My great-aunt Marta Jakstāne (born Līcīte) in a winter storm in Copenhagen, Denmark, c. 1946.

My grandfather Aleksandrs Francis with the Fishwife Statue in Copenhagen, Denmark, c. 1945-1948.

Fishwife Statue. Taken by me, November 2009.

Then in 1940, [...]]]> My grandfather Aleksandrs Francis was born on September 24th, 1920. The first twenty years of his life were, by all accounts, relatively normal for a middle-class Latvian youth growing up in the 20s and 30s. He attended an agricultural high school, followed by a degree in agronomy from the Jelgava Academy of Agriculture.

Then in 1940, everything changed. World War 2 had broken out, and the Soviet forces invaded Latvia when Aleks was nineteen. His father, Arvīds, an intelligence agent, was arrested by the Soviets, and subsequently executed. By the end of the war, Aleks had ended up in Denmark. He was twenty-four, and would never see his mother or sister again.

Aleks became a leader in the Latvian Displaced Persons community in Denmark, and was the Latvian representative of the Gurrehus manor DP camp. This poem was presented to him on his 25th birthday, on September 24th, 1945. Below is my literal translation – I’m sure it is littered with inside jokes and is probably partially in jest, these were probably twentysomething men writing this, after all – so it is likely that some aspects of it are lost in translation.

A humble offering
to Latvian leader and board member Aleksandrs Francis on his birthday.

Latvian camp in Denmark at “Gurrehus” castle, 1945.

(You have) Gone into the field of our people,
Gathered people all around you,
Keep a pleasant smile on your face -
Don’t slide back down the mountain!
There are weeds for you to weed in the fields,
Blame the envious and glorify friends!
Don’t worry yourself with trivial things -
(Rare is the time with love’s joys)
Don’t pay attention to Liza or Zete -
Give your friends a cigarette!
The envious will choke on porridge,
Friends will call you smart:
They’ll give you commendations,
Medals with rhyming poems.
May you rise in honour and glory,
Abroad and in your country!

While at first glance, a document like this might not appear to have genealogical value besides personal interest, looking more closely does reveal important elements – namely, dates and places. I knew about the Gurrehus DP camp from my grandmother and great-aunt (and I believe it is where my grandmother and grandfather met), and have visited the site personally, but I had thought that it was one of the later places that they stayed during those four years in Denmark. This shows that Aleks at least was already at Gurrehus in 1945, not long after the end of the war. This can help to reconstruct his post-war movements and places of residence. Once I obtain ITS documents for him, then I will be able to get a fuller picture of his life after leaving Latvia and before arriving in Canada.

If your ancestors were ethnic Latvians, however, you might find yourself lucky – most ethnic Latvians in the capital [...]]]> Rīga is the capital city of Latvia and the largest city in the Baltics. Since Latvian records are largely unindexed, this means that locating an ancestor in Rīga is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

If your ancestors were ethnic Latvians, however, you might find yourself lucky – most ethnic Latvians in the capital arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1897, Rīga was 45% Latvian, in 1867, only 23%. Therefore, if your ancestors are ethnic Latvians, there is a good chance that you might only need to deal with Rīga records for a generation or two.

Thus the title of this post – how can you most efficiently look through that haystack of records to locate your ancestors and link them to a parish outside of Rīga, and thus a place that can be searched much more easily?

1. Passports. The Latvian State Historical Archives has a collection of internal passports for Rīga residents in the inter-war period. The good news is that they are indexed on a computer for ease of searching. Bad news is that they are not online, and only available by searching the database onsite. These passports note both place of residence and place of birth. Also important is “place of registration”, which can often be the place of birth – even if they haven’t lived there in years. One of my great-grandfathers was still registered as a citizen of Vijciems parish, even though at the time of issuance of the passport he had been living in Rīga for at least a decade.

2. 1940 Telephone Directory. Available online at GenealogyIndexer (has all of Latvia, scroll down to find Rīga). Now, not everyone had a telephone, but it is a start. This can be used to locate an address, and then you can look for parish records for that area. Of course, people move, and sometimes frequently, but a starting point is better than nothing.

3. 1897 All-Russia Census. Available on Raduraksti. The records for Rīga are fairly complete, and organized by street name. The census mentions place of birth and religion, both important tools to locate the proper religious BMD documents.

