Tracing Lithuanian ancestors: parish books, revision lists and where they are kept

Most searches for Lithuanian ancestors start with a name that is wrong. Not wrong exactly, but bent: a surname shortened by an American clerk, a first name translated by a priest, a village written down in Polish by someone who did not speak Lithuanian. The records exist, often in surprising quantity. The trick is learning how they were written and where they ended up.

I have spent a good many winters with these books and microfilms. This is a practical map of the main record types, where they are kept, how names shift between languages, and a worked example of how a search usually unfolds.

Start on your own side of the ocean

The temptation is to jump straight into Lithuanian archives. Resist it. You need two things from the records at home before the Lithuanian ones are of any use: the ancestor's name as it was written in Lithuania, and the parish or village they came from. "Born in Russia" or "born in Lithuania" will not get you far in an archive with thousands of parish books.

Which records matter depends on when the family left. Our piece on the waves of Lithuanian emigration sets out the periods. In broad terms:

United States

• Passenger lists. Arrivals at New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston survive for most of the main emigration years. From 1907 the manifests recorded the nearest relative in the home country and the place of birth, which often gives a village name and a parent.
• Naturalisation papers. After the federal reforms of 1906, the declaration of intention and the petition for naturalisation usually record the date and town of birth, the ship and the date of arrival.
• Census returns. The 1910 and 1920 federal censuses asked about mother tongue, which helps when the birthplace says only "Russia".
• Draft registration cards from the First World War, death certificates (often naming parents) and Social Security applications (which name both parents) fill in the rest.
• Parish records of Lithuanian Catholic churches in America often recorded the home parish in Lithuania at baptisms and marriages.

Britain, Canada and Australia

• Passenger lists, naturalisation files and civil registration records are held by the national archives and registry offices. In Scotland, where many Lithuanian miners settled in Lanarkshire, civil registration began in 1855, and marriage and death certificates name parents.
• Displaced persons who arrived after the Second World War usually left a good paper trail: camp registration cards, resettlement files and immigration records that give exact dates and places of birth.

Our page on Lithuanian emigrant archives in North America covers the community side: parish histories, newspapers and organisation files.

The main record types in Lithuania

Parish metrical books

The backbone of Lithuanian genealogy is the parish metrical book (metrikų knyga): registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths kept by each parish. Most Lithuanians were Roman Catholic, so the Catholic books are the most used, but there are also Lutheran registers (especially for the west and the former Klaipėda region), Orthodox registers, Old Believer registers and Jewish records.

Catholic registers in Lithuania survive in some places from the seventeenth century, and coverage becomes good from about the 1830s. From 1826 parishes also sent annual copies to the church authorities, so a lost original can sometimes be replaced by its copy. Until the Soviet period, church registers were in effect the civil register too (the Klaipėda region was an exception), so interwar births and marriages are usually also in parish books.

Most surviving pre-Soviet Catholic metrical books are held by the Lithuanian State Historical Archives (LVIA) in Vilnius. Some volumes are in regional archives, notably Kaunas, and later records belong to the civil registry system. A very large number have been digitised.

Revision lists

Revision lists (revizijos sąrašai, from the Russian revizskie skazki) were tax censuses of the Russian Empire. For Lithuanian lands they cover the period from 1795 to 1858, with several rounds in between. Each list records households in a village or estate: the head, his family, their ages, and often notes on who had died or left since the previous round. They let you see a family together, which parish books never do. They are held mainly by the LVIA and the Kaunas regional archives, and many are not indexed, so you need to know the estate or village.

Estate and land records

Manor inventories, land reform files and estate records can show a family farm across generations. They take more patience but sometimes reach further back than the parish books.

Interwar records (1918 to 1940)

For families who lived in independent Lithuania, the Lithuanian Central State Archives (LCVA) in Vilnius hold the records of the interwar state. The most useful for genealogy are the application files for the internal passports that every citizen aged 17 and over had to carry. Applications often include a photograph, the place and date of birth and the parents' names. These files are also among the documents used to show that an ancestor held Lithuanian citizenship before 1940, which is why so many people come to genealogy through a citizenship application.

Military records, school records and land reform files from the same period are also in the LCVA.

