Day of Remembrance – Jewish Victims of the Holocaust

This post should have been up yesterday, but I was out of town for most of the day and returned with a splitting headache, so I hope you’ll accept the post today instead.

On July 4, 1941, numerous synagogues across Latvia were burned to the ground, some of them with people inside. One of the most [...]

Project Update – June 2, 2010

The Latvian Surname Project has been updated!

The total name count is now 800, I added 200 new names including TRĪSTILTIŅŠ and PODNIEKS.

Today I am also launching a new project, the Latvian Farm Project. The goal of this project is to match old farm names to their pre-WW2 parishes, as well as begin a study on [...]

Making Sense of Exonyms

So after puzzling through the various alphabets and orthographies, you have been able to establish what your ancestors’ names would have looked like back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is a great first step towards tracking them back through the years.

Now you get to do the same for the places they lived! [...]

Village of My Ancestors: Krustpils

[This post was written for the 27th edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy, hosted by Al's Polish-American Genealogy Research.]

For this edition of the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy, I will be talking about the town of Krustpils, where both of my grandmothers lived for a time. My maternal grandmother [...]

Importance of Farm Names

Before I went to the Latvian State Historical Archives for the first time, I didn’t pay much attention to farm names. Sure, I knew the name of the farm where one of my grandfathers grew up, but I didn’t attach a significance to it beyond an address.

My work in the archives showed me just how [...]

Britons in 1870s Latvia?

I’ve been looking through the church records for the Sece Lutheran congregation, in southern Latvia. South of the Daugava river, between the towns of Jaunjelgava and Jēkabpils. My great-grandfather Brencis Līcītis is allegedly from around this area, born in the neighbouring Sērene parish. Many Sērene baptisms took place in Sece, so hence my reason for [...]

Surname Saturday – Kukurs

This edition of Surname Saturday is about the surname Kukurs.

I have chosen this surname for two reasons – a person with this surname in my family tree is currently giving me trouble, and I happened across the definition of this word in my Latvian etymological dictionary while looking for something else.

The root of the word [...]

Surname Saturday – Radziņš

Today I’m featuring one of the new surnames I’ve discovered in my family tree – Radziņš (feminine form Radziņa, the surname of one of my great-great-grandmothers.

Marija Radziņa was born on November 16, 1856. I am not sure yet where she was born, but she married Pēteris Celmiņš sometime before 1878, when their first child was [...]

Mysteries Revealed – And Created

So today was my second day, and first full day, at the Latvian State Historical Archives.

I was able to view the passports I mentioned in my previous post, belonging to Pēteris Celmiņš and Anna Celmiņa (born Liepa), and confirmed that they are the correct individuals, and thus able to add their information to my family [...]

Families Unknown

When doing your research, have you ever come across a family – not your own – that appears to have a story to tell, and you want to find out what that story is?

This has happened to me while looking at the Limbaži parish registers.

While looking at the christening records, the records where no father [...]