Frequently asked questions
Before we start
Where do I begin if I know almost nothing?
With a name, an approximate year of birth, and a place in Latvia. That is enough to give me a first thread to pull.
If no birth date is known, perhaps you know where the family was living in 1941 — that would let me identify them in the census returns for that year.
Before you write to me, ask the oldest members of your family and go through whatever papers are at home. If nothing certain survives about the interwar years, you can request a birth, marriage or death certificate yourself from any Latvian civil registry office (Dzimtsarakstu nodaļa).
What if the name we use isn't the name in the records?
That is normal, and it is not an obstacle.
Latvian parish registers were kept in German until the 1890s and in Russian after that, so the same man may appear as Jānis, Johann and Иванъ in three consecutive records.
Latvians in Vidzeme received surnames only in 1826 and in Kurzeme in 1834, and the spelling of those surnames drifted for decades afterwards. Families who emigrated then changed the name again — often at the port, sometimes a generation later.
Send me the spelling you have. Reading through the variants is part of the work.
My family came "from Riga" — is that actually where they were from?
Very often, no. In my experience this is one of the most reliable ways a family history goes astray.
People who emigrated in the nineteenth or early twentieth century routinely gave the nearest large city as their place of birth, when in fact they had been born in a small rural parish some distance away. There was good reason for it. An emigration official, a ship's clerk or a naturalisation court in New York or Melbourne had no way of recognising the name of a Latvian country parish, still less of spelling it. "Riga" — or Libau, Mitau, Dünaburg — was a name that meant something on the other side of the world, and it was close enough to be true.
So a birthplace written on a ship's manifest, a naturalisation paper or a passenger list is a lead, not a fact. The parish register that actually contains the birth is often somewhere else entirely, and finding it means working outwards from the stated city through the surrounding parishes. That is ordinary work and it is often successful — but it is worth knowing at the outset that the city in your family's papers may be wrong.
What does the free assessment cover?
Before any research begins and before you pay anything, I check two things: whether what you know is enough to identify a person in the records, and whether the sources for that place have survived. If the information is too thin, I may ask you to request a certificate from the civil registry archive first, or to go back and check details.
The assessment is not research, and it will not tell you how large the eventual project will be — that becomes clear only as the work goes on. What it tells you is whether I have a thread to start from.
What do you not research?
I work with the Lutheran and Orthodox parish registers and the soul revision lists of Vidzeme, Kurzeme and Zemgale. I do not take on Latgale families or Jewish ancestry — that is a different history, in different languages, recorded in different registers and held in different archive collections. A specialist in those records will serve you far better than I would.
I can only research sources held in Latvian archives. Research in other countries has to be commissioned from specialists there, who have access to the local archives and know their own country's history and record-keeping.
What can and cannot be found
How far back can you go?
In the Lutheran parishes of Vidzeme it is sometimes possible to reach the middle or second half of the eighteenth century — it depends on when the surviving registers of that particular parish begin, and how far back the soul revision lists for that particular estate go. In most Latvian-speaking congregations, however, systematic registers begin only in 1834.
The other natural limit is surnames. Peasant families in Vidzeme were first recorded with surnames in 1826, in Kurzeme in the revision of 1834, and on some estates only in 1850. Where the soul revision lists for the estate have survived well, the line can still be followed back; where they have not, identifying a particular family with any confidence is often impossible.
What is available online, and what only in the archive?
The National Archives website Raduraksti holds digitised parish registers, soul revision lists, the 1897 census returns, some Riga house books, and the interwar Riga Prefecture passport collection, which is incomplete. For most parishes the registers are available up to 1914, and for a few beyond that.
Much of what matters for the interwar period can be consulted only on site at the State Historical Archives in Riga: the 1935 and 1941 census returns, passport books, parish population lists, and the house books of Riga and other towns.
Civil registration records of roughly the past hundred years are held by the civil registry offices (latv. Dzimtsarakstu nodaļa) and are not open to researchers. For those years, a relative has to request a certificate directly from the registry office.
Can you find out when my ancestor died and where they are buried?
If your ancestor died before 1919, the burial date — and occasionally the place — is usually recorded in the parish death register. The cemetery is rarely named.
