Opening the Floor

So I’ve had this blog for about seven months now. I completely missed my six-month blogiversary!

In honour of that overdue milestone, I’d like to open the floor to reader suggestions. What would you like me to write about? Are there periods of Latvian history you’d like me to explore in more depth? A record type [...]

Making Sense of Exonyms

So after puzzling through the various alphabets and orthographies, you have been able to establish what your ancestors’ names would have looked like back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is a great first step towards tracking them back through the years.

Now you get to do the same for the places they lived! [...]

Surname Saturday – Compound Surnames

Welcome back to Surname Saturday on Discovering Latvian Roots!

This week I’m going to talk about compound surnames – that is, a surname formed from two words, rather than one. These are a relative rarity in Latvian surnames when it comes to names of Latvian language origin (German language origin compound surnames are more common when [...]

Project Update – May 1, 2010

The Latvian Record Project has been updated!

I have added 1506 new entries to the indexes, covering Lēdurga births 1895-1899, marriages 1895-1899 and deaths 1895-1900. Note however that unfortunately records for 1897 are not available, and are probably lost.

Compared to the previous updates, you’ll note that I’ve pared down the information available in the indexes. This [...]