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WW1 Diary – January 17, 1916

Fourteenth 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 [...]

WW1 Diary – January 6, 1916

Thirteenth 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 [...]

WW1 Diary - December 31, 1915

Twelfth 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 [...]

Using Saaga

If you have Latvian ancestors who didn’t stay in one place, and thus ended up moving from estate to estate every few years (or even several times a year), keeping track of them can become a bit of a challenge. It can become even more of a challenge if those ancestors are from northern Latvia, [...]

Where Could They Be From?

What do you do if you have little to go on when it comes to researching your Latvian ancestors? What if they emigrated in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and the only information that passenger lists or naturalization records provide is that they came from “Latvia” or “Russia”? What do you do then?

First, do [...]

V is for Vitebsk

So now the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge has the last Latvian province of the Russian Empire… Vitebsk!

Like Livland, Vitebsk is also divided between different countries in the modern day. Only the northwest portion of Vitebsk is a part of Latvia, now the province of Latgale. The rest of Vitebsk is divided between [...]

Š is for Šanhaja

“Šanhaja” is the Latvian name for “Shanghai”. But wait – why is a Chinese city a topic on a Latvian genealogy blog?

A year or so ago, the idea of Latvians in China might have seemed a bit strange to me too. But as I learned through my work with Latvians Abroad – Museum and Research [...]

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 [...]

WW1 Diary – October 4, 1915

Note: If you are following this series closely, please go and read the ninth installment first, which I had forgotten to schedule for September 22nd. It is up now though, so go there before reading this one!

Tenth installment from the diary of my great-grandfather’s sister Alise, written during the First World War. When the diary [...]

WW1 Diary – September 22, 1915

Ninth 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 [...]