4. Religious records. Available on Raduraksti. There are many religious records available for Rīga, so if you’ve narrowed down where your ancestors lived, start searching in nearby parishes, and then expand your search from there. Rīga records sometimes contain rudimentary indexes (still handwritten), available at the beginning or end of the book. Check both to see if one is available. If someone is a recent migrant to Rīga, any information pertaining to them with regards to “home parish” will frequently reference their non-Rīga parish (see above with regards to place of registration). This is most common with marriage and death records, so if you know when an ancestor died in Rīga, find their death record first to see if they were born in Rīga as well.

5. School records. If your ancestor went to school in Rīga, there may be extant records for the school that could provide information on where the student was from. Sometimes school archive files (available at the Latvian State Historical Archives) will contain birth certificates of students, previous school transcripts, and so on.

6. Revision lists. These are available on Raduraksti. If you find your ancestors were in Rīga prior to the early 1860s, you will need to head to the revision lists. Now, the ones for Rīga are more complicated than for rural parishes – they are arranged by social class and, in some cases, religion (the religious groups most likely to have separate lists are Jews and Old Believers). Alphabetical indexes appear to exist for some of the lists, but not all of them. Raduraksti has many different lists relating to Rīga, so you may have to sort through them for awhile to find who you’re looking for. It appears that for the most part, the latest date on these documents is 1863.

Another thing to remember is that your ancestor might not have been from Rīga at all – just like emigrants from other countries, people might name the largest city to their home as their place of birth, when they were actually from the countryside. So unless you have a document (preferably of Latvian origin, since they would be most likely to be correct on Latvian places of residence and birth) that specifically links your ancestors to Rīga, do not assume that is where they are from, just because it is a large population centre. This holds especially true for ethnic Latvians – while the share of ethnic Latvians in Rīga did increase in the late 1800s and eventually become a majority in the interwar period, ethnic Latvians were still a predominantly rural population. If your ancestors were not ethnic Latvians, however, their chances of being Rīga-born for centuries are much higher.

Have you searched for your ancestors in Rīga? Do you have any other tips to share for Rīga searches? Add them below!

Until now! This news article, which I first saw in [...]]]> I’ve mentioned the International Tracing Service (ITS) numerous times, as a key resource to finding out information about WW2-era Latvian emigrants who spent the post-war years in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Western Europe. Despite their important activities, I rarely see them get a mention anywhere.

Until now! This news article, which I first saw in a local newspaper last week, highlights the important work they do – and even has a Latvian connection! [Update November 2011: Original link is dead, but you can read the same story here.]

“Peter Jaunzemis went by the name George for more than six decades, but always wondered whether the Latvian refugee who brought him to New Zealand and raised him there was really his mother…. Jaunzemis recently discovered his true identity through the help of the International Tracing Service, ITS, in the central German town of Bad Arolsen, some 66 years since he was spirited away from a displaced persons camp in Belgium. He visited the archive Thursday to view his original file.

For more than a decade, Jaunzemis sought to trace his Latvian family roots, searching first through archives in New Zealand, where he grew up and served 27 years in the air force, then in Latvia, where he moved in 2000 after marrying his wife. He found nothing, not even a birth certificate.”

Sometimes documents disappear – I have yet to be able to find my maternal grandmother’s birth certificate, even though I have for certain when and where she was born and baptized, since her older sister was there and able to verify to me the time and place of birth – but finding absolutely nothing regarding one’s existence? This can be indicative of something that hadn’t been considered before – that the name you’re looking for isn’t actually the right one. This was the case here – and finding the right one brought a whole host of previously unknown information, including living relatives – a tangible link to a past previously unknown.

“Margret Schlenke, who heads the ITS department for missing persons, immediately found a file for Jaunzemis. But it also held another name, Peter van de Velde — a boy with the same birthdate as Jaunzemis who had been removed from his mother at a DP camp in Belgium in June 1945.

The file, stuffed with more than 150 tattered, yellowing pages, contained old photos and letters from Jaunzemis’ natural mother, Gertrud van de Velde, who for years sought for her son. She died in Brussels in 2009, months before he first wrote to the ITS.

Nevertheless Jaunzemis, who now goes by Peter, said he is relieved to finally know who he is and that he has family, a nephew and a cousin in the eastern German city of Magdeburg, where he was born.

‘I am at peace with myself now,’ he said. ‘Before I felt that I was something that had dropped out of the sky.’”

Finding connections to the world around you, about your and your family’s place in history and how life moved from point A to point B and onwards, is, in my opinion, what genealogy and seeking your family history is all about. Adding names to your family database has little meaning if you don’t know the stories behind those names, and how they came to be there.

