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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, [...] This post is the first in a series that I’ll be making about events in my ancestors’ lives, on the days that the events took place. My reasons for this series are twofold – first of all, it helps me organize my own family documents and files, which is something that has been severely lacking, especially [...] So you want to use Raduraksti, but you’re intimidated, because you don’t know German or Russian. That’s okay! With a bit of work, you can find everything you need to know from these records, without needing to be fluent, or even proficient, in the languages. It is just a question of being able to extract [...] 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 [...] It is too easy, especially when reading records that require interpretation of handwriting in an unfamiliar language, to pick out the main details – date of birth and parents – but ignore the details that are “not strictly necessary” – godparents, occupations, and so on. It is also easy to just scan for the surnames [...] 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 [...] 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, [...] One year ago today, I created this blog! I never imagined I’d get the response that I have. Turns out there are a lot more people looking for their Latvian roots than I thought! I know the past couple of months have been relatively slow on here. Between going on my trip to Latvia, then moving to [...] 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 [...] Welcome to Surname Saturday on Discovering Latvian Roots! Today we’re going to look at Latvian surnames beginning with the prefix “aiz-”. This is a prefix that can mean various things depending on the context, but most commonly it means “beyond”, “behind” or “across”. All of these names are from surname lists found in the book “Kas jāzina [...] |
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