LithuanianCatholic

AncestorSearch.com

Lithuanian Roman Catholic (RC) Ancestor Search Information

​Welcome

This LithuanianCatholicAncestorSearch.com website is about Lithuanian genealogy (finding the Lithuanian ancestors in one's family tree).

This website is aimed at helping Americans of Lithuanian descent to identify several successive generations of their Lithuanian ancestors by making use of the archived and online baptism, marriage and death registers of Roman Catholic parishes in Lithuania. (Before the twentieth century, churches and synagogues were the primary repositories of birth, marriage, and death records in Lithuania.)

​ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.  In my translations made over the years including those on this website, I've made extensive use of the Polish and Russian volumes of the "In Their Words" books by Shea & Hoffman (References 1 and 2 on the References page of this website).  I highly recommend these books to anyone who is attempting to search for an ancestor in the RC parish registers of Lithuania.  

This website is dedicated to providing information about Lithuanian genealogy, but in a non-interactive way.  For interactive help, I highly recommend the website of the LGGS Discussion Group on Lithuanian Genealogy, (groups.io/g/LithuanianGenealogy) .  [In 2014, I started a website (then named LithuanianGenealogy.us). My intention is / was that it should contain "how-to" information that would answer the questions that I saw repeatedly on the Lithuanian Genealogy group website, and that it would not be interactive (because that role was already being fulfilled by the Lithuanian Genealogy group website, and because I needed to devote my time to the "how-to" information rather than to personal interactions). In mid-2016, I changed the name of this website to LithuanianCatholicAncestorSearch.com (because the initial name was too easily confused with that of the Lithuanian Genealogy group website).]

NAVIGATING THIS WEBSITE:

You can navigate to various parts of this website by using the navigation links that are located at the right-hand top of the page. (The same arrangement of links appears at the top of every page.)  If the mouse cursor hovers over a link, any sub-links are then displayed. Below is a short description of where each primary navigation link will take you.

​

• Home (this page).  Sub-links are About (about me and about this website), and Contact Me.

• ​Lithuanian RC Ancestor Search Process.  A description of the process of searching for the records of your Lithuanian Roman Catholic ancestors, including your options for who will search the records of Roman Catholic parishes in Lithuania​​.

​​

• U.S. Data Sources.  A description of how to obtain from family sources and U.S. records the information that you need about an immigrant Lithuanian ancestor and his/ her immigrant relatives to enable searching records in Lithuania.  [Information about how to access online archived copies of the Chicago Lithuanian newspaper Draugas has recently been added on the following page of this website: Chicago Newspaper "Draugas" Obituaries.]

​

• Chicago (Lithuanian) RC Parish Registers Online.  A description of how to use the online pre-1926 baptism, marriage and death registers of Lithuanian Roman Catholic parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago to find records of one's Chicago immigrant ancestor and his/ her US family and relatives. This includes transcribed and translated examples of these Latin-language records.
  

​​

• Lithuania RC Parish Registers (in the Lithuanian Archives and Online).  A description of the birth, marriage and death registers of Roman Catholic parishes in Lithuania that are located at the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius and/ or online at website epaveldas.lt.  This includes transcribed and translated examples of these Latin-language, Polish-language, Russian-language, and Lithuanian-language records.

​

• Nobility Documents.  If one of your ancestors was "noble" (as identified in the birth, marriage, and death records), there might be a "nobility document" that shows the male ancestors of that "noble" ancestor. (This is a later step that can be taken after you have identified a specific "noble" ancestor in Lithuania.)
  

​

• Search Aids for My Ancestral Parishes in Lithuania.  A description of search aids for my ancestors' parishes (primarily for Tverečius and Lieplaukė, but also includes Kantaučiai, Krekenava, Kurtuvėnai, Pakapė and Žarėnai) in Lithuania, including lists of registers available online and examples of transcribed and translated baptism, marriage, and death entries from the registers.  [The page Tverecius Emigrants Lists contains a list of 174 people in the Tverečius area who emigrated from Lithuania and immigrated to America [mostly to Chicago] between 1900 and 1930.] [The page Lieplaukė RC Parish 1844 Census contains portions of that census.]

• Tverečius RCC Register Entry Data Tables.  These are tables that consist of data that has been transcribed and translated from many of the individual handwritten entries in the online 1755-1920 birth, marriage and death registers of the Roman Catholic church (RCC) in Tverečius, Lithuania. The translations are into English, except that names of Lithuanian people and places are translated into modern Lithuanian. Because the 1755-1920 register entries are in Latin, Polish or "Old" Russian, this transcribed/ translated data can be an aid to anyone who is trying to translate a similar entry from the online registers of other RC parishes in Lithuania. These Tables are posted on Google Docs, and this page contains links to those documents on Google Docs. 

• Lithuania-Unique Aspects of Family Trees.  A description of some Lithuania-unique aspects of entering information about a Lithuanian ancestor into family tree documents.
  

​

• References.

• Other.  Miscellaneous topics, such as the Lithuanian alphabet and DNA testing.

On this website, links colored red are links to other websites and open in new windows; links colored blue are links within this website and open in the same window.

​​​​​​​​​