Jekob Zekants and Magreete Latīnis are the parents of the five Zekants siblings that are at the heart of this family story. They were married in 1875 in the village of Nurmuižas near the north-western town of Talsi. They had six children: Lizette in 1876, Andrejs in 1879, Karl in 1881, Fricis in 1884, Teodors in 1887 and Žanis in 1892. The only one of their children to not survive to adulthood was little Fricis, who died in 1886 just before his 2nd birthday.
It was around this time that the family turned away from the Lutheran Church and embraced the newly burgeoning Baptist sect. Was this spurred on by the grief of the death of their son? Or from the growing nationalistic movement known today as the ‘Latvian National Awakening’? Or maybe for some other reason entirely. We will probably never know.
They remained Baptists until 1897. In October of 1897, they had their two youngest sons, Teodors and Žanis, baptized in the Nurmuižas Lutheran Church. By the time of the 1897 All Russia Census, Magreete and her children are actually living with the local Lutheran pastor as workers on his property. For unknown reasons, Jekob was not listed with his family in this census.
Jekob Zekants was born in 1848 near the village of Spāres. He was one of two sons born to Fritz Karl Zekants (grandson of Indriks) and Lavize (surname unknown). Jekob’s family seemed to be simple peasants working at one farm or another generation after generation.
Magreete Latīnis was one of seven children born to Indriks Latīnis and Dore Abolins. This surname ‘Latīnis’ is very rare and may come from Indriks’s birthplace of ‘Lattweet farm’. By the mid-1840s, Indriks was the manager of Wolfshof-Annuse farmstead near Talsi. In 1847, Indriks married Dore Abolins, a maiden residing on a neighbouring farm.
Dore is a real mystery. In the 1897 All Russia Census, as well as in her death record from 1904, her birthplace is listed as Riga. Her birth must have been around 1829 and her father’s name was Mattis. This circumstance of being from Riga in the 1820s and moving to the countryside by the 1840s does not seem to be common. And her father’s name, ‘Mattis’, is definitely not a normal peasant name from the Talsi area. I have searched in existing online church records for Riga and not been successful in locating Dore’s baptism record. I would love to solve this mystery and hope that one day I can shed light on this story.
As each of Jekob and Magreete’s children grew up, they made sure that they were educated. Their eldest, Lizette, made her way to the city of Jelgava by the turn of the 20th century where she married and started her own family before her untimely death due to childbirth complications in 1906. Their four sons all took advantage of the newly founded Latvian sailing schools started by the famous Krišjānis Valdemārs. Throughout the first decade of the 1900s each of their children forged a path much different than their land-bound forebears.
By 1914, Jekob and Magreete’s children had all left. Lizette was dead. Andrejs had been murdered. Karl had gone off on an adventure to far-off Australia. Teodors was finishing his mandatory military service in the Black Sea and their youngest son, Žanis, had recently married Emilija Rozentals/Rozenvalds. Magreete’s sisters had transitioned to Krumkalni farm in the village of Valtaiki, which was quite far from Talsi. So it must have been very lonely for Magreete when in September 1914, Jekob passed away. Now a widow, Magreete also moved to Valtaiki to live on Krumkalni farm with her sisters, including Angrieta. We do not know when or where Magreete died. Did she live through the war years? Did she pass away after seeing Latvian independence? We may never know. But the family story is that she is buried in one of the small cemeteries in the Valtaiki area.
If it wasn’t for Jekob and Magreete’s decisions to educate their children and ensure they had a ‘better life’ than the one they had, my husband and my children would not be here today. All of the happiness and joy as well as the tragedies and pain all had to happen, in order to create the reality of the Zekants family today. It has been my honor to be able to tell their story.