All posts in Lithuanian Lands & Journeys

A second wave of Lithuanian emigration looks nothing like the first. It was not a slow movement of villagers toward ports, but a flight in the last year of the war, followed by years in camps and a scattering across several continents. Many American, Canadian…

For many descendants, the story of Lithuanian emigration to America begins at the end of a documented trail: a naturalization paper, a ship manifest, a parish marriage in a coal town. The difficulty is the other half. The emigrant left a village in the Russian…

Family stories about the 1860s tend to arrive in fragments: a great-great-grandfather “sent to Siberia,” a prayer book hidden under a floor, a surname spelled strangely after that decade. Two events lie behind them, the 1863 uprising against Russian rule and the ban on printing…

Samogitia is the Lithuanian region most families can name and fewest can map. Genealogists run into a second puzzle on top of it: the diocese whose name is on the old church books is not the diocese that covers the same parishes today. A baptism…

Most of this site’s guides lead to Vilnius, where the Lithuanian State Historical Archives hold the Catholic and Russian-era books. Families from Lithuania Minor are the exception. Their records were written in German, kept by Lutheran parishes in Prussia, and now sit mostly outside Lithuania….