The waves of Lithuanian emigration, from the 1860s to the 2000s

Ask a room of Lithuanian Canadians when their family left, and the answers will cluster. Some will say "before the First World War, to the mines". Some will say "1944, on a cart heading west". Some arrived at Pearson airport with a student visa in 1997. They share a language, more or less, but they come from different Lithuanias, and each group brought its own habits, songs and grudges.

Lithuanian emigration did not happen once. It came in waves, each pushed by something different. Knowing which wave your family belonged to tells you a great deal: where to look for records, why your grandmother's parish had the name it had, why the "old" and "new" Lithuanians at the community hall sometimes talk past each other.

Before the waves: an empire's border province

After the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, most of Lithuania became part of the Russian Empire. Serfdom there was abolished in 1861, which freed peasants to move but left many of them with little land. After the uprising of 1863, the imperial authorities banned printing Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet, a ban that lasted from 1864 to 1904. Books were smuggled in from East Prussia by the famous knygnešiai (book carriers).

Add a severe famine in 1867 and 1868, long military service in the tsar's army, and a rural population growing faster than its farms, and the conditions for the first great departure were in place.

The first wave: mines, mills and stockyards (1860s to 1914)

The first large movement began in the late 1860s and grew through the 1880s and 1890s. Most emigrants were young, rural and poor. Many crossed the border illegally into Prussia and sailed from Hamburg or Bremen.

The main destination was the United States. Lithuanians settled in the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, especially Schuylkill County, and in Chicago, where the Bridgeport neighbourhood grew into a Lithuanian district around the stockyards and factories. Others went to the industrial towns of New England, Ohio and New Jersey. A smaller stream reached Britain: the coalfields of Lanarkshire in Scotland drew Lithuanian miners from the 1880s, and a community formed in the East End of London.

Because there was no Lithuanian state, American officials usually recorded these people as Russian, Polish or occasionally German. That makes the numbers uncertain, and it makes family research harder (more on that in a later piece). Estimates of Lithuanian immigrants living in the United States by the early twentieth century run to the hundreds of thousands.

This first wave built the earliest Lithuanian parishes, mutual aid societies, choirs and newspapers abroad. Much of the Lithuanian-language publishing banned at home was printed in America and sent back.

The First World War closed the door. Fighting moved across Lithuania, and very large numbers of people fled or were evacuated into the Russian interior. Many returned after Lithuania declared independence on 16 February 1918.

The second wave: South America and the quota years (1920s to 1930s)

Independent Lithuania between the wars was a poor agricultural country, and people kept leaving. What changed was where they could go. The United States restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe with quota laws in 1921 and 1924, and the Lithuanian quota was tiny.

Emigrants turned south. Brazil received the largest group, many of them recruited to work on coffee plantations in São Paulo state in the second half of the 1920s; the city district of Vila Zelina later became the centre of Lithuanian life in São Paulo. Argentina and Uruguay received thousands more, mostly to Buenos Aires, the meat-packing towns near it, and Montevideo. Canada also took Lithuanian farm workers and labourers in this period.

The interwar emigrants left with Lithuanian passports, which matters today: for their descendants, an interwar passport or citizenship record is often the key document in a citizenship case. They also tended to be a little more literate and more nationally minded than the first wave, having grown up in a Lithuanian state with Lithuanian schools.

The third wave: refugees and displaced persons (1944 to early 1950s)

In June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. Mass deportations to Siberia began in June 1941. Nazi Germany occupied the country from 1941 to 1944. When the Red Army returned in the summer and autumn of 1944, tens of thousands of Lithuanians fled west rather than live under Soviet rule a second time. Many were teachers, priests, lawyers, engineers, writers, farmers with some land, and their families: the people most at risk from the returning regime.

After the war they ended up in displaced persons (DP) camps in western Germany and Austria. Lithuanian sources put the number of Lithuanian refugees in the German DP camps at about 60,000. Inside the camps they ran schools, printed newspapers, staged plays and formed parishes, all while waiting to find out which country would take them.

Resettlement came mostly between 1948 and 1951. The United States passed the Displaced Persons Act in 1948, which let roughly 30,000 Lithuanians in outside the quota system. Canada, Australia and Britain (through its European Volunteer Workers scheme) took thousands more, and smaller groups went to South America and New Zealand.

This wave changed the diaspora. The DPs were political refugees who expected, at first, to go home soon. They built Saturday schools, choirs, folk dance groups, scout troops, summer camps, publishing houses and a dense web of organisations. In 1949 they adopted the Lithuanian Charter, and the World Lithuanian Community was founded the same year as the umbrella for Lithuanians abroad. Much of the institutional life that families in North America and Australia know today, from the weekend schools to the folk dance festivals, comes from this generation.

The closed decades (1945 to 1990)

Under Soviet rule, leaving was almost impossible. Emigration in the ordinary sense largely stopped. A small number of people left through family reunification or marriage, and occasionally someone defected while travelling abroad.

Movement did not stop, though. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians were deported to Siberia and Central Asia in the 1940s and early 1950s, and many who survived came back after Stalin's death. Others moved within the Soviet Union for work or study. For the diaspora in the West, contact with relatives at home was limited to censored letters, parcels and, later, carefully supervised visits.

These decades explain one of the quiet tensions at many community halls. The DP generation and their children kept a pre-war Lithuania alive abroad, with its spelling, its songs and its memory of 1940. People who grew up in Soviet Lithuania carried a different set of experiences and, sometimes, a different vocabulary.

The fourth wave: independence, the EU and open borders (1990 to the present)

Lithuania declared the restoration of its independence on 11 March 1990. Borders opened, and emigration resumed almost at once. In the 1990s people went to the United States, Germany, Scandinavia and elsewhere, some legally and some not, as the economy went through a hard transition.

The great acceleration came after 1 May 2004, when Lithuania joined the European Union. Britain, Ireland and Sweden opened their labour markets to the new member states straight away. Lithuanians went to Dublin, Cork and the Irish towns, to London, Peterborough, Manchester and the agricultural east of England, and later in large numbers to Norway. The financial crisis that hit Lithuania hard around 2009 and 2010 brought another surge.

The numbers are large for a small country. Lithuania had about 3.7 million residents around 1990 and roughly 2.8 million by the end of the 2010s, and emigration was the main reason for the fall. In 2019, for the first time since 1990, more people moved to Lithuania than left it. Many of those arriving were returning Lithuanians, although the overall gain came mainly from newcomers of other nationalities.

This wave is different again. People travel back cheaply and often, keep their phones on Lithuanian networks of friends, watch Lithuanian television online and may move back and forth more than once. Many have founded new Saturday schools, choirs and basketball clubs in places that had never had a Lithuanian community.

The waves at a glance

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Which wave was yours?

If you are working this out for your own family, a few clues help:

• A great-grandparent recorded as "Russian" or "Polish" in an American census before 1920, with a Catholic parish and a mining or factory job, almost certainly belonged to the first wave.
• A grandparent who arrived in Brazil or Argentina in the late 1920s, or anywhere with a Lithuanian passport, belonged to the interwar wave.
• A family story about Germany, a camp, a ship in 1949 and a first job on a farm or a railway points to the DP wave. Their records are often well kept: ship manifests, camp registration cards and resettlement files.
• A parent who left in the 1990s or after 2004 belongs to the newest wave, and the paperwork is probably in a drawer at home.

Each wave left records in different places. Emigrant newspapers, parish histories and organisation files from North America are described in our page on Lithuanian emigrant archives, and the heritage circle gathers the rest. Start with the wave, and you will know which archive to open first.