In an older blog post , I already wrote about the transition from German to Russian in church books. In this post, I will explain how to...

On June 3, 1891, an order was issued in the Russian Empire that from now on Lutheran church books should also be kept in Russian. The...

I previously wrote about the 1935 and 1941 censuses, but there is an older census as well. It took place in 1897 in the Russian Empire, and since Latvia was part of the empire at that time, it also took place in Latvia. Unfortunately, only part of this census has been preserved in the Latvian State Historical Archives. Primarily, pages for Latgale Region, the Riga and Valmiera districts, and the cities of Courland (Latv. Kurzeme) are available. I haven't heard if more documen

If your ancestors were from Latgale Region, they were probably Roman Catholic. Earlier Catholic church books were written in Polish, but...

In the 1840s, many Latvians in Vidzeme Region converted to Orthodox Christianity. They received new Orthodox names. How to identify your converted ancestor? What were the new orthodox names of the converted Lutherans? Limbaži Orthodox Church. Photo by Ints Lūsis When I first learned that my great-grandfather’s name was Aleksandrs, and his sisters were called Olga and Tatjana, I was truly surprised. Were they Russian? But the truth is that they were descendants of those many L