvians. What the records do tell us is that while Roma children often had Roma godparents, sometimes they also had Latvian godparents and vice versa. The records also tell us that there was a higher rate of births outside of wedlock among the Roma than in the general peasant population in a number of congregations. A source I consulted for research on the topic of Roma in Latvia seemed to imply that it was not unusual for Roma to have children prior to marriage, but other sources say that virginity prior to marriage is important, so I’m not sure which is the case. Maybe someone can provide more information?

What the social relationships were between Roma and Latvians, though, I can’t say. However, there was a great deal of moving from place to place in general in 19th century Latvia, regardless of ethnicity, so nomadism was not something that could be associated only with Roma families. In some cases, Roma families were more settled than many Latvian landless farmhand families, who could move every year, if not more often, looking for new work.

Now, this is not to say that discrimination didn’t happen – I know it certainly did. One need look only at the one Latvian-origin Roma surname that I have seen – Mangotājs. This would come from the verb “mangot”, meaning “to beg/scrounge”, thus meaning “one who begs/scrounges”. This shows the “establishment” that granted surnames was not particularly well-disposed towards the Roma population.

This discrimination still exists today, with Roma being generally frowned upon, not getting the same levels of education as the rest of society, having a much higher rate of unemployment, etc. Work is being done to improve the situation, but slowly. As time passes, hopefully the Roma community will be able to be more integrated in Latvian society, so that they can pursue higher education, get better jobs and explore more opportunities, while also having the ability to maintain their cultural traditions and language.

Do you have Latvian Roma ancestors? Or information about the lives of Roma in 19th century Latvia? Please share their story in comments!

Remembering June 14, 1941

As with other years, I’m doing a commemorative post for June 14, 1941. This is the day when tens of thousands of Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians were deported from their homelands by the Soviets to the far reaches of Siberia. Men, women, children, the elderly, the rich, the poor… people of all walks of life.

This year’s selection of readings is from Dear God, I Wanted to Live by Ruta UpÄ«te, a young girl sometimes called “Latvia’s Anne Frank”. She was deported on June 14, 1941, at the age of fourteen, along with her younger sisters Dzidra and Maija, mother and grandmother. She kept a diary chronicling this time. Her mother and grandmother died, but she and her sisters returned to Latvia in 1946, only to be deported again, this time with their father, a few years later. They were able to return home to Latvia in 1956, though Ruta died not long afterwards of tuberculosis, which she had contracted in Siberia.

The deportation:

They drove us to the freight station at Torņakalns, but we were not let on the trains, which were already packed with people. Then we were taken to the junction Å Ä·irotava and told to get out of the truck. A long train with barred windows stood there waiting for passengers. People from many trucks were herded into cattlecars. We were placed in the middle of the echelon and found ourselves in a car with some acquaintances. The box car was furnished with bunk beds, two at each end. There were more than thirty of us…. Shortly after midnight on June 15 we left Riga, heading for an unknown destination, and an unknown future. The night was dark and full of terror. The rain kept falling, the windows howled, the thunder roared and lightning slashed across the sky with bolts of fire. Moans and sobs were audible in the dark.

Such grief and sorrow! It seemed as though tonight the whole Latvian land were trembling with pain and tears. None of us could sleep an instant on this fearful, stormy night. As we took leave from our homeland, its name, Latvia, was a whisper on our lips. This dark night of dread can never be forgotten.

Starvation and death in Siberia…

Hunger had come to Bilin. Who could survive on the meager portions of food? Those who had saved a few garments of better quality, set out on Sundays for the nearest village to trade them for edibles. The hungriest would rummage through the villagers’ garbage, hoping to find potato peels to cook and eat.

Several women became ill with dropsy, swelled up little by little and died. There were five such deaths within a week. The swelling was caused by lack of nourishment, and by freezing. It started in the legs so that walking became difficult, then spread through the whole body. Soon the face puffed up beyond recognition. Dropsy also affected the brain, and speech became incoherent. The skin turned yellow and waxen like that of corpses. Most deaths at Bilin were caused by dropsy.

Starting with December, there was not a week without another life lost. We got up in the morning wondering who would be the next to go.

In the first days of December, I received a message from some Latvian friends in Kolpashev that my mother, ill with dropsy, had passed away on October 17, 1943.

