The Courland Vedomosti Database

Jewish entries in the official Government Gazette for Kurland · Courland · Latvia

This database indexes and summarises over 2,000 entries relating to the Jewish community in Courland (now part of Latvia) appearing in the official Russian Government Gazette, the Vedomosti. At present it covers the period 1853 to 1861, but the project is ongoing and over time it is hoped to extend the material up to 1900.

Courland was a separate gubernia (province) of the Russian Empire from 1797 to 1918, with its own provincial government based at Mitau (now Jelgava, Latvia). The Kurlyandskiya Gubernskiya Vedomosti, or Kurländische Gouvernements-Zeitung, was the official newspaper, published every Tuesday and Saturday throughout the year from 1852 to 1915. It contained public announcements, reports of court cases, “wanted” lists of people sought by the authorities, details of arrivals in and departures from Courland, lists of appointments to public bodies, and a small number of private announcements and advertisements.

In the period up to 1866, most of the entries are in German, with a few in Russian and a sprinkling in Latvian; from 1886 onwards Russian was used exclusively. As can be seen from the sample page, the German entries are in the old-fashioned Fraktur script with rather archaic spelling. The language is formal, with much use of elaborate standard formulas, and with a liberal admixture of Latin terms in the legal reports.

The database includes a summary of all entries referring to the Jewish community in the relevant years. In the majority of cases Jews are identified explicitly in the text, as “ebräisch” or Hebrew; others have been recognised by their names. Where there is doubt whether a particular individual was Jewish, we have erred on the side of inclusion.

A detailed description of the content and a page of sample entries are both available.

The first work done on the Vedomosti as a source for genealogical research was to extract and create a database of those individuals who were “without permit”. That list has its own introductory material and stands separately, although its entries also appear here. The reason is that we wanted to create a complete index of all entries relating to Jews available from the Vedomosti during the relevant time frame; the historical importance of the Passlosen lists and the role they played in Jewish history was considered sufficient to justify a free-standing dedicated database. This is being kept under review.

The database is clearly not a comprehensive guide to the Jewish population of Courland in these years: it was a matter of chance whether a particular family had the necessary brush with officialdom to be mentioned in a given year. Where there is an entry, however, the list shows that a named Jew was registered in a given locality on a given date, and may provide a good deal of additional information.

Quite apart from references to specific individuals, the entries provide a fascinating insight into everyday life in 19th-century Courland, and can bring people alive in a way that other databases do not.

The figures immediately after KGZ (for Kurländische Gouvernements-Zeitung) give the volume number, running from 1 to 103 or 104 each year; the next two digits give the year; and the final digits are an arbitrary project reference. The reference refers to a specific page in the Vedomosti, which may include several separate entries. Some entries take the form “KGZ/zz/xx” without numbers: these are entries where photocopies were received from Riga but were undated and could not be traced to originals. These are in fact all one sheet of names, and the likely date is in or about 1855.

Where an entry does not refer to a specific individual — an advertisement for a new Rabbi, say, or a reference to the whole Jewish community in a district — the surname has been entered as GENERAL. In a small number of cases the surname cannot be read in full and is given as, for example, “…cus” or “Eck…”. In one or two cases no surname is given and the field is left blank.

Place names are given exactly as they appear in the entry, with the modern equivalent in brackets when it is significantly different. Several of the places mentioned will have a variety of different names — we have tried to use the name most likely to be familiar to English speakers. It should be noted that a registration area was known by the name of the chief town of a district, but may have covered several separate smaller towns or villages. Where possible these distinctions are brought out in the Comments. Initials are used to refer to the subject of an entry — the comment for Israel Elias WEISS, for example, reads “Tax receipt issued to IEW by police has been found”. Addresses are given where relevant, though few Courland properties had a street address in the modern sense; in most places properties were simply numbered sequentially across the town, and Mitau was divided into four Quarters with properties numbered sequentially in each.

Money amounts are quoted in Roubles or Kopecks. Exact modern equivalents are hard to give, but items in the Vedomosti themselves help. A table published each fortnight gave maximum prices for bread and meat: in September 1859 bread cost roughly 3 Kopecks for a one-pound loaf, veal 9–11 Kopecks per pound, and lamb 7 Kopecks per pound for ordinary quality and 10 for best. The penalty for selling above the set price was 15 Roubles for a first offence and 30 for a second. The annual budget for the city of Libau (Liepaja), published in March 1859, shows annual rentals of 75, 180, 225, 350 and 400 Roubles for various houses rented by the city. The return fare by coach between Libau and Polangen in 1860 was 2 Roubles 50 Kopecks.

The central libraries in Latvia hold an almost complete collection of the Courland Vedomosti. The originals are frail and rapidly perishing, as the newsprint of the period was not of good quality. The Courland Research Group has a photocopied set of all Jewish entries between 1853 and 1860, obtained from the copies in the library in Riga, and continues to receive material. Copies are also held by libraries in St Petersburg and Moscow and may be consulted there. We are not aware of any copies in Western libraries or collections.

This database can be searched via the JewishGen Latvia Database or the JewishGen Unified Search.