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In this series, I am providing pictures of tombstones from Latvian cemeteries, all with death dates prior to 1945. I do not have any further information on the people mentioned.
Photo taken by me, October 2012. Click to enlarge. Name: Lid. Serž. Roberts Bemchens (Airman Sergeant Roberts Bemchens), born July 15, 1898, died June 29, 1927 Location: Meža kapi, Rīga Part of my series of publishing the banns read in Rīga in the interwar period. See this post for more details. April 13, 1925 (Latvijas Vēstnesis [Latvian Herald], April 17, 1925)
April 18, 1925 (Latvijas Vēstnesis [Latvian Herald], April 20, 1925)
Did this post help you find your ancestors? Do let me know! 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, religion, occupation and previous address/next address. Right now, they only appear to have house registers from Rīga from before the First World War, and I know that this must still be a work in progress, because a number of major Rīga streets are missing, for which I know they have books in the collection. But it is definitely a good start! Be aware, most of the records are in Russian. Now, even when they do get the whole collection scanned in, you may be disappointed. House registers do not survive for all addresses or all time periods. House registers for towns and cities outside Rīga do exist, but this collection is even smaller than the Rīga collection. Hopefully the rest of the pre-First World War Rīga books will be scanned in soon, and then perhaps they will move to the inter-war period housing registers – while also not complete, I’ve seen the survival rate of books to be somewhat better than that of the pre-war books. Have you found an ancestor in the house registers? Do you need to know what a street name was in the pre-war period? I can help with that. Let me know! Twentieth 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 the war moves even closer. It was here that her third child, a son, was born in February 1916. For more background, see here, and click on the tag “diary entries” to see all of the entries that I have posted.
In this series, I am providing pictures of tombstones from Latvian cemeteries, all with death dates prior to 1945. I do not have any further information on the people mentioned.
Photo taken by me, October 2012. Click to enlarge. Names: Lid. Virs. Viet. Andrejs Šleiners (Air Force Officer Andrejs Šleiners), born August 26, 1900, died June 3, 1929; Location: Meža kapi, Rīga This is part of my series of interesting newspaper articles and snippets that I find in the old Latvian newspapers available through Periodika. Most of the articles I post are in some way related to migration, wars or other events that are of particular genealogical note. Source: Strādnieku Avīze (Workers’ Newspaper), April 7, 1923
One has to wonder – why did these ship workers desert the Estonia, a ship that travelled from Liepāja to New York during the 1920s? I am particularly interested in finding answers, since the last man mentioned, Reinholds Baburs, is very likely to be my great-great-grandmother Karline Matilde Baburs’ cousin. Baburs is an extremely uncommon name in Latvia, and the ages fit with a Reinholds Baburs I have a record of. I looked up the ship manifest on Ellis Island, and this is what I found about the twelve men, in the same order as mentioned in the article – their jobs, their ages, and their years of service at sea.
The manifest mentions four other deserters as well, but those four were not Latvian citizens, so hence why they probably weren’t mentioned in a Latvian newspaper. Looking at their ages, and the average time at sea – one really has to wonder why they left the ship. The conditions must have been extremely harsh to get people who have had as many years of service as some of them have to desert – I’m sure that could affect future job prospects. And why would two musicians and a conductor desert a ship if there were bad conditions? Could they have not pursued a career on land? I’m very curious. Then the next question – did they leave as a group, or individually? Did they know that the others were planning it too? How common was desertion from ships in this era? That is a question I want to answer. Furthermore – did any of these men ever return to Latvia? I found a newspaper article that mentions a Reinholds Baburs selling land in Preiļi parish in 1935, but that doesn’t say anything about his age, so I don’t know if he is the same Reinholds Baburs. Not to mention such a sale could potentially take place without him being there. So did he ever return? If so, what was his punishment? Or do I have some unknown distant relatives somewhere in the United States? I’m curious to know! So if you happen to be descended from Reinholds Baburs – or any of these crewmen, for that matter – do let me know what happened to them! Part of my series of publishing the banns read in Rīga in the interwar period. See this post for more details. April 7, 1925 (Latvijas Vēstnesis [Latvian Herald], April 8, 1925)
April 8, 1925 (Latvijas Vēstnesis [Latvian Herald], April 11, 1925)
April 11, 1925 (Latvijas Vēstnesis [Latvian Herald], April 15, 1925)
Did this post help you find your ancestors? Do let me know! What do we have for today’s Surname Saturday? A new content category on the Latvian Surname Project! If you’ve stopped by the Latvian Surname Project recently, you may have happened across some of the work I’ve been doing adding surnames from some of the earliest estate revision lists. I’m adding these for two reasons: One, because these revision lists are some of the earliest sources of surnames that we have, and thus it is important to keep track of them to see how people and their surnames migrated from place to place, and two, because there are a lot of surnames that I don’t have entered into the Project itself yet, for a variety of reasons (time and uncertainty about the meaning are the main culprits here). But it is still important to see where surnames came from, so at least the bare minimum of information – that is, the name – will appear on these estate pages, even if they don’t have their own separate surname pages yet. All in good time! So you can see this new category here – right now I only have a few added, but this number will grow with time! Nineteenth 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 the war moves even closer. It was here that her third child, a son, was born in February 1916. For more background, see here, and click on the tag “diary entries” to see all of the entries that I have posted.
In this series, I am providing pictures of tombstones from Latvian cemeteries, all with death dates prior to 1945. I do not have any further information on the people mentioned.
Photo taken by me, October 2012. Click to enlarge. Name: Lid. Serž. Pēters Lodziņš (Airman Sergeant Pēters Lodziņš), born May 15, 1904, died December 4, 1930 Location: Meža kapi, Rīga |
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