There may always be unanswered questions – but some questions will have answers, if you know where to look. And everyone with WW2-era Latvian emigrant ancestors should look at the ITS. Even if you already know when and from where your family came, there is always the potential to find out new information about their lives and families, and what brought them to this place in their lives.

Dates and places are handy reference points for charting an ancestor’s life – but in the end, that’s all they are. Points of reference along a line of one person’s experience, but the stories to be found in between – what brought them to these pivotal places and dates? What kind of feelings could they have had about these life moments? Did they see them coming, or were they surprises? How did they react when their world was turned upside down and everything they knew vanished? How did they make the choice to trek across a continent in the middle of a war, hoping that peace would be on the other side? What did they give up and leave behind to do so?

We may not be able to get direct answers to these questions. But by conducting fuller research into our ancestors’ lives, going beyond the basic statistics, we can begin to grasp their motivations, hopes and dreams, and begin to understand the choices that they made.

Now here is your guide to making sense of these documents!

I’m going to start with just the revision lists themselves – many of them come with all sorts of [...]]]> A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the Kurland revision lists are up on Raduraksti. Good news – the Livland (Vidzeme) revision lists are up too!

Now here is your guide to making sense of these documents!

I’m going to start with just the revision lists themselves – many of them come with all sorts of supplementary documentation as well, but with the exception of the incoming/outgoing registers, these can be highly individualized to each estate or parish.

It is important to note that revision lists are based on estate, not parish. There can be numerous estates within a parish. If you know what parish your ancestors lived in, but are not sure of the estate, consult their birth record in the religious records – the first line of the record should list the estate name and farm name. If you don’t have a birth record yet, consult this map to find the estates in your ancestral parish and start going through them to find your family.

The latest revision list is for 1858. The format of the records are as follows…

Left-side page:

1. 9th revision list family number (that is, the previous list)
2. 10th revision list family number (current list)
3. Names of males in the household (often including father’s name as well – be careful you don’t mix up this and the surname), the name of the farm is also indicated in this column, also numbered (but usually with a Roman numeral so as to not confuse this with the family number)
4. Age at previous revision list, or, if not dwelling at this address, previous place of residence (and sometimes year of arrival to this address)
5. Changed circumstances since the last revision list – such as moving to a new address since the last list was written, death, etc.
6. Current age

Right-side page:

1. 9th revision list family number
2. 10th revision list family number
3. Names of females in the household, often prefixed by relationship to male in the household (wife-Frau or daughter-Tochter), or if single woman, as an unmarried woman (Magd) or a widow (Wittwe).
4. Changed circumstances (this can sometimes be used sparingly for women)
5. Current age

It is important to note that in the revision lists, an individual (especially a male) could appear twice if they had moved during the time between lists. They will appear in their current home, with a notation that they moved from location X, and they will appear in location X with the notation that they have moved to the new address. People moved about frequently, especially within an estate.

The formats for the 1834 and 1850 revision lists are identical to the 1858 one, with the exception of family numbers – the family numbers (should) stay consistent between the different lists, and only changed with the 10th revision, so there is only one family number column per page.

For 1826, the format changes a tiny bit – the farm name and number now has its own column, and it is the first column on each page – also note that farms are now numbered with regular numbers, while family numbers have become Roman numerals – the family name is also now listed in the same box as family number. Any other data in the name column can pertain to things such as status (Knecht – farmhand/servant, Wirts – landowner/manager – remember the purchasing of farms from barons and other large landowners only started in earnest in the latter half of the nineteenth century, so “Wirts” may not yet indicate ownership but rather the head of the farm household), or might include items that should be in the next box over (previous place of residence, etc.).

Prior to the 1826 revision list, things can get difficult, for 1826 is the first revision list with surnames for peasants. The 1816 list does not have surnames, so one must rely on relationship markers (wife, daughter, etc.) to determine family relationships. Men and women are no longer listed on separate pages, but rather one after another on the same page. Beware of assuming that just because your ancestors lived on a farm in 1826, and there is a family with the same given names on the farm in 1816, that they are the same family. I almost fell into that trap on one estate until I noticed the notation that they had moved from another estate in the early 1820s. There was not a large variation in given names, so there could be many families with the same names, with the same ages (I’m still angry at one of my ancestors for naming his daughter the same name as his brother’s daughter when these two girls were born a month apart on the same farm).

