Internal Passports and Vital Records

Another useful document is the 19^th Century passport. The appearance of the person is described: his height, the color of his hair and eyes, his age.

The passports were usually given for a short time, for six months or for a year or two, and these gave permission for a Jew or any other town dweller to leave his permanent place of residence for a certain time. For Jews it was for travel in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. These just gave them permission to live somewhere else for a short time. These were internal passports. There certainly were external passports, only we have a very small number of them - for separate months of separate years, and the rest applied to internal passports only. This is an example of records we might expect to have but which are missing.

I have already told you that we have no vital records, but we have one little exception. It is Rokiskis, a town in Zarasai, which became the Novoalexandrovsk district. For some reason in Rokiskis, the town dwellers' administration made up a book of abstracts from the vital records of 1876 through 1894. These are not even the copies of vital records. These are abstracts. They don't give the same information. For example, in the case of birth, the mother's name is not indicated, just that a child was born to such and such a name. But as far as I know other vital records for this region and for this period do not exist, so these are the only ones available.

There is one more thing I'll try to explain to you. It's quite complicated. It is about another possible source of vital records we might have. All of the records I have been speaking about so far were from Kaunas guberniya from the period from 1843 until 1915. And later, after the First World War, the independent Lithuanian State was established. But during the First World War, most of the Jewish population was evacuated to Russia. The non-Jewish population also fled. When they came back in 1920 - 1921, they came back to a different state, not to Russia, not to Kaunas guberniya. They came to the independent country of Lithuania. If they came to the capital of independent Lithuania, they came to Kaunas. They may have come to many other places, but we have these records only for Kaunas. In Kaunas they were issued passports. To have a passport issued, they had to prove their right to be a Lithuanian citizen. They had to produce copies of their birth certificates or abstracts from family lists, or at least some testimony from their former neighbors that they had lived in Kaunas guberniya territory before the War, and had a definite right to Lithuanian citizenship.

We all have passports now in Lithuania, we had them under the Soviets, and in 1919 - 1940 everybody had a passport. It is the main document for a person. We have the cards of these passports which were issued in Kaunas; Kaunas town, not Kaunas region, not Kaunas district, but in Kaunas town. So, for the town dwellers -- in some cases -- we also have the documents which were the basis on which passports were issued: copies of birth certificates or copies of marriage certificates. We have a large number of them and they are cataloged. It is quite easy to find them, but they are only for Kaunas town dwellers. So if some member of your family returned to Kaunas in 1920 or 1921, there might be more records for them, but this is an exception to the rule that we have no vital records.