All posts in Visiting Lithuania

A roots trip is more than a records search, and some of the most useful places for a family historian are not archives. Museums and institutes hold the stories that explain why a family left, was deported or stayed, and a few historic sites give…

Lithuania is small enough that moving between its main cities is easy, and the trouble starts where the records lead: a parish church at the end of a country road, a cemetery with no bus stop. Getting around Lithuania on a family history trip therefore…

Entry rules look simple until they change underneath you. Lithuania is part of the Schengen area, which means its short-stay rules are shared with most of the European Union, and two new EU systems have been in the news for travelers: a biometric border register…

Standing in the village where your family lived is a different kind of research. There may be no house, no road sign with the old name and, in some places, almost no neighbors. What remains is usually a church, a cemetery, a landscape and a…

For many family historians, the Lithuanian archives in Vilnius are the point of the whole trip. They hold the church books, the revision lists and the civil records that a village visit can only point toward. They are also working government offices with set hours,…