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After six months of hard work and fiddling around with the new software, I’m proud to present the all-new version of the Latvian Surname Project! What’s new… … you can browse surnames by parish! 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 [...] Once again we have some Latvian surnames for a more obscure Latvian letter of the alphabet for the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge. “Ū” is a long U sound. ŪDENS means “water”. In old orthography, it would have been written as Uhden or Uhdens. In Cyrillic, it would be Уденс. I have seen this name [...] I know, I know, it has been a long time since I updated on the Family History through the Alphabet challenge. I was already behind when I joined, now I’m even further behind! But no matter. I will catch up by the end of it! So, without further ado, Here we have O is for Orthography! When [...] This blog is three years old today! As I’ve said in previous blog anniversaries, when I first started this blog, I never imagined that I would get the response that I have. I’ve had people contact me from all over the world to share their stories, ask questions and solve the riddles of their family trees. It [...] Time to celebrate the Latvian medalists of the 2012 Olympics! This can fit in nicely with Surname Saturday – let’s take a look at their names, shall we? The first Latvian medalists of 2012 were bronze medalists Mārtiņš Pļaviņš and Jānis Smēdiņš in mens’ beach volleyball! PĻAVIŅŠ is the diminutive form of “pļava”, which means “meadow”. This [...] We’ve stumbled onto a particularly difficult letter for the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge… Ļ. “Ļ” is an odd letter – sort of like the “ll” in “million”, with more of a “y” added to it. The only word that I could come up with for this letter is a surname, “Ļaudis”. It means “people” [...] So I have finally ran out of regular genealogy-related words for the more unusual letters of the Latvian alphabet for the Family History Through the Alphabet challenge, so we’re off to surnames… so today for Ķ we have Ķimene and Ķiploks! Both of these surnames are food-related. This is not unusual for Latvian surnames, as you [...] I’m starting a new Surname Saturday feature – each week, I will profile the surnames of a different manorial estate from the 1826 revision list. Why 1826? That is the year that surnames first appeared in the revision lists – for the Livland guberniya, at any rate, in some cases in the Kurland guberniya they [...] Part 2 – Genealogical Sources After reading Part 1 of this primer, and the historical context of Latvian emigration, now it is time to move to genealogical sources – the resources that you can use to trace your Latvian ancestry. What You Need to Know About Latvian Genealogy Most records are in Russian or German prior to the [...] |
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