So I have formulated a precise plan of attack for finally finding her and [...]]]> My most difficult ancestor is my great-grandmother Anna Liepa. The reason for this is because she was born in Rīga, and Rīga is a big place. This means that any record search inevitably takes forever, since there are many records to search.

So I have formulated a precise plan of attack for finally finding her and her family, and, hopefully, getting them out of Rīga to a locale that is much more friendly to research (that is, the country, or a smaller town). Since I’m in Latvia right now, I’ve got all of the archives at my disposal, which should make this easier.

Let’s start with what is known about her:

1. Anna Liepa was born on September 22, 1895 (N.S.), at the time of her birth her birthday was September 10, 1895 (O.S.).
2. Her father’s name was Fricis.
3. She was likely not an only child – my father has mentioned that there are Liepa cousins somewhere in Australia, so they could be descended from her siblings. (If any of you Liepa cousins in Australia are reading this, do leave a comment!)
4. She married Pēteris Eduards Celmiņš on September 17, 1919.
5. My earliest known address for her is Romanova iela (street) 62/64, apartment 4. She left this address on December 16, 1919 to move to Skolas iela 4, apartment 22 with her husband. Romanova iela is now known as Lācplēšu iela.
6. Anna was a bookkeeper, and worked for the cooperative association “Konzums” from November 1, 1912, for at least ten years, possibly longer (my family has a certificate that was presented to her on her ten-year anniversary of being with the company).
7. Her son Juris was born June 8, 1920, and her daughter Skaidrīte on July 7, 1921.
8. Anna and her husband moved around frequently in the years following their marriage, living both in Rīga and Jūrmala, before eventually settling at Mātīšu iela 51/53 in 1934.
9. Her husband Pēteris died in 1943, her son Juris and his new wife Zenta left for the West in 1944.
10. Anna died in Rīga on June 20, 1987.

So, knowing that, let’s see what I’ve got on her father. Unfortunately, nothing concrete. I know that there were several Fricis Liepas living in Rīga at this time from different address books. However, all of them also had a penchant for moving around, since the addresses are different each time.

1903 address book

-Fricis Liepa, Dundagas iela 1.

-Fricis Liepa, Zeļļu iela 6, apartment 21.

1912 address book

-Fricis Liepa, Vidus iela 4, apartment 17.

-Fricis Liepa, Sabiles iela 16.

-Fricis Liepa, Dārtas iela 50. (Dārtas iela is now E. Smilģa iela)

1925 address book

-Fricis Liepa, Matīšu iela 43, apartment 46.

-Fricis Liepa, Talsu iela 9, apartment 57.

I plotted these all out on a map (with the exception of Dundagas iela, which does not appear to exist anymore, and I can’t find an alternate name for it), and found that four of them were concentrated in the same area, in the district of Āgenskalns in “Pārdaugava” (the left bank of the river Daugava, while the Old Town and main “city centre” are on the right bank). Could this make it more likely that three out of the four are actually the same person? Maybe, maybe not.

However, the only birth record I have for an Anna Liepa is from the St Paul’s Lutheran Church, which is in the main city centre, quite distant from the addresses in Āgenskalns. I would need to find an address book closer to her date of birth.

My theory is that the address mentioned above on Romanovas iela was her family’s address at the time she left it. She left that address only a couple of months after getting married, so it would make sense. This address is also close to the St Paul’s church. But this could then mean several things – a) they moved around a lot prior to settling there, since there is no Fricis Liepa at that address in any of the address books; or b) Fricis died not long after Anna’s birth, therefore none of the listings above for a Fricis Liepa are connected to Anna.

So this is all to say: Anna’s origins are a big puzzle. What am I going to do to try and straighten out this puzzle?

1. Try and locate the house books for Romanovas 62/64. Problem here seems to be that the archives only seem to have the book for 1900 – which may be too early. We’ll see. Also I noticed in the index for house books that there is also a Romanova iela 62/66 – which is a bit odd, because it skips 64. Maybe I should go down there and check the building layouts out, and see if there were some changes back and forth, or if 62/66 is a completely separate building from 62/64.
2. Try to find Anna’s employment records. Records do exist for the Konzums company, so maybe they have some personnel files that list her address?
3. I could try looking at the tax rolls for Rīga, and see if I can find her anywhere. Since she started working at Konzums in 1912, which was before independence, there might be a record of her in 1394. fonds – Rīga tax records.
4. Continue to make my way through the All-Russia Census. Since this was taken around the time of her birth, the areas to concentrate on are the ones around St Paul’s Church.
5. Find more address books – the National Library apparently has a number of them, so I can go check those out and see if there are any listing a Fricis Liepa in 1895.

