You do not need a month to start. A weekend is enough to gather what your family already holds, settle on the place names you will search and run a first round of searches. Here is a plan.
Saturday morning: collect what the family already has
- Passports, naturalization papers, ship tickets and manifests, which often name a town.
- Baptism, marriage and funeral papers from the parish where your family settled, since they sometimes record the place of origin.
- Letters, postcards and photographs with place names or addresses on the back.
- A list of names exactly as relatives spell them, with the older generation’s spelling, not the modern one.
Write down who gave you each fact. When two relatives disagree, record both versions.
Saturday afternoon: pin down the place names
A Lithuanian town may appear under several names. Vilnius also appears as Wilno or Vilna, Kaunas as Kovno and Klaipėda as Memel, depending on the language and the period. Villages work the same way, so list every form you find. Then find the parish, because church books are kept by parish and a small village often had no church of its own.
Illustrative composite (not a real family): A reader’s grandmother’s naturalization papers name her birthplace in a Russian-style spelling, while a cousin’s letter uses a Lithuanian spelling. Putting both on one note lets her search the databases under each form and find the parish.
Sunday: run your first searches
- Search ePaveldas, Lithuania’s largest genealogical database of church book images, which has no index and keeps growing.
- Search FamilySearch for church records and revision lists, and check whether your parish is covered.
- Note which language the books are in for the years you need. They run from Latin to Polish to Russian over the centuries. See the records map.
- Write down what you could not find, so that you know which archive to contact.
What to do next week
- Read the full walkthrough in our complete Lithuanian genealogy guide.
- If you took a DNA test, open the DNA hub.
- If you are thinking about citizenship, begin with the citizenship overview.
The details above draw on the Office of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania and the FamilySearch wiki on Lithuanian church records.
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