There are earlier lists for 1811 and 1795, which have even less information than the 1816 list – usually just ages (current and previous list age, with separate columns for men’s ages and women’s ages), and the 1811 list does not usually include women.

Hopefully this guide will help you work your way through the main portion of the revision lists. More to come soon on incoming and outgoing registers – peasants were much more mobile than we may think, and these registers are key to tracing their movements.

Have you found your family in the revision lists? Share your story below!

Their goal is to create a museum in Latvia about the Latvian diaspora – Latvians who have left Latvia and settled elsewhere in the world, [...]]]> I came across this initiative awhile ago, though I can’t remember where: “Latvieši Pasaulē – Muzejs un Pētniecības Centrs” (Latvians Abroad – Museum and Research Centre in English, LaPa-MPC for short).

Their goal is to create a museum in Latvia about the Latvian diaspora – Latvians who have left Latvia and settled elsewhere in the world, why they went, and what their lives were/are like. This would be complemented by a research centre focused on Latvian emigration. There are numerous museums dedicated to emigrants across northern Europe – I’ve been to two in Germany, Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven and BallinStadt in Hamburg – so it is about time there was one in Latvia as well!

The museum hasn’t been built yet, since they’re still working on finding a good location and raising funds. They have, however, organized some traveling exhibitions. I’m hoping to get involved with them on the emigration research and genealogy side of things. Though who knows, since I’m currently studying Applied Museum Studies – which encompasses a lot of fields including artifact preservation, display construction, collections management, exhibit design and educational programming – I might try to get involved with other facets of the museum too.

I would encourage all of you to take a look, and if you can support them in any way, whether through donation of artifacts/stories, monetary donations, membership or just getting the word out, please do!

There are lots of different types of records available for the post-1905 period – however, as of right now, none of them are available online. The main online genealogical resource for Latvian records – religious records on Raduraksti [...]]]> In my last post, a reader requested that I talk about records after 1905. So here we go!

There are lots of different types of records available for the post-1905 period – however, as of right now, none of them are available online. The main online genealogical resource for Latvian records – religious records on Raduraksti – ends at 1905. But later records are accessible through a variety of avenues, depending on the specific years you’re looking for. Unless mentioned otherwise, all documents are located in the Latvian State Historical Archives (LVVA).

Vital Records

Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths did not begin until the 1920s. Records prior to this time are religious in nature, so it will be necessary to know the religion of your ancestor.

While Raduraksti only goes to 1905 for now, most available records from 1906 to 1909 have been transferred to the LVVA. A list is available on their website here (PDF, the list is organized first by religion, then by parish). However, some records from this time period may still reside with the Ministry of Justice’s Registry Office Archives. This is because of how some records were organized – the registry entries were made into books, so if it happens that earlier years (say 1908 and 1909) are in the same volume as later years (such as 1910 and 1911), the entire book will remain at the Registry Office Archives.

For vital records between 1910 and 1921 (and earlier years as relevant based on the criteria above), it is necessary to contact the Ministry of Justice’s Registry Office Archives (page in Latvian only). This can be done by phone, email or in person. I went in person. You will need to provide as much information as you can, including the religion of the person you are inquiring about. It will then take at least two weeks for them to issue a transcript to you. However, just like with all records, there are no guarantees that the information you are looking for will be found, even if you know for certain what happened where – for example, they could not find my maternal grandmother’s birth record, even though I know for certain when and where she was born and baptized, as these were events witnessed by her older sister, my great-aunt, who confirms the information provided in later official documents. While this record does not seem to exist, numerous others that I asked for do, and I was able to solve the longstanding mystery of where my maternal grandfather was born – in some documents, he says he was born in Lāde parish, in others that he was born in Rīga. His birth record confirms that he was born in Lāde parish.

For vital records after 1921, it is necessary to contact the regional registry office for the area that a person lived. Note that this may not be the local registry office of today – many smaller towns now have their own registry offices, but older records will still be found in the regional office. If you need help figuring out which regional registry office you may need to contact, let me know and I can try to help you.

