In the third and final part, Jānis Sirms has finally saved enough money and is able to set out on his journey to America. What prompted...

Part 2: Continued from Jānis Sirms's memoirs about his journey from Courland to America in 1888. Why didn’t he board the ship in Hamburg?...

How did Latvians travel to America in the 1880s? Why did they emigrate? What challenges did they face? How long was the journey? Read...

Currently, my focus is on the story of an emigrant. A person who left Latvia around 1909. Why did people emigrate at that time? And what...

Summer is a great time for traveling and visiting relatives. Instead of sitting at the computer or in the reading room of an archive,...

Last time, I wrote about Latin abbreviations, but this time I want to look at some Latvian abbreviations in church books. It seems that...

Recently, a colleague and I were examining a death record that was partially in Latvian and partially in Latin. Here is what we found and...

Did anyone in your family work in public service? If they retired during the interwar period, you have the chance to find their pension...

Why were farm names changed during the interwar period? What was the purpose of these changes, and how did it happen? This week has been...

This week, I researched a family whose member changed their surname in 1940. Why did people change their surnames, and what laws...

Previously, I wrote about the rules of divorce, but there were just as many regulations governing marriage. Who was allowed to marry, and...

Do you think that in the past everyone lived "happily ever after" and never got divorced? Recently, I saw a 1906 marriage record with a...

Have you come across the terms "half-manor" or "cattle manor"? What are they, how do they differ, and why should a family researcher know...

If you've looked through the church records on the Raduraksti website, you may have noticed the parishioner registers. What can be found...

Is a church congregation the same as a parish? Are a manor and a parish one and the same? How should one understand the administrative...

Finding living relatives is not the task of a genealogist, but I have agreed to help in this matter a few times. What are the options for...

What could be simpler than finding people in address books? But which address books and from which periods are available to us? And which...

In this blog, I have looked at both baptism and marriage records. Now, it's time to look at death registers in German. What is indicated...

For Kurzeme and Vidzeme family researchers, German language skills are a must. In this post, I will help decipher what is written in the...

Many of us have ancestors from the border regions – and our origins may be sought on the Estonian, Belarusian, or Lithuanian side....