About PLBE

PLBE is a website about Lithuanian life outside Lithuania. We write about the language as it is spoken at kitchen tables in Chicago and Dublin, the Saturday schools that teach it, the holidays and food that families carry from one generation to the next, the history of the people who left and why, the records they left behind, and the practical business of citizenship, documents and trips back. The readers we have in mind are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of emigrants, people who moved in the last twenty years, and the husbands, wives and friends who married into Lithuanian families and want to understand what is going on at Christmas Eve.

Who writes here

Five writers share the work, each from a different city and each with a corner they know well: language and bilingual families, archives and the diaspora press, holidays and food, paperwork and moving between countries, and community life. Their short biographies are on the storytellers page. They write under their own names, from their own experience as people with Lithuanian roots, and they say so when something is a personal observation rather than a checked fact.

How articles are checked

Dates, laws, institutions and numbers are checked against official sources such as the Lithuanian Migration Department, the register of legal acts, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the national archives and libraries, and statistics offices, with a second source where the first is thin. Where a rule or a fee changes often, we say so and point to the office that sets it instead of printing a figure that could be out of date. Citizenship, inheritance and document pieces are general information, never legal advice. If you spot something wrong, please write to us and we will correct it.

About the name and the address

This site sits on plbe.org. For many years that address was the website of the World Lithuanian Community (Pasaulio Lietuvių Bendruomenė), the umbrella body of Lithuanian communities abroad, which moved its website to a new address around 2020. PLBE is a separate publication that took over the expired domain and writes on the same subjects. We are not the World Lithuanian Community, any national Lithuanian community or any government body, we do not speak for them, and nothing here should be read as their position. A few of our reference pages explain how the community is organised, in the third person, because readers still arrive looking for that. For the organisation itself, search for the World Lithuanian Community by name.

Partner boxes

Some articles and the learning shelf carry clearly marked partner boxes, for example for online Lithuanian tutors, books on Lithuanian history or places to stay in Lithuania. If you sign up or buy through one, PLBE may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Partners do not see articles before they are published, do not choose topics and cannot pay to be mentioned. The boxes are added by the site, never by the writers inside the text.

Getting in touch

Letters are welcome at mailbag@plbe.org or through the contact page: corrections, questions about an article, and stories from your own family that might help another reader.