Census Records

Latvia carried out a national census in 1935 (fonds 1308 abstract 12), and again in 1941 (fonds 1308 abstract 15), a few months after the beginning of the Nazi occupation. The records are arranged by parish or town, and are usually alphabetical based on street or farm name – though beware of only going by street/farm name, since sometimes they will be out of order. As well, sometimes a farm may have been part of a smaller hamlet falling under the purview of a parish and thus grouped by hamlet name first, then farm name. And, of course, just like with censuses in other parts of the world, people may have been somewhere else either for the night of the census or for a longer period of time. The 1935 census is on loose sheets of paper, the 1941 census is bound in book form. The 1941 census has additional fields that the 1935 census does not that are of particular interest to genealogists – namely, full birthdates (the 1935 census only asks for birth year) and places of birth. Of course, this information may not always be accurate, but it does provide a starting point to work from.

School Records

I talked about school records in this post. As a summary: school records can provide more than just your ancestors’ grades – they can also potentially lead to previous school attendance information, birth certificates, and more.

Passports and Immigration/Emigration

In the interwar period, everyone in Latvia needed to have an internal passport. These passports provided the basic details on a person, such as birthdate/place, father’s name, address, occupation, etc. When moving to a new home, it was necessary to register this with the local authorities and have a stamp placed on the passport providing this new information. Stamps were also made to confirm that someone had voted in an election or paid various types of local taxes. For women, it also listed the birth of children. Thus these passports can be a source of all sorts of useful information for the genealogist. However, the collection is not comprehensive – the most extensive collection is available for Rīga (fonds 2996), but some exist for other Latvian cities as well (fonds 2258).

Was your ancestor an international traveler in the interwar period? Numerous external passports and passport applications are also available (fonds 3234, abstracts 24, 32, 33). I found the passport application that was made on my grandfather’s behalf so that he could spend a semester in Sweden to do his practical work (what we’d probably call a co-op or internship these days) while studying at an agricultural secondary school. I knew he had studied agriculture and that he had spent time in Sweden as part of his studies, but I didn’t know where in Latvia he had gone to school, since his family moved all over the country – with the information this passport application provided, I was able to get his full set of secondary school marks, as well as a copy of his diploma.

Did your ancestor immigrate to Latvia during the interwar period? Document collections on immigrants, both legal and illegal, as well as citizenship applications, might be able to provide more information. In the time period directly after the First World War, there were many non-permanent residents in Latvia that needed to be sorted out and either repatriated or settled – refugees, prisoners of war, and so on. Many people fleeing from the Soviet Union chose to settle in Latvia. Documents on legal immigrants and citizenship acquisition can be found in fonds 3234 abstracts 2 and 5, documents on refugees, POWs and illegal migrants in fonds 3234 abstract 1a and 13, and documents on loss of citizenship and expulsion from Latvian territory in fonds 3234 abstracts 21 and 23. Since all of my ancestors were already in Latvia at this time, I only took a look at the abstracts, but since they are mostly organized by surname, it should be easy to find if your ancestors are in them or not.

For emigration from Latvia during World War 2, and subsequent time ancestors would have spent in Displaced Persons Camps, see my post on the International Tracing Service.

House Books

As well as addresses being recorded in internal passports, the movements of people were also recorded in “house books” kept for each address. These books recorded the names of the people, birthdates, supporting document numbers (usually those of internal passports), when they moved to this address, previous address, when they left this address, and the address they moved to. It is thus theoretically possible to follow a family’s moves around the country using only house books. However, like the internal passport collections, the house book collection is far from comprehensive. The books exist mostly for the interwar period, though some individual books may extend beyond those dates (both backwards and forwards). For Rīga, consult fonds 2942, for the rest of Latvia, fonds 2110.

… and more!

What kind of job did your ancestor do? There might be documents relating to trade unions they could have been members of, social clubs or even employment files. If you know where specifically they worked, you could find information on the company that could mention your ancestor. I was able to find two employment files for one of my great-grandfathers – one for his time with the police force (fonds 5604), another for his time as a justice of the peace (Rīga district court, fonds 1536).

Did your ancestor change their name? Throughout the interwar period, but especially in the late 1930s, there was a push for Latvians who had names that were not of Latvian origin to change them to something Latvian-sounding. Records for surname changes can be found in fonds 3234, abstracts 1 and 31, though they appear to be arranged by pre-change surname, so if you don’t know what the earlier surname was, it could be a challenge. I will be addressing the topic of name changes and regulations involved in this in a post later this week.

These are only the most popular types of records. Many others exist as well – look at local court documents, to see if your ancestor was involved in any civil or criminal cases. Rural land records, which I will discuss later, may also cover this time period. Consider all aspects of your ancestors’ lives to try and figure out what may have generated a written record. There are many possibilities!

