Discovering Latvian Roots » germany

Importance of the ITS

Antra — Sun, 29 May 2011 02:39:08 +0000

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.

28th Edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy

Antra — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:18:09 +0000

Welcome, everyone, to the 28th edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy! This month’s topic was War Stories.

J.M. of Tracing My Roots, in the post The Effects of War, describes the lingering effects of war after the battles are over, and how in this particular case they influenced the life of a German ancestor living in the Netherlands.

In her post Ray, Karen of Ancestor Soup writes about the peacetime and wartime activities of Flight Officer Raymond Christensen, a WW2 pilot, as told to his friends back home in the USA.

Next, Brenda Dougall Merriman talks about the experiences of her ancestor Otto during the 1905 Revolution in the Latvian provinces of the Russian Empire.

Al of Al’s Polish-American Genealogy Research discusses how the Franco-Prussian War Impacts the Wierzba’s from Lipusz, and how this may have influenced their decision to emigrate to the United States.

Finally, in the post War Stories, Antra of Discovering Latvian Roots recounts her great-aunt’s memories of a childhood spent in rural Russia to avoid the battles of World War I being fought in Latvian territory.

That concludes this month’s carnival! May’s edition will be hosted by J.M. of Tracing My Roots, and the topic will be “Religion, religion as part of the life of an ancestor, sources about an ancestor that are connected to their religion, basically anything to do with religion would be accepted.” The deadline for submissions is May 14th, and the edition will be posted on May 17th. Submissions can be made on the Carnival’s BlogCarnival submissions page.

International Tracing Service

Antra — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:35:42 +0000

I first read about the International Tracing Service about a year ago when searching for more information about post-World War Two Displaced Persons Camps. According to their website, their history starts in London in 1943, as a tracing bureau for people missing due to war. After the war, they continued to work to identify and register displaced persons, liberated prisoners and forced labourers. They gained their current name while under the auspices of the International Refugee Organization in 1948.

From their website, I had been under the impression that they only held documents relating to victims of Nazi terror. However, a couple of months ago, one of my readers here informed me that they hold documents on other displaced persons as well, including Latvian DPs, and that they had been able to provide her with a lot of useful documentation.

So at the beginning of January, I submitted information requests for both of my grandmothers. I received a response in mid-February, wherein were full-colour copies of several documents relating to both of them, listing places they had lived, family profiles, where they wanted to go next, and so on.

What information did I learn? Most of the information on my maternal grandmother I had already known, but it did provide some other addresses she had lived at in Denmark. It also indicated her desire to resettle in Switzerland. For my paternal grandmother, Zenta Lūkina, I learned more – I learned that, along with her husband Juris Celmiņš and her parents Augusts and Lilija (nee Šīrs), she departed for Canada from Bremerhaven, Germany on October 13, 1948 aboard the USS General W. C. Langfitt. Her family’s intent was to move to Canada. A “Resettlement Record” for her father, Augusts Lūkins, indicates his primary occupation as “Lawyer”, and secondary occupations of “Occupational Interviewer” and “Gardener”. I never knew that Augusts was a gardener! The family had been housed at DP Camp Noor in Eckernförde, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

These documents have, however, presented a conflict of information in terms of my maternal grandmother’s port of emigration. Here, it says that the SS Samaria departed for Canada from Cuxhaven, but her Canadian citizenship application states that this ship departed from Bremerhaven, some 40 kilometres south. In everything I’ve read about emigration via German ports, these two, while being near to each other, have always been considered separate from one another. My grandmother and great-aunt say that they departed from Hamburg, which lends itself to the Cuxhaven version, since Cuxhaven was the official port from which Hamburg’s ships sailed. But then why write Bremerhaven? Did the ship sail from Cuxhaven to Bremerhaven, and stay in port long enough for it to be considered to have departed from Bremerhaven by Canadian authorities, but officially have departed from Cuxhaven according to German authorities?

That mystery aside, I will be writing to the ITS again for information on my grandfathers, to fill in more pieces of my family’s post-war puzzle.

The service is free of charge. While it could provide information for anyone who had family members in DP camps after the war, it is of particular use to those who are just starting their research into their Latvian ancestors, and may not know where in Latvia they came from. Information cards list all of this information, which will pinpoint the necessary places in Latvia to continue the search.

Provide as much information as possible to make the search easier – any names, places and dates you may have. You might just be able to find the answers to the mysteries you have been seeking!

Have you written to the ITS? What kind of results did you get?

Expanding Family Knowledge

Antra — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:44:00 +0000

Before I went to Latvia and started conducting my research in the archives, I was purely a genealogist. I wanted names, dates and places. While at the archives, a transformation occured: I became a family historian as well. Rather than spending most of my time stretching back further into history, I concentrated on finding out what information I could about the lives of the people I already had that basic information for.

Now I’ve returned home, and I’m continuing that search for information – I had never really looked at the documents for the grandparents and great-grandparents I had that came to Canada, because I already knew that they were here and roughly when/how they arrived, so I was only concerned about where they came from back in Latvia.

So I’ve begun looking at what I have available here, and I’ve learned some interesting things:

I had been under the belief that my maternal grandmother and her sister came to Canada from Denmark by way of Hamburg, Germany. This is not correct – they came via Bremerhaven, departing from there on June 30th, 1949 on the SS Samaria and arrived in Quebec City on July 11th, 1949. My maternal grandfather came later, and they married on May 24, 1950 in Toronto.
My maternal grandparents became Canadian citizens on December 18, 1957.
My paternal grandparents married in Latvia in 1943 – I had been under the impression that they met at a DP camp in Germany and married there or after they immigrated to Canada.
Thanks to a 60-year old duffel bag in my father’s possession, I now have the information I need to find more information about my paternal grandparents’ time in DP camps. This duffel bag was one they brought with them from Germany, and has the name of the DP camp they lived in – Camp Noor, near the German city of Eckernförde, which is located about 50 kilometres south of the Danish border. I’ve put in a request to the International Tracing Service, hoping to learn more information.

I’ve also learned about the Latvian Diplomatic Service, especially in the post-war time period, but that is for a different post. Still lots of documents to sort through and things to learn, even when I’m back home!