My Year as a Genealogist in 2025

Every year in genealogy brings its own challenges and discoveries, but 2025 was special. It made me reevaluate my work, taught me to adapt to new circumstances, and at the same time reminded me why I do this work at all – because it interests and engages me. I love that the result of my work is personally meaningful to someone.

And what actually happened this year? If I had to say it in one word – I think I can safely say it was dramatic! The biggest events were concentrated in autumn – in October, FamilySearch closed access to Latvian documents from the interwar period. This was expected, as FamilySearch must also comply with the restrictions provided for in Latvian legislation for 110 years, but it was still a blow to all genealogists. I'll admit that I even briefly considered changing professions. This year, for the first time, I offered courses in English for researchers abroad. I had already announced a new course in October when access to the documents was closed. Shock! What would we research if the documents weren't available?

Here I can thank a motivated course participant who persuaded me to still hold the courses, and I came up with a different format to realize this plan after all. The course took place, and although the group was small, it was very interested and experienced. I am grateful to my course participants from America, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia for their support and also for their active participation, suggestions, and questions! Document accessibility restrictions do make any research from abroad practically impossible without a local helper who can obtain document copies from the archive. I would very much like to hope that we will solve this problem at some point.

However, there was also good news – in November, the new Gemini artificial intelligence model came out, which finally solved the handwriting reading problem. Until then, no model had really been up to the task. It can be said with complete certainty that artificial intelligence is now here to stay in the genealogy field as well. It is expected that more and more large platforms like Ancestry and FamilySearch will use AI for document indexing. Currently, it seems that Ancestry is using it more successfully, at least with regard to Latvian documents.

This was also a year of books. I spent several months working on the Sikšņi family book, and I am also very grateful for this experience, both to the client and to the artist Daiga Dunse with whom we collaborated. The transformation of research into a book is perhaps the goal of a large part of researchers. Well, maybe it won't always be a book – for some it will be a folder of materials, for others perhaps just a family tree, but some tangible result that can be passed on to others is needed. I enjoyed writing and thinking about what the lives and personalities of the people being described were like, but I must admit – it was also very time-consuming and easiest to do when you still don't know how much work it will actually require😊 

A book was also published by Mr. Paul from Switzerland, with whom I have been collaborating for several years, researching his Latvian roots. Likewise, books are being written or have been written by two family history enthusiasts I know, and I am very happy about that too!

My great-grandmother Ella Buša née Zvejniece, meanwhile, appeared in a study published by the Latvian National Archives about the activities of the Latvian Women's Organizations Council. Ella's active social work was little known in our own family, because during the Soviet era, no one wanted to talk too much about any social activities during the time of so-called "bourgeois" Latvia. So it happened that contributions to my own family's stories were made by archive researchers – thank you for that!

Among the books, there was also a performance. In September, at White Nights events, Geoff Allnut from Great Britain performed with a poetry performance about the Latvian Arvīds Pūrs. Arvīds was a former legionnaire who lived in Geoff's parents' house after the war. One day we had driven together to Dāviņi parish, where we searched for the former homestead in an empty grain field. A tractor started working in the adjacent field and, as it turned out, the tractor driver still remembered well the old, long wooden house that was demolished relatively recently. Researchers won't be surprised that the right people come at the right time!

Of course, there were also larger and smaller genealogy research projects, and it seems that increasingly I receive the most complex assignments - when people have already compiled the information available online themselves, but that's not enough. Sometimes it's possible to find what's needed in archival documents, but there have also been cases when a solution cannot be found. Particularly complex are those cases when the clients' ancestors left Latvia in the late 19th or early 20th century. There are always many myths and unknowns there.

And yet – returning to that good November news about Gemini. What to expect from next year? American genealogists say that AI will enter every family history researcher's life. If initially only a few people were interested in the new technologies, then gradually, as AI tools become simpler and more capable, a broader part of society will also start using them. With us here in Latvia, it may happen a little more slowly, but it will happen. And I find that exciting, because it will open new paths, and allow some things to be done faster. Of course, along the way there will be much disappointment, struggle, and effort trying to understand what can and cannot be done with AI, but it's still interesting

I hope for an interesting year and wish all researchers not to lose their determination and curiosity! And thank you to everyone who was with me this year!

Happy New Year!