There is no complete database of Latvian burials. Two free sites are worth searching, cemety.lv and nekropole.info, but they cover only part of the burials and mostly from the twentieth century.
My family left Latvia during the war. Can you find out where they went?
Not from Latvian archives — the records here end when the family left, and that is the honest limit of what I can do.
Their onward trail is held elsewhere. Displaced persons in the German camps were registered by UNRRA and the International Tracing Service, and those records are now held by the Arolsen Archives, which has a free online search. From there the trail continues in the immigration and naturalisation records of whichever country the family reached.
What I can often do is establish who the family was and where they came from before they left.
Can it happen that nothing is found?
Yes. There are parishes with years of registers missing, and there are records so sparse that a person cannot be identified with any confidence. That is exactly why I check what has survived before you pay for anything.
If the research reaches a dead end, you will receive an account of what exists and what does not, what was searched, and whether there is a way round the obstacle worth trying.
I need documents for Latvian citizenship by descent. Can you help?
Partly, and it is worth being clear about which part.
A person who was a citizen of Latvia on 17 June 1940, and their descendants, may register as Latvian citizens through the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (PMLP). PMLP decides these applications; a researcher's report is not itself a legal document. What the application needs is proof of the ancestor's citizenship in 1940 and an unbroken chain of birth and marriage certificates down to you, legalised and translated into Latvian — though public documents issued in the EU, EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland do not need legalisation.
What I can do. I can find the evidence in the interwar records held in Latvia — the 1935 and 1941 census returns, passports, house books that show your ancestor was living in Latvia as a citizen. Once the document is located, I can obtain the official certificate (arhīva izziņa) or the certified document copies from the National Archives of Latvia for you. Those are the papers PMLP will accept as proof of the Latvian end of the chain.
Allow extra time for this. The National Archives prepares a certificate within a month of the request; it can be issued faster, but the fee rises steeply — doubled for fifteen working days, quadrupled for five.
What I cannot do. I do not obtain documents or certificates from archives outside Latvia. The birth, marriage and name-change certificates that link you to that ancestor — issued in the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden or wherever your family settled — you will need to obtain yourself, along with any legalisation and the translation into Latvian. Public documents issued in the EU, the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland do not need to be legalised.
How the work is done
Why is the work divided into steps rather than one commission for the whole family?
Because the next step only becomes visible as the work goes on. Each document found points to where to look next.
A standard step covers one family — the parents, their children and the grandparents. An extended step covers two families, or several questions at once. Every step ends with a written report and with recommendations for what to research next. You then decide whether to continue, and in which direction.
What does it cost, and when do I pay?
A research step is EUR 395. An extended step is EUR 745. SIA Lūse Research is not registered for VAT, so these are the final amounts.
Reports written in English include considerably more historical background than those written for Latvian clients, who already know the context. That is why the English prices differ.
Payment is made in full before the research begins. Once we have agreed what the step will cover, I send you the invoice and a payment link, and you pay by credit card or PayPal on this website — there is no international bank transfer to arrange. Amounts are charged in euro, so if you pay in another currency your own bank sets the conversion rate.
How long does it take?
Two weeks to a month, usually. Files ordered in the reading room take three working days to arrive, which is why even a straightforward step runs to several weeks.
What will I receive?
A research report as a PDF, together with digital copies of every document found.
In the report, each record is translated in full — into English — and each one carries a reference to the archive file, frame or page it came from. That means any statement I make can be checked, by you or by another researcher.
May I publish the report, or pass it on to relatives?
Yes. You are free to use the report and share it within your family, and to publish it, keeping the attribution to its author.
If you intend to reproduce images of archive documents in a book or another publication, tell me at the outset. Copies obtained from the archives may only be used for the purpose declared when they were ordered, so it is much simpler if publication is part of that purpose from the beginning than to arrange it afterwards. Published images must also cite the National Archives of Latvia and the document.
Can you help me get in touch with living relatives in Latvia?
I do not normally search for information about living people, and I can help only in a few exceptional cases.
If the research establishes a person's date of birth, you can use the service "Forwarding a letter to a person being sought", run by the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (PMLP). You write the letter; PMLP forwards it to that person's registered address or official e-address. Neither you nor I are given the address, and the recipient decides whether to reply. The PMLP service is chargeable.