Indriks Zekants (or Seekant as it was first written) was the first man to use the ‘Zekants’ surname in Latvia. Every person I have found throughout the records with this surname can trace back to him. He was born in 1797 on a farm near the village of Spāre in north-western Latvia. His parents were Kristaps and Ann Katrine. He had a brother, Jannis, and a sister, Lawize. He was born into a world where peasants did not have surnames and they were tied to their Baltic German masters under the laws of serfdom. In 1819, Tsar Alexander I made a bold move. As an experiment, he abolished serfdom in the western province of Kurland in modern-day Latvia.
The changes of this for the everyday labourer were slow to be felt, but by the mid-1830s peasants were being issued with surnames of their own. We may never know if Indriks chose his own name or if the German nobility or the Lutheran church chose it for him. But as of 1837, Indriks and his brother, Jannis, had taken the name ‘Seekant’. At this time Indriks was working at a farm on a small promontory jutting into the vast Usma Lake. He may have even been the manager of this farm. The word ‘Seekant’ in German means ‘at the edge of the water’. I believe this is the most logical guess as to the origin of this unique Latvian surname.
There were many spellings of this name throughout the decades: Seekant, Sekant, Sehkant and Zekants just to name a few. In 1837, there was a document issued in local periodicals stating that if anyone owed money too or was owed money from Indriks Seekant they were to come forward to settle their accounts. Why was this document issued? Was Indriks in trouble? Was it connected to the Usmenieki farm? I have tried to find the answer to this but no one can tell me what the circumstances were. Whatever the situation, this is the earliest recorded mention of the Zekants name.
Indriks married a woman named Lihse in 1820 and they went on to have two sons and five daughters. He and his family moved from farm to farm as most people did and he passed away in 1853 at the age of 56. His death record is hard to read but his death may have been due to alcohol. Indriks only had two sons (Karl and Fritz Karl) and his brother only had a daughter. Of Indriks’s two sons, Karl had only one son (Fritz) and Fritz Karl only had two sons (Jekob and Karl). Jekob Zekants would become my husband’s great-great grandfather. All of this means that the name has been at risk of dying out several times. And although there still aren’t very many of us, the Zekants name can still be found in Latvia, Ukraine, Germany and Australia today.