Lizette was the eldest child of Jekob Zekants and Magreete Latīnis. She was born in 1876 near the town of Talsi in north-western Latvia. Her younger brothers were Andrejs, Karl, Teodors and Žanis. Unfortunately, I have never been able to locate a photograph of Lizette. We don’t know much about her childhood, but by the 1897 All Russia Census, she was not listed as living with her family. By this time she may have already transitioned to the larger city of Jelgava, the old capital of the historical Duchy of Courland.
In 1903, Lizette was married to Ernsts Pudze. The marriage was recorded in the parish records of St. Nicholas’s Lutheran Church, a newly established congregation in Jelgava at that time, with an immense new church building having just broken ground. Because construction on this new church had only just begun the actual ceremony took place at St. Anne’s Church, which had been built in the 1600s.
At the time of marriage Lizette was working as a maid for a butcher in town named Hans Wise. In 1904, Lizette and Ernsts welcomed their first child, a son they named Davids Voldemars. Davids’s godparents were Ernsts’s mother and his brother. Davids was followed in 1906 by a sister, named Minna. Minna’s godparents were Lizette’s brother, Andrejs Zekants, and her mother’s sister, Minna Latīnis. Sadly, something went wrong during or after childbirth and both mother and child passed away. Lizette was dead at age 30. The first tragic death of the Zekants siblings. But it wouldn’t be the last.
The family story is that at some point in young Davids’s childhood, his father, Ernsts, packed him and his things into a carriage and headed off to the Valtaiki farm owned by David’s maternal great-aunt Minna and her husband, Peteris Krumbergs. Ernsts left him there to be raised by Minna and her sisters. I don’t think Ernsts was ever heard from again. I have found a document that lists Ernsts Pudze, and a new wife, as having evacuated to Riga during WWI. Is this when he abandoned his son? We don’t know if Davids and his aunts also evacuated to Riga but it is highly likely as most people west of the Daugava River did so. After the war, Davids also learned the art of sailing like his uncles before him.
I don’t know how the family retained or regained the farm, named Krumkalni farm, in the village of Valtaiki, but by 1921 it would become a gathering place off and on for all branches of the family for the next several decades. Zekants, Blezurs, Latīnis and Rozentals/Rozenvalds all would spend time here up to and beyond WWII. I am not sure when Aunt Minna died but at some point, probably in the 1940s, the farm passed to Davids Voldemars. He raised his 7 children there.
We don’t know the exact date of Lizette’s death but it was announced in the Jelgava newspaper in September 1906. We also don’t know where she was buried. I have not been able to find any death record for Lizette or baby Minna. I would love one day to be able to find a photograph of Lizette but most likely this will never be possible. She may have died young and never known her children but there are many descendants of her living in Latvia today.