Анна Матолисовa

When I came across Lithuania's "eHeritage" website in 2014, I described it as a potential goldmine of family history information. I did discover some information about Antonina Kemešienė, but I initially under-estimated just how hard it was going to be to read the handwritten Russian script that many of the documents are written in. The minuscule bits I was able to decipher gave me hope that there's some really useful information there, but even the native Russian speakers I showed had a hard time reading these documents. Not only is the handwritten Cyrillic script hard to read, it's apparently a form of "Old Russian" that isn't spoken these days. Needless to say, I didn't get far digging into these records.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that the birth of Anna Sviatikiene would likely appear in these records. Her death record (from 1972 in New Hampshire, USA) listed her birth date as 18 January 1891, so I pulled up the ePaveldas site and found this in the 1891 index of the Births book:

I wasn't all that confident I was deciphering it correctly, but I suspected the first two words might say Маmолuсовa Анна, or "Matolusova Anna". I flipped to the page where record #17 was listed ...and quickly gave up any hope of being able to read it myself!

May as well be squiggles on a page for all I was able to get from it.

I asked a Russian friend if she was able read it though. With some difficulty, she was able to tell me a few key things that confirm this is, in fact, Anna's birth record. First, it lists the names Милашевичев and Матолисов -- in Latin characters, that's Milashevichev and Matolisov. These are the surnames of Anna's mother and father (it says she's "the legitimate daughter of the peasants Mikhail and Katarina").

"Matolisov" is a Russified version of Matulis, and "Milashevichev" is a close approximation of the (likely corrupted) version I have seen elsewhere, "Milasziawicziuke". The correct Lithuanian is possibly Milaševičiute / Milaševičius.

From Anna's marriage to Joseph Sviatikis in 1912, New Hampshire
(NB: "Russia" is actually Tsarist occupied Lithuania!!)

The other piece of information confirming its the right document is the location. The document is in the Catholic register from Pociuneliai parish church. That's the family church (I learned during my first visit to Lithuania) where many of our ancestors are buried. The record indicates that Anna was born in the "Krakenovsk" region - that's Krekenava - in the county just next to Pociuneliai. The family lived in the village of Kurgulai in the Krekenava district, but