Did I miss an important type of record? What kind of records have you had success with? Share in comments!

All four of my grandparents came to Canada for the same reason: to flee from the Communist terror that had overtaken their homeland [...]]]> [This post was written for the 30th edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy on the topic of "Arrival in New Lands", hosted by Al of Al's Polish-American Genealogy Research.]

All four of my grandparents came to Canada for the same reason: to flee from the Communist terror that had overtaken their homeland and the rest of Eastern Europe. I have already talked at some length about their experiences in leaving and life as Displaced Persons, so for this post I will look at their arrival and first years in their new home. This is a time period that I initially neglected in my research, but now I am starting to try and learn more about it.

After World War 2 ended, there were millions of Displaced Persons across Western Europe who either could not or would not return to their homes. As a result, refugee organizations had to work to resettle all of these people into new homes across the world. This is a process that took several years, and most DPs departed for new lands between 1948 and 1951.

In numerous cases, DPs were admitted to countries through a variety of worker placement schemes – agreements that they would take up a pre-arranged position of employment that they needed to remain in for at least a year to fulfill the obligations of their contract. These schemes were not perfect, and in some cases exploitation did occur. However, for most it provided a good opportunity in their new country, to already have a steady job waiting for them, which sometimes also came with a place to live for the duration of the contract.

My grandparents participated in such placements upon their arrival in Canada. My maternal grandmother took up a nursing position at the Weston Sanatorium in Weston, Ontario, now a part of the city of Toronto. My grandfather Aleksandrs Francis obtained a contract to work on a farm near Niagara-on-the-Lake while he learned English. They were married in Toronto in 1950, presumably after he completed his contract. They lived in Toronto for several years, and then in 1954 moved to Saint Catharines, Ontario, where they built a home. Aleksandrs died in 1983, and my grandmother moved from this home in 1993, when she and her sister moved north to my family’s town.

My paternal grandfather, Juris Celmiņš, had trained as a civil engineer back in Latvia. He and his wife Zenta (nee Lukins) moved around to numerous places before they settled in Toronto. Juris’ first job was working in a mine in Sudbury, Ontario, but after a few days his supervisors thought “Why do we have this engineer who speaks English working down in the mine?” and gave him a new position. Juris had learned English while working in his DP camp, which had been in the British zone of Germany. After this job, he also worked in Sarnia, and then by 1954 was living in Toronto, where he and Zenta and their three children lived until Zenta’s death in 1959. Juris remarried to Edīte Bulle, a fellow Latvian who had been recently widowed, and they lived in their home in Toronto until their deaths in 2002 and 2003.

The homes they lived in were simple post-war homes. I’m not sure when my paternal grandparents began to own their homes, but I know my maternal grandparents’ first home in Toronto, from roughly 1952 to 1954, was jointly owned by them and another Latvian couple. I have the bill of sale of them selling this property to a young Jewish family (searching the address on Google provided me with several “society pages” articles from the Canadian Jewish Review where the name matched that on the bill of sale). Then they built their home in Saint Catharines, and defied apparent social conventions of the time with the design – instead of putting the living room at the front of the house, they put the kitchen in the front and had the living room with large windows overlooking their beautiful garden. My mother tells me that several neighbours were displeased about this design – I guess this setup made it harder for them to be nosy! The garden had many different plants and shrubs, both for decoration and for food. I have fond memories of eating black currants and red currants straight off the bushes when I was a child.

The worker placement schemes could take DPs to far corners of the country – late 1940s editions of the newspaper “Brīvais Latvietis” (Free Latvian) mentions Latvian clubs in places such as the Yukon. But through newspapers like this, they kept in touch, found lost friends and kept the community spirit alive. Early editions of this paper are available through the website Connecting Canadians. At some point during this time, though I’m unsure as to how it happened, my maternal grandmother came back into contact with her high school sweetheart, who had settled in the USA. They still keep up correspondence to this day.

After the contracts ended and DPs could move to anywhere they wanted, Latvians tended to congregate in larger cities – Toronto has the largest Latvian community in Canada, but there were also communities in Montreal, Saint Catharines, Ottawa and Hamilton. They set up Latvian Saturday schools for their children, organized singing and dancing clubs, created scout and guide troops, organized summer camps and established churches. A prevailing notion that inspired this flurry of activity right from the beginning was that Latvians in the Soviet Union would be systematically eliminated, so it was up to the exiles (“trimdinieki”) to maintain their identity, heritage and language.

