I honestly don’t know how I could have gone anywhere on this family history journey without the Periodika website. If you aren’t familiar with this site, it is one branch of the extensive online database collection of the Latvian National Library. Periodika is their collection of newspapers and periodicals. The collection spans the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It also includes Latvian language newspapers from throughout the 20th century from around the world including Australia, the USA and the UK. The collection includes newspapers in over 25 languages, but I have mostly come across Latvian and German in my searches. It is very easy to search this database and extremely exciting and rewarding when you come upon something new! (Note: some of the most recent publications are not available online and only in person.)
Here is the link for the site: Periodika.lndb.lv
I have found many different types of articles and information through searching on Periodika such as:
News articles, obituaries, arrests lists, court cases, accident reports, birth, marriage and death announcements, Baltic German repatriation lists, biographies, serialized narratives, classified ads, land ownership records, interviews and photographs.
Here are some examples of important discoveries I have made on Periodika that propelled me forward in my genealogical search:
Article in German from 1913 about the murder of Andrejs Zekants (‘Seikand’) on the left and an article in German from 1888 about the Okten distillery explosion that killed Jannis Blezurs on the right
Ad, in German, for a publishing company from the 1930s employing Hans Droune, brother of Willi Droune on the left and an announcement from 1837 (in old Latvian script) with the very first instance of my surname in print, spelled here as ‘Seekanta‘ on the right
How To Use Periodika
The website is very easy to use. Enter a name, keyword or words into the search bar and a list of results will appear. Your keyword(s) will appear highlighted in yellow for each entry. If you don’t read Latvian (which I do not) you can easily use something like Google Translate to read the snippets that appear in the list. On the search page, you can organize the list by date or relevance on the right as well as searching through the different years available on the left. You can also filter by periodical name, author name or language of the original article. If you see something that you are interested in, click on it and it will appear in a new window. The image below shows a search for my surname ‘Zekants’. I chose the specific year ‘1929’. I can see the name Līna Zekants (daughter of Jāņa). If I am interested in this I click on it.
It will then open in a new window. This particular article was an alphabetical list of people who had been arrested around the end of 1929. I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the list before I found my highlighted name. It turns out this was the first wife of Teodors Zekants. She was arrested in Daugavpils at the age of 32. I have asked experts what her offence was but have not been able to conclusively figure it out. I do know that she would have been pregnant at the time! Not only does this tell me the interesting fact that Teodors’s wife had a run-in with the law, but it also told me her age, date of birth and father’s name. Very valuable information!
One challenge you will have is old style script. If the article you find is earlier than the 1930s, it might be in Gothic Blackletter script (also known as Fraktur). This can be really hard to read but can be translated on websites such as: Old German Handwriting To Text
If the article is in German, the translation will be straight-forward. But if it is in Latvian it might also be in old orthography (spelling) and the handwriting translator will not work. I used to have to match up each letter with its modern equivalent by hand. But today, programs such as Google Gemini can translate an article like this very easily. You can also put up short pieces that you find in Facebook groups such as Latvian Genealogy and often someone will translate it for you.
The software that Periodika uses is usually quite good but sometimes there are glitches. For example, sometimes I can see my keyword in the search list but when I click on the article my keyword is not there. Or sometimes the entire website is too slow to use or isn’t working all together for a period of time. This should not put you off from using it to its full potential however!! It can do wonders for breaking through genealogical brick walls and for fleshing out historical context.
A Note About Names
A very important thing to consider when you are searching for names is thinking about alternative spellings. There are probably many more spellings of your surname than you realize. And because of the grammatical rules of the Latvian language a name can include various endings and diacritics (the small marks above or below a letter in Latvian that indicate pronunciation). Generally I find that the text recognition software tends to ignore diacritics in searches but it doesn’t hurt to do a seperate search for each individual spelling. My surname, Zekants, can be any of the following, based on Latvian grammar and changes in spelling over time:
Zekants, Zēkants, Zekante, Zēkante, Zekantu, Zekanta, Zēkanta, Zekanti, Zēkanti, Zekantam, Ziekanta, Zeikante, Zeikants
You also have to remember that until WWI, many names were spelled in the German way. And in all eras, knowledge of how a surname was written in Russian is also essential. There can be several variations in both of these languages. Often a name is then changed again based on the country your ancestors immigrated to. I found several articles on Periodika from Latvian language newspapers in Australia from the 1950s with my father-in-law listed as ‘J. Zekants’ since he had Anglicized his first name from ‘Žanis’ to ‘John’. You can search in all of these languages on Periodika.
Some of the German variations I have seen of my surname are:
Sekant, Seekant, Seekants, Sehkant, Sekanta, Seikand, Seikant
And some of the Russian (Cyrillic) variations are:
Зекант, Зеканте, Зейкант
Because the text recognition software is not perfect, it often makes mistakes with the Gothic Blackletter script. For example, mistaking a ‘k’ for an ‘l’. I remember realizing this one day and deciding to look up the spelling ‘Selant’. I was surprised to find several important historical articles about the family that I would never have found otherwise. This was the day I truly realized that no alternative spelling, no matter how ridiculous it seems, is out of the realm of possibility!
If you are researching your Latvian family history and have not explored the Periodika website there could be a goldmine waiting there for you! It is not only a great way to find valuable information about your specific family members, but also a resource where you can add important historical context to the life and times of your ancestors.
