Latvian Genealogy Blog

What Was a Parish Board? Was one of your ancestors a parish elder? What was a parish board, and what did the parish elder do? This blog post will explore these questions. The granary of Sēļu Manor. The 1866 Parish Self-Government Law The history of parishes in Latvia is much older, but here we will focus on a relatively short period from 1866 to 1918. In the 17th–18th centuries, self-governance was primarily organized by manors. While parish boards (Latv. pagasta valde) exis

Many state officials have personal files stored in archives, including teachers. What kind of information can be found in teacher files?...

Reading and interpreting the records of Riga's church books can be more complicated than those of rural congregations. This is due to the...

Now and then, in church books, you come across words that you don't find in modern dictionaries. How to understand their meaning? Where...