On how to find your Estonian relatives

Ain Dave Kiil

The lives of tens of thousands of Estonians have been disrupted by invasions, migration, war, deportation, and mobilization. Families have been forcefully uprooted, whereas others chose to leave their ancestral homes to avoid living under foreign rulers . It is therefore little wonder that the descendants of these people are curious about their forefathers.

For me, a nostalgic visit to the family’s ancestral farm on Saaremaa in 1992 kindled an interest in my genetic and cultural roots. Until the late 1990s, progress was very slow and limited to information about my immediate family. It was only after I inadvertently found that microfilm records of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church were available through the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City that the scope of my research escalated. This source of information, reinforced with access to Estonian archival documents in Tartu, Tallinn, Kuressaare and Kihelkonna, helped me to assemble a computer-based data base of several thousand relatives.

For budding genealogists, there are two main avenues to pursue. The first approach is described in this issue of AJAKAJA by Fred Puss of the Estonian Biographical Centre ( http://www.isik.ee, info@isik.ee). Perhaps the main advantage of this approach is that professional genealogists are aware of the available archival materials and therefore able to zero in on relevant information in a short period of time. Handwritten archival records may be in Russian, German, Estonian and even Gothic, and present quite a challenge for the neophyte family historian.

The other approach, whereby you do your own research, is also feasible owing to the wealth of material now available on the Internet. A new website http://www.eha.ee/saaga/, launched in May of this year, contains many of the archives of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church and provides access to a wealth of information. The website is in Estonian but will likely have an English version soon. After opening the website, the user will be asked to register by inserting a User Name and a Password.

The archives are listed by the name of the congregation (kogudus) of interest. Once you open the data base for a particular congregation, you have access to listings of family names and groupings, births, names of godparents, deaths, christenings, marriages, and other information. Generally, the church/census information prior to about 1890 is in German, between 1890-1918 in Russian, and in Estonian during the first Estonian Independence period from 1918 to the early 1940s. The same type of information can be ordered on microfilm through the Family History Centers of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Microfilm readers and computers are available on site.

The following websites (in English) also provide valuable information about Estonian genealogy:

1) Archival Information System (AIS) : http://ais.ra.ee;

2) Estonian Genealogical Society and links: www.genealoogia.ee/English/english.html

Note: Should there be enough interest, we might consider holding a workshop, or set up a “genealogy support group” to assist us in tracing our Estonian ancestors. Feedback is welcome.

My e-mail address is: adkiil@telusplanet.net