Archive saga

Archive Adventure...
So begins the Latvian Archives adventure...
Nov 30, 2010
I found my way down to Latvian Archives on Slokas Iela in Riga. Kind of a dilapidated building... One would never guess from the signage etc, what was inside. Typical old country bureaucracy, one reports to the reception desk, and is ushered into a little room where one fills out an application to use the reading room. Not a lot in the applications.. Name, purpose of research etc... The secretary then take the application and me to another room and she hands it to an archivist.. The first archivist does not speak English, so I strike out.. She hands the application to the second archivist who tries to speak to me in German... Strike two... She hands the application to the third archivist who does speak moderate English.

She sits down with me and asks what I am looking for. I explain that I am on a quest for finding records of my ancestors. She asks what I have for information, I tell her not much. I showed her a copy of the marriage certificate to Marie Fortney, where it is stated that he was from Riga, Russia. She looks at it, hims and haws for a few minutes and suggests raduraksti. She also suggests that his name would have been Jahnis or Jannis, not Jahn or John. I explain to here that we have been there and show her the negative results so far. She says to wait, and goes to her computer and looks the name up. She comes back with information that there was a passport issued to a Jahnis Rosenthal that was born in 1884, and another for a Jahnis Rosenthal in 1881. I ask if I can look at them, and she explains that she will order them in and they will be here tomorrow (Dec 1). We talk a bit more and she suggests that I go over to the Riga History and Navigation Museum as they may have some records over there. She gives me the name of Miklaus Iaiger to contact. I ask her if she has a map of Latvia, showing the parishes. She says she does not have one, and does not know if there is one. I stumble on that one. She said she would order up a list of sailors that went to school for navigation in Riga in that time frame and bids me farewell.

That afternoon, I look up the address of the museum and find it at 3 Mars Pils Iela.. I wander over there and find nothing. No idea what that is all about. Just a locked door, and nothing to indicate a museum. That night I look it up on the internet again, and find it is located on Pilasta Iela, quite close to my hotel.

Next morning, I am there when the museum opens at 11:00. I ask for Miklaus, and they phone him up. A few minutes later, he comes down to the lobby and he does speak some English. A good natured fellow in his late 50's. He takes me up to his office and we chat for a while about what I am looking for. He says he has records of Captains and Officers, but as we chat, he doubts very much that Jahn would have been an officer. He explains that any Russian ships (Latvian ships) would have had to file crew registers when they were in port. Those registers, he said, were over at the Archives. He wrote down “187 fonds” (whatever that means) on a piece of paper and told me to take that to the Archives. He then toured me around the museum exhibitions of scale models of sailing ships, steam ships and various related artifacts. A full trip to the museum is recommended.

On the wall of the lobby of the museum is the first panoramic drawing of Riga on record. Surprisingly, the drawing depicts over 20 ships in port. This was a busy little place, way back then....Now back to the Archives.

Ok, so I made a mistake.. The arcives do not open until 1:00 PM.. So what if I am an hour early...Finally they open. The archivist and I talk for a bit.. She sits me down at a table and computer and brings out three passports. Each passport is the original, complete with initial application papers all stored neatly in envelopes. I open each of them. The passport holders were all born in the right years, but unfortunately they were all issued after the Republic of Latvia was formed in 1919. So the passports were a strike out...

Next she brings me a catalogue of data files that they have. They are all written in Latvian, so it is difficult to understand what is in them. I figure out how to read the years that the data covers, and order them up. From what I gather, they are the crew lists for the time frame 1895-1907. Apparently Russian ships (Latvian) from that time frame were the only ships that had to file crew lists. Ships flying a different flag were not required to file a crew list. Passenger lists are not available. I am informed that it is going to take at least a week to dig those files out of the archives.. Hmmm sounds like my trip to St Petersberg and then back to the archives. She also hands me a list of other people who have done searches and been successful at finding relatives. Mostly it is people who were trying to establish ownership of land which was confiscated by the Russians in 1941, so they details of their ancestry does not go to previous to 1919. Strike two! We sit and talk a bit about a map of parishes in Latvia.. She insists there is no such thing. All church records are stored at the archives and she seems to know her stuff. I am insistant that there must be a map, so she brings out the catalogue of maps for me to go through.. Yikes! Ten big books, each with 200 pages, and each page with 50 different maps listed.. I start to go through them, even though the lists are in Latvian.... Every kind of map imaginable from the first time they started making maps in the 1300's. After an hour or so of walking through the lists, it dawns on me that I would probably not recognize the title of a parish (draudze) map even if I saw it.. Strike three!.... I finally give up and talk to her again.. This time she pulls out a little map book from under her desk. It is a contemporary map showing all the highways etc in Latvia today. The one big benefit is that it also shows churches. So I sit down with my magnifying glass and work through the map, trying to identify churches, the town that they are in and then go to the computer and try to establish the parish name.. I guess there was some benefit to that, as I found a couple of parishes that were on or close to the coast, that we had not scanned fully...... I left with the confirmation that the archives would be there Dec 13....