So many lives ended, so many more destroyed, such pain and suffering. Perhaps the most painful part is that so few people outside of the Baltic countries and their diasporas know about these events. So I ask all of you who are reading this, be you of Baltic origins or not: Tell someone else. Share the stories of those lost. Talk about it, blog it, Tweet it, however you wish to pass on this piece of history. Make sure that the world does not forget about the events of June 14, 1941.

C is for Census

Time for the letter C in the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge!

C is for Census

Census records are key genealogical records in most countries. Latvia is no exception. However, accessing and interpreting Latvian records can be a bit of a challenge.

The first census available for Latvia is the 1897 All-Russia Census. This is the only census related to Latvia that is available online on Raduraksti. However, it is not complete. The part of Latvia that is most represented in these records is the eastern part, modern-day Latgale, which was at the time part of Vitebsk guberniya. This is a pleasant change, since when it comes to 19th century records, Latgale is not as well represented as Kurzeme or Vidzeme. This is partially due to the fact that serfdom did not end in Vitebsk guberniya until 1861, while it ended in the 1810s in Kurland and Livland. This meant that peasants in Vitebsk guberniya often would not have had surnames until the 1860s. 1897 All-Russia Census records for the rest of Latvia are very hit-and-miss, even in major centres such as RÄ«ga – records for RÄ«ga are there, but they are not complete (which I’ve learned the hard way, trying to track down any trace of my great-grandmother Anna Liepa).

The next census that is available for the public to look at is the 1935 Census. This was conducted in an independent Latvia. There were others, in 1920, 1925 and 1930, but as of yet I have found no trace of individual surviving records, only the statistics. At any rate, the 1935 Census is not available online, probably due to a combination of the time needed to scan it, as well as privacy, since many people enumerated in it might still be alive. The records for 1935 are organized by parish or town (and then street name). It is possible that they were once in alphabetical (for rural farms) or numerical (for urban streets) order, but they are not reliably so, since since hundreds of researchers have looked through each packet of loose-leaf forms. These records also provide information about the dwelling – its owner, rooms, lighting (electric, oil lamps, etc.), source of water and the location of the toilet (in the house or in an outhouse).

The last available census is that for 1941. It is also not available online. It does not provide as much detail on the dwellings, though it does have an advantage in that it is bound in books, so the pages cannot be arranged out of order. It also gives full birthdates and places of birth, while the 1935 census only mentions the year of birth. The important thing to remember about this census, however, is that it was conducted while Latvia was under Nazi occupation. Nowhere do the forms mention this, but it is worth keeping in mind nonetheless, since it explains many cases of densely populated areas having many “empty” or “vacant” homes – Jewish homes whose inhabitants had been deported, either to camps or to ghettos. These forms will also mention if someone usually lives there, but was in prison at the time of the census (quite often due to political reasons).

The most recent Latvian census was conducted in 2011. This was the first time that people had the opportunity to fill out the census online. If they did not fill it in online, an enumerator would visit the household and collect the data that way. The statistical results are currently being published.

Have you had any luck in finding your ancestor in the 1897 Census? Have you found them in the 1935 or the 1941? Share your stories!

B is for Baptists and Brazil

Now up on the Family History through the Alphabet challenge…

B is for Baptists and Brazil

Now, you may be wondering what Baptists have to do with Brazil, and what either have to do with Latvia. Quite a lot actually!

Towards the end of the 19th century, while there were still lots of people emigrating from Europe to Canada and the United States, many potential emigrants were beginning to look to other places instead, seeing North America as lacking the real opportunities and possibilities that it had presented a century or two earlier. Many instead started looking to South America, Brazil and Argentina in particular. It was sparsely populated, which meant more land could be available, though the conditions were much harder than anticipated.

Some early migrants from Latvia to Brazil arrived in the late 1800s, and their reports home about this “wild frontier” were favourable enough that later emigrants also considered migrating there. The biggest such movement was of much of the Latvian Baptist community.

While the dominant religions in Latvia at the time were Lutheranism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the Baptist faith began to make inroads in the late 1800s. The nonhierarchical, chaotic nature of Baptist organization at the time was attractive to people who felt their faiths were being dictated by hierarchical German or Russian organizations that had no room for Latvians in their power structure. The movement was strongest in Kurland and Livland.

