Just a week ago, during a lecture for family history researchers in Valmiermuiža, I said that I was impatiently waiting for the moment when artificial intelligence would finally be able to read handwritten texts. Until now, my experiments with different AI models for reading Latvian genealogical documents had been rather unsuccessful. But then Gemini 3 Pro arrived! The model was released exactly on November 18 , and it immediately caused a wave of excitement. Of course, new d

I would like to introduce another family history book that I had the pleasure of contributing to. Its structure, in my opinion, can serve as both inspiration and a practical example for researchers who wish to create their own family books. Peter Paul, who lives in Basel, is a descendant of Ludvigs Pauls , a Latvian baptized in the Zaļenieki parish, Latvia. In 1889, Ludvigs’s father purchased the very same “ Daukšas ” homestead where the renowned Latvian poet Aspazija was bor

To find someone, you first need to know where to look. The same goes for family history. Before you can begin your research, you have to know which parish  your ancestors lived in. Sometimes it’s enough to know which congregation  they belonged to — but that’s where things get tricky. A parish ( pagasts ) and a congregation ( draudze ) are not the same thing. Let me share a confusing little case I ran into involving both. A Confusing Certificate This one research started with

Anyone actively researching Latvian family history has probably noticed that interwar-period documents are no longer available online (on...