So that’s where I’m going to start, and see where it leads me! Hopefully the house books and Konzums files are detailed enough to get me what I’m looking for, because otherwise the tax lists and All-Russia Census could involve a great deal more legwork. Wish me luck!

Caroline Mathilde, daughter of worker Martin Babbur and his wife Edde born Jansohn. Baptized by Pastor Getter(?) in the church [Church of Jesus, an evangelican Lutheran church south of the Old City of Rīga]. Godparents maiden Caroline Wendt, worker Martin Lasmann and Jann(?) Krasting.

Usually I post records on the day of the event based on [...]]]>

Usually I post records on the day of the event based on the Gregorian calendar, but for this event, I’m making an exception, due to its special circumstance.

The year an event takes place often matters. So what happens when the year suddenly changes? My great-great-grandmother Karolīne Matilde Baburs was born on December 31, 1867 according to the Julian Calendar. When the change to the Gregorian calendar happened, her birthday would have changed to January 12, 1868.

This calendar switch happened in 1919 in Latvia, according to the Latvian-language sources that I’ve found. This means that Karolīne would have just turned 51. I wonder what she thought about celebrating her birthday not only on a different day, but a completely different year. Was she sad that her birthday was no longer on a “special” day? Or relieved? Was she happy to be born at the “beginning” of the year, rather than the “end” of the year?

Click for full image. Image courtesy of a cousin from my Lūkins family line.

Fishing manager JĒKABS ŠĪRS, 61 1/2 years old, born in Aloja, divorced.

Died on October 4, 1923, at 10 o’clock in the evening in Rīnuži.

Buried October 14, 1923 at the Baltās Baznīcas (White Church) cemetery.

Daugavgrīva church book, 1923 deaths, #53.

Jēkabs Šīrs was my [...]]]>

Jēkabs Šīrs was my great-great-grandfather. He was born in Aloja in northern Latvia to parents Jānis and Kristīne on May 30, 1862 (O.S.). When he came to live in the Rīga area is unclear, but his daughter Lilija was born at Kalnciems in 1899. Sometime prior to this, he married Kristīne Kukure, who is also allegedly from northern Latvia, but I have yet to find her birth record anywhere. They divorced in June of 1923.

At the time of Jēkabs’ death, he was living at Rīnuži, which was a place in what is now the Vecmilgrāvis part of Rīga. Whether Rīnuži was a hamlet with a number of families or a property owned by the Šīrs and Lūkins families, I’m not exactly certain yet, but today in that area is a Rīnuži street, which intersects with Baltāsbaznīcas street (White Church Street), where the Šīrs and Lūkins families lived. The “White Church” in question is the Daugavgrīva Lutheran Church, in whose cemetery Jēkabs was interred.

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 [...]]]> 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 in this past year when I’ve been so wrapped up in other activities that I’ve barely had time to touch my own family research. Secondly, it provides concrete examples to you, my readers, of the different kinds of documents that you may be able to consult in your own Latvian research.

This may be the birth record of my great-grandmother Anna Liepa. I’ll get back to the “may be” in a bit, first a bit on her.

Anna Liepa was born in Rīga on September 22, 1895, according to the Gregorian calendar. At the time of her birth in the Russian Empire, her birthday was September 10. Her tombstone cites her date of birth as September 23, but every document of hers that I have (internal passport, marriage record, numerous house book entries, etc.) all state September 22 (and in the early years of independent Latvia, both the Gregorian and Julian dates are cited together). She was a bookkeeper, and married Pēteris Eduards Celmiņš in Rīga on September 17, 1919.

Now back to the “may be” – Anna was born in Rīga, which was and is the biggest city in Latvia. This means there are lots of records to check, and both her first and last names are fairly common. I haven’t consulted all of the Rīga records yet, but this one certainly is the best candidate.