After the First World War, while Latvia became an independent country, the infrastructure and the countryside had been devastated by years of war. Many people were optimistic, because after this war Latvians could rebuild on their own terms, rather than the terms of a foreign power. However, a number of Baptist congregations had been preaching a millenarian revivalist message, expecting the Second Coming of Christ to be imminent, with numerous visions and prophecies recommending resettlement outside of Latvia. Brazil was selected. The mass preparations being made for departure worried the Latvian Government and the main Latvian Baptist Association, who decried the revivalists as a splinter sect.

By the end of 1922, the government refused to approve passports for Baptists or for emigration to Brazil, but by that point, most of the revivalists had departed – almost 2000 in total. On November 1, 1922, the first group arrived at their destination in southern Brazil, under the guidance of Pastor Iņķis. This colony was to be named Vārpa. Many colonists became individual farmers, but the Christian commune Palma was also organized, many members being the elderly, single people, war widows and their children.

As with any organization, there were squabbles, factions and leadership disputes, but the colony prospered through the 1930s and 1940s. As time went on, many of the Latvian youth moved away to other parts of Brazil, but Vārpa still stands today, if with a smaller population. Signs are still visible in Latvian and Portuguese.

The Latvian population of Brazil was also given a boost after the Second World War, when approximately 1000 Latvian Displaced Persons settled in Brazil. Today there are approximately 20,000 Brazilians of Latvian origin.

Are you a Brazilian of Latvian origin? What is your family’s story? Please share in comments!

Ā is for Ārlaulības Bērns

Continuing on with the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge, using the Latvian alphabet!

Today’s challenge… “Ä€”! This is the first of the Latvian letters that we’ve got in this challenge. This letter makes a long A sound.

Ā is for Ārlaulības Bērns

“Ä€rlaulÄ«bas bÄ“rns” means “child born out of wedlock”. This notation happens sometimes in Latvian documents, but it is much more common to see that status be implied rather than stated outright. Patronymic-style forms of record-keeping were used in interwar Latvia. I say “patronymic-style” because they weren’t true patronymics, such as “Ivanovna” in Russian, or “Johansson” in Swedish, rather just “Friča dÄ“ls” or “Friča meita” (“son of Fricis” or “daughter of Fricis”). If there was no acknowledged father, then the child would have their mother’s name there instead, such as “KatrÄ«nes dÄ“ls” or “KatrÄ«nes meita”. This is the easiest way to see if someone was born out of wedlock prior to finding the actual birth record.

Births out of wedlock were relatively commonplace in 19th century Latvia – if you look through the birth records for any given year, there will usually be a smattering of them. A number have notations on the side that were added in later when the previously unwed mother then married and her new husband formally adopted the child. Whether or not this resulted in the child’s later documentation using that man’s name in the patronymic-style instead of their mother’s, I don’t know, as I have not had that come up.

I have one person who was born out of wedlock in my family tree – my great-grandfather Brencis LÄ«cÄ«tis. His early origins and childhood are mostly a mystery to me. I know he was born to Ieva LÄ«cÄ«te in SÄ“rene parish, south of Jaunjelgava, in 1866. He moved to Krustpils sometime prior to 1897, where he was enumerated on the All-Russia Census. He married my great-grandmother JÅ«le Å telmahere in 1909. His daughter Marta was born in 1911. During the First World War, the family evacuated to Inner Russia, living with the Kislev family outside of Rzhev. After the war, they returned to Krustpils where my grandmother was born in 1919. His daughters left for the West during the Second World War, and he died a few years later, in 1948 or 1949.

So who was Brencis’ father? I don’t know. I know he did have a brother KriÅ¡jānis, but I have no avenue to look for him, since I don’t know if he was also born out of wedlock, or if he was born after their mother married. I have some theories though. Allegedly, when he arrived in Krustpils, he had a lot of money – more than one would expect from a young peasant. I have read about a number of cases where the German baron of an estate, or one of his sons, would impregnate a local peasant girl, and then she would be either married off, and her husband given a better job, or simply paid off. This seems like a possible source of this money. I’ll have to look into the different barons in the area, and see if I can find any photos of them, to see if there are any family resemblances to my great-grandfather. It wouldn’t be complete proof, but an option to pursue nonetheless for curiosity’s sake.

Up next on the Family History through the Alphabet challenge… two very related B words – Baptists and Brazil!