Where to look online

• Epaveldas, the Lithuanian digital heritage portal, carries scanned metrical books from Lithuanian archives, thousands of Catholic register volumes among them. The images are free to view; most are not indexed by name, so you browse by parish and year.
• FamilySearch holds microfilmed and digitised Lithuanian church books, revision lists and other records. Some images can be viewed from home; others only at a FamilySearch centre or affiliate library.
• The archives themselves accept research requests by post or email, in English, for a fee. Send what you know precisely: name, approximate date, parish, and the sources for each fact.
• Volunteer projects have indexed some record sets, particularly Jewish records from Lithuania, which have been extensively indexed by Jewish genealogical groups.

How names change between languages

This is where most searches stall. A single person may appear in four forms across their life.

Languages of the records

Older Catholic books are in Latin or Polish. For much of the nineteenth century, under Russian rule, the books were kept in Russian, in Cyrillic script. Lithuanian appears in the registers mainly in the twentieth century, especially after 1918. American records were made in English by clerks who heard the name once.

First names

Surnames

Lithuanian surnames were often written in Polish or Russian form. A Lithuanian Kazlauskas may appear as Kozłowski in a Polish-language entry and Kozlovskiy in a Russian one. Women's surnames take their own endings in Lithuanian: a wife of Kazlauskas is Kazlauskienė and a daughter Kazlauskaitė, while a Polish-language record writes Kozłowska for both. In America, the same family might become Kazlauskas, Kaslauskas, Kazlow or Kasloski within a generation.

Places

Town and village names also come in several languages. Kaunas was Kowno in Polish and Kovno in Russian; Vilnius was Wilno; Šiauliai was Szawle; Ukmergė was Wiłkomierz. Smaller villages often had a Polish name quite unlike the Lithuanian one. Gazetteers and old maps help, and so does saying the name aloud the way an English-speaking clerk might have heard it.

A worked search, step by step

The family below is illustrative, not a real case, but the steps are the ones most searches follow.

Say a woman in Ohio knows only that her great-grandfather was "Joe Kazlow", a coal miner in Pennsylvania who died in the 1940s.

1. She orders his death certificate. It names his parents as "Joseph Kazlauskas and Mary" and gives his birthplace as "Lithuania".
2. She finds him in the 1920 census, naturalised, mother tongue Lithuanian, arrival year 1909.
3. His naturalisation petition gives a birth date in 1888, birthplace "Wilki, Russia", the ship's name and the arrival date.
4. The 1909 passenger list shows "Juozas Kazlauskas", age 21, last residence Wilki, nearest relative his father in the same place.
5. A gazetteer shows that Wilki is the Polish name for Vilkija, a small town in the Kaunas district with its own Catholic parish.
6. On Epaveldas she opens the Vilkija parish baptism register for 1888. The book is in Russian. Using a Cyrillic alphabet chart and a list of Russian genealogical words, she finds a baptism for Iosif Kozlovskiy, son of Iosif and Marianna, from a nearby village, on a date that matches.
7. The same entry names the village. In the revision list of 1858 for the estate that owned that village, she finds a Kozlovskiy household with a boy of the right age to be the grandfather.
8. Searching the marriage registers backwards from the 1880s, she finds the parents' marriage and the mother's maiden name.

Each step used the previous one's information. Nothing in Lithuania would have been found without steps 3 and 4.

Tips that save time

• Write down every source as you go: archive, collection, volume, page. You will need it again, and archives ask for it.
• Note every spelling you see, even the obviously wrong ones.
• Learn the Cyrillic alphabet and about thirty Russian words: born, baptised, married, died, son, daughter, widow, peasant, village, parish. It takes a weekend and opens the whole nineteenth century.
• Check neighbouring parishes. Families married in the bride's parish and moved between villages.
• Do not assume the family name stayed fixed even in Lithuania. Spelling was loose until the twentieth century.

Common questions

Do I need to read Lithuanian?

For nineteenth-century records, Russian and Polish matter more than Lithuanian. For interwar records, basic Lithuanian helps a great deal.

What if the parish book for my year is missing?

Look for the annual copy sent to the church authorities, check neighbouring parishes, and use revision lists to fill the gap.

Can someone in Lithuania do the research for me?

Yes. The archives do paid searches on request, and independent researchers work in the reading rooms. Ask for a written estimate and the exact archival references of everything they find.

The reference library collects more background on records and archives. Before you write to any archive, find one document at home that gives the ancestor's birthplace in his own lifetime; it will save more time than anything else on this list.