My reasoning, in favour of this being her birth record:

• Her precise birth date is mentioned here – September 10, 1895, according to the Julian calendar.
• Numerous other documents, such as her internal passport and her marriage record, mention that her father’s name is Fricis, which this record agrees with.
• This record is an extract from the Sv. Pāvila (St Paul’s) Lutheran Church. This church is the closest one to where Anna and her husband and children were known to live. While this doesn’t prove that she was born in that same area of town, her husband was from the country, and thus it was likely for him to join her family rather than the other way around. This happens numerous times throughout my family history, so could have happened here as well.

Points against this being her birth record:

• No other documents mention a middle name of “Natalie” or “Natālija” (a more Latvianized form of the name). Neither her passport nor her marriage record nor any house book records mention a middle name.
• There are numerous “Fricis Liepas” in Rīga around this time. The 1903 Rīga address book mentions two, the 1912 address book mentions three. Any of them could have had daughters named Anna around the same time.

So the search continues. Is this the right record? I won’t know until I check the rest of the churches. I could also obtain her death record and hope that it has her mother’s first name and maiden name on it. Until then, Anna remains one of my problem ancestors.

If your ancestors were ethnic Latvians, however, you might find yourself lucky – most ethnic Latvians in the capital [...]]]> 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 arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1897, Rīga was 45% Latvian, in 1867, only 23%. Therefore, if your ancestors are ethnic Latvians, there is a good chance that you might only need to deal with Rīga records for a generation or two.

Thus the title of this post – how can you most efficiently look through that haystack of records to locate your ancestors and link them to a parish outside of Rīga, and thus a place that can be searched much more easily?

1. Passports. The Latvian State Historical Archives has a collection of internal passports for Rīga residents in the inter-war period. The good news is that they are indexed on a computer for ease of searching. Bad news is that they are not online, and only available by searching the database onsite. These passports note both place of residence and place of birth. Also important is “place of registration”, which can often be the place of birth – even if they haven’t lived there in years. One of my great-grandfathers was still registered as a citizen of Vijciems parish, even though at the time of issuance of the passport he had been living in Rīga for at least a decade.

2. 1940 Telephone Directory. Available online at GenealogyIndexer (has all of Latvia, scroll down to find Rīga). Now, not everyone had a telephone, but it is a start. This can be used to locate an address, and then you can look for parish records for that area. Of course, people move, and sometimes frequently, but a starting point is better than nothing.

3. 1897 All-Russia Census. Available on Raduraksti. The records for Rīga are fairly complete, and organized by street name. The census mentions place of birth and religion, both important tools to locate the proper religious BMD documents.

4. Religious records. Available on Raduraksti. There are many religious records available for Rīga, so if you’ve narrowed down where your ancestors lived, start searching in nearby parishes, and then expand your search from there. Rīga records sometimes contain rudimentary indexes (still handwritten), available at the beginning or end of the book. Check both to see if one is available. If someone is a recent migrant to Rīga, any information pertaining to them with regards to “home parish” will frequently reference their non-Rīga parish (see above with regards to place of registration). This is most common with marriage and death records, so if you know when an ancestor died in Rīga, find their death record first to see if they were born in Rīga as well.

5. School records. If your ancestor went to school in Rīga, there may be extant records for the school that could provide information on where the student was from. Sometimes school archive files (available at the Latvian State Historical Archives) will contain birth certificates of students, previous school transcripts, and so on.

6. Revision lists. These are available on Raduraksti. If you find your ancestors were in Rīga prior to the early 1860s, you will need to head to the revision lists. Now, the ones for Rīga are more complicated than for rural parishes – they are arranged by social class and, in some cases, religion (the religious groups most likely to have separate lists are Jews and Old Believers). Alphabetical indexes appear to exist for some of the lists, but not all of them. Raduraksti has many different lists relating to Rīga, so you may have to sort through them for awhile to find who you’re looking for. It appears that for the most part, the latest date on these documents is 1863.

Another thing to remember is that your ancestor might not have been from Rīga at all – just like emigrants from other countries, people might name the largest city to their home as their place of birth, when they were actually from the countryside. So unless you have a document (preferably of Latvian origin, since they would be most likely to be correct on Latvian places of residence and birth) that specifically links your ancestors to Rīga, do not assume that is where they are from, just because it is a large population centre. This holds especially true for ethnic Latvians – while the share of ethnic Latvians in Rīga did increase in the late 1800s and eventually become a majority in the interwar period, ethnic Latvians were still a predominantly rural population. If your ancestors were not ethnic Latvians, however, their chances of being Rīga-born for centuries are much higher.

Have you searched for your ancestors in Rīga? Do you have any other tips to share for Rīga searches? Add them below!

Until now! This news article, which I first saw in [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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 supplementary documentation as well, but with the exception of the incoming/outgoing registers, these can be highly individualized to each estate or parish.

It is important to note that revision lists are based on estate, not parish. There can be numerous estates within a parish. If you know what parish your ancestors lived in, but are not sure of the estate, consult their birth record in the religious records – the first line of the record should list the estate name and farm name. If you don’t have a birth record yet, consult this map to find the estates in your ancestral parish and start going through them to find your family.

The latest revision list is for 1858. The format of the records are as follows…

Left-side page:

1. 9th revision list family number (that is, the previous list)
2. 10th revision list family number (current list)
3. Names of males in the household (often including father’s name as well – be careful you don’t mix up this and the surname), the name of the farm is also indicated in this column, also numbered (but usually with a Roman numeral so as to not confuse this with the family number)
4. Age at previous revision list, or, if not dwelling at this address, previous place of residence (and sometimes year of arrival to this address)
5. Changed circumstances since the last revision list – such as moving to a new address since the last list was written, death, etc.
6. Current age

Right-side page:

1. 9th revision list family number
2. 10th revision list family number
3. Names of females in the household, often prefixed by relationship to male in the household (wife-Frau or daughter-Tochter), or if single woman, as an unmarried woman (Magd) or a widow (Wittwe).
4. Changed circumstances (this can sometimes be used sparingly for women)
5. Current age

It is important to note that in the revision lists, an individual (especially a male) could appear twice if they had moved during the time between lists. They will appear in their current home, with a notation that they moved from location X, and they will appear in location X with the notation that they have moved to the new address. People moved about frequently, especially within an estate.

The formats for the 1834 and 1850 revision lists are identical to the 1858 one, with the exception of family numbers – the family numbers (should) stay consistent between the different lists, and only changed with the 10th revision, so there is only one family number column per page.

For 1826, the format changes a tiny bit – the farm name and number now has its own column, and it is the first column on each page – also note that farms are now numbered with regular numbers, while family numbers have become Roman numerals – the family name is also now listed in the same box as family number. Any other data in the name column can pertain to things such as status (Knecht – farmhand/servant, Wirts – landowner/manager – remember the purchasing of farms from barons and other large landowners only started in earnest in the latter half of the nineteenth century, so “Wirts” may not yet indicate ownership but rather the head of the farm household), or might include items that should be in the next box over (previous place of residence, etc.).

Prior to the 1826 revision list, things can get difficult, for 1826 is the first revision list with surnames for peasants. The 1816 list does not have surnames, so one must rely on relationship markers (wife, daughter, etc.) to determine family relationships. Men and women are no longer listed on separate pages, but rather one after another on the same page. Beware of assuming that just because your ancestors lived on a farm in 1826, and there is a family with the same given names on the farm in 1816, that they are the same family. I almost fell into that trap on one estate until I noticed the notation that they had moved from another estate in the early 1820s. There was not a large variation in given names, so there could be many families with the same names, with the same ages (I’m still angry at one of my ancestors for naming his daughter the same name as his brother’s daughter when these two girls were born a month apart on the same farm).

There are earlier lists for 1811 and 1795, which have even less information than the 1816 list – usually just ages (current and previous list age, with separate columns for men’s ages and women’s ages), and the 1811 list does not usually include women.

Hopefully this guide will help you work your way through the main portion of the revision lists. More to come soon on incoming and outgoing registers – peasants were much more mobile than we may think, and these registers are key to tracing their movements.

Have you found your family in the revision lists? Share your story below!

Revision lists are a great resource that take the place of censuses [...]]]> 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 for the early and mid-19th century in Latvian research. They show family groups, ages, farm names and often previous residences. I will be providing a guide on how to use this resource soon.

Here’s hoping the lists for southern Livland (modern-day Vidzeme) make an appearance soon as well!