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This is part of my series of interesting newspaper articles 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. This article is a harrowing account of the lives of Latvian Baptists [...] Merry Christmas, or, as you would say in Latvian, Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus! Hope you and yours have a good holiday! And what would be a Latvian Christmas without pīrāgi (bacon buns)? Here is my dad, making pīrāgi yesterday… And here is (some of) the finished product! I helped. We made both the traditional bacon-filled ones, as well as mushroom-filled ones, [...] What do you do if you have little to go on when it comes to researching your Latvian ancestors? What if they emigrated in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and the only information that passenger lists or naturalization records provide is that they came from “Latvia” or “Russia”? What do you do then? First, do [...] So what does the third Latvian letter of the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge get us? Ērģeles! I’ll admit, this one is a bit of a stretch. But there aren’t many Latvian words that start with Ē (a long E sound – not like the “ee” in “feet”, but rather an elongation of the “e” [...] Now up on the Family History through the Alphabet challenge… B is for Baptists and Brazil Now, you may be wondering what Baptists have to do with Brazil, and what either have to do with Latvia. Quite a lot actually! Towards the end of the 19th century, while there were still lots of people emigrating from Europe to [...] I never thought that this was something I’d end up doing on this blog – reviewing a Who Do You Think You Are? episode. But it has happened – last weekend’s episode took place partially in Latvia! The celebrity in question was Rashida Jones, an American actress, daughter of music mogul Quincy Jones and actress Peggy [...] 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 [...] In my last post, a reader requested that I talk about records after 1905. So here we go! There are lots of different types of records available for the post-1905 period – however, as of right now, none of them are available online. The main online genealogical resource for Latvian records – religious records on Raduraksti [...] So you have established that your ancestors lived on Latvian territory. But what were their ethnic origins? Latvia has been a multi-ethnic territory for centuries, so the distinctions between ethnic groups might not always be so clear in the old records. There are, however, numerous ways in which to establish someone’s ethnic identity. They are not [...] |
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