Guidelines for Commenting

1. Please do not post the same item on multiple posts. You only need to post once for it to be seen.

2. Please include a working email address - if your comment is related to your own personal family history, rather than Latvian genealogy in a more general sense, I prefer to respond by email to maintain your privacy.

3. I don't sell email addresses or send anything to them besides responses to your comments. I am the only person who has access to them.

Pre-Independence Rīga House Registers on Raduraksti!

I looked into Raduraksti this morning, and what did I see…. a new document section for house registers!

These are the “house books” that I have mentioned a number of times before. They provide information about everyone living in a given building at a given time period. They may also offer information such as birthdate, birthplace, [...]

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 [...]

Latvian Genealogy Primer - Part 2

Part 2 – Genealogical Sources

After reading Part 1 of this primer, and the historical context of Latvian emigration, now it is time to move to genealogical sources – the resources that you can use to trace your Latvian ancestry.

What You Need to Know About Latvian Genealogy

Most records are in Russian or German prior to the [...]

Kurland Revision Lists!

I was looking around on Raduraksti, and I saw that they have posted what appears to be the full collection of the revision lists for rural Kurland (modern-day Kurzeme and Zemgale). They can be accessed by going “Saturs” -> “Dvēseļu revīzijas” -> “Lauku teritorijas”.

Revision lists are a great resource that take the place of censuses [...]

Records after 1905

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 [...]

Getting Started with Latvian Research

I’ll admit, this post is long overdue. It should have been one of the first posts on this blog. But it is here now!

For the purposes of this post, I am assuming several things. The main assumption is that you have utilized all of the records in the place where your Latvian ancestor migrated to [...]

Navigating Raduraksti

I make many references to LVVA’s Raduraksti. It is the best resource for people researching their Latvian family history if they’re not able to go to the LVVA itself. The collection of documents available there is growing – recently they also added revision lists for some towns and cities.

But the website can be a bit [...]