Jewish
Genealogical Resources at the
Kaunas Regional Archives
Vitalija Gircyte
Copyright LitvakSIG, Inc. 1998
Presented at the 18th Annual
Seminar on Jewish Genealogy
July 13, 1998, Los Angeles, California.1
I am very glad that so many of you are interested in our holdings. But what I am going to do is to try and discourage you. I am going to tell you how few records we have, how complicated and time consuming the research is, and what little hope you have for success. And if you still want to try to obtain some information from our holdings, well, you are welcome.
First I want to repeat a few well-known things. In the holdings of the Kaunas Regional Archives, there are no vital records. That means we have no birth, marriage or death registers with very few exceptions I will tell you about, and we have no records at all for the 1897 All Russia Census. People keep asking about it, but in the Kaunas Archives there are no such records.
To begin with, I'll remind you, that in the Lithuanian Archives, perhaps as in the archives of all other countries, the records are not arranged according to subject -- there is no such thing as Jewish Records in some corner of our repositories. The records are arranged according to their provenance: according to their origin. All of the records created or accumulated by a state agency in the process of its activities are called a fond. That's what we indicate when we send you our copies. It's indicated by a letter "F." So I am going to speak about fonds of various institutions and the records they have.
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Biography: Vitalija Gircyte is a 1983 graduate of the Vilnius University, where she majored in History, specializing in the archives. After graduation she worked in the Kaunas Archives until 1988. She taught for several years, and returned to the Archives in 1994. She started working with requests for records in Kaunas Guberniya, which were at that time not of a genealogical nature. In 1995 when the archives started receiving genealogical requests, Vitalija knew very little about the sources of genealogical information. In a statement which is very typical of her modesty, she says, " I just tried to find out which moments of human life were documented in Kaunas guberniya, by what institution, and in what records." Today she is a real expert on genealogical research in the Kaunas archives. |