Many of these same instutitions continue to exist today. My father and I both graduated from the same Latvian school in Toronto, which this year celebrates its 60th anniversary. The Latvian summer camp that I attended as a camper from 1993 to 1998, and as a counselor for five of the eight following years, has been operating for fifty-three years.

Now, since independence was regained, there has been a shift – children and grandchildren of exiles, who were born and grew up in the West, are increasingly moving to Latvia to live. Many of my childhood friends have done so, and it is my intention as well. How much of a trend this will be, and how much culture and identity is retained in the West by those who do not return, is yet to be seen.

Since I’m hosting this edition of the Carnival, I got to choose the topic. I chose War Stories. When I thought of this topic, I initially [...]]]> [This post is for the 28th edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy, which will be hosted right here. The Carnival post will be up on Friday!]

Since I’m hosting this edition of the Carnival, I got to choose the topic. I chose War Stories. When I thought of this topic, I initially had ideas to talk about the various experience of my family members in World War II, since this was a defining moment of my family’s history, since over the course of the war, all four of my grandparents left Latvia, spent several years in displaced persons camps, and then came to Canada.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I should tell a different story – the narrative of my family’s history focuses on World War II so often, it would be interesting to tell a different story for a change.

So instead I will talk about one branch of my family’s experience during World War I and the Russian Revolution. These stories have been told to me by my great-aunt, who is now 98 years old.

When World War I started, Latvia was still a part of the Russian Empire. My great-aunt was three years old, living in Krustpils, which was then part of the Vitebsk guberniya, with her parents Jūle (nee Štelmahers) and Brencis Līcītis. Because of the war front raging through Latvia, the family moved further east, and settled near Rzhev, a city approximately 200km west of Moscow.

The three lived with a Russian family by the surname Kislev in a manor house. The family had two daughters, Vera and Zoya. It is living here that my great-aunt learned to speak Russian, and took great pleasure in going to the local market as well as to the Orthodox church, even though the family was Lutheran. They were not the only Balts living in the area – other Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians had also moved to the Rzhev area to avoid the war.

But World War I was not the only war going on at the time. This was a time of political upheaval in Russia, which eventually led to the 1917 Revolution and the beginning of the Communist era. The family was opposed to Bolshevism early – my great-aunt remembers going with her father to listen to a speech that was given by a political party leader that was opposed to Lenin and his party. After the Bolshevik victory, she also remembers her mother arguing with a Communist about “workers” and what the party would do with people who were unable to work due to age or infirmity, and his response being less than satisfactory. When the Communists came asking how much they were paying in rent to the Kislevs, they lied and said a lower price than they were actually paying. They knew that otherwise the Kislevs would have had even more of their property expropriated for being “kulaks” (affluent farmers), even though they really didn’t have very much.

But the defining moment that showed the family precisely where the Bolsheviks went wrong and why their family would always remain opposed to Communism was when the Communist soldiers came to the village, took the grain stores and burned them in the town square, calling them “rich peoples’ food”. Instead of this grain that they had stored up, the people were given animal feed to eat.

World War I officially ended in 1918, but the following years were still filled with conflict in Eastern Europe, with the civil war in Russia between the various factions, as well as the wars of independence in the Baltics. While Latvia in declared independence on November 18, 1918, this wasn’t officially recognized until the early 1920s.

I’m not certain when exactly the family returned to Krustpils, but it would have been before the autumn of 1919, when my grandmother was born. The wars ended, and Latvia gained an independence that had been lost eight hundred years earlier.

In recounting this story, I’ve realized just how many of the details of this time period are a mystery to me, historically speaking – in Latvian Saturday school, we didn’t really study it. We learned about early Latvian history and the beginnings of German rule. We learned about the following periods of Swedish and Russian rule, and then about some of the Latvian writers of the late 19th century who started to inspire political movements of independence and nationalism. But we didn’t study the independence wars. We celebrated the 18th of November every year, acknowledging independence as being gained in 1918, and that from that day on people lived happily ever after until World War II broke out. The first I recall hearing about the independence wars was looking at some maps in my Latvian historical atlas that I acquired in my first year of Latvian Friday night high school, but I don’t recall ever discussing them in class.

So my mission for the next couple of months is to educate myself more on this time period. It was an important period of Latvian history, and it might hold the key to answering some questions about different types of access to various Latvian genealogical records. I will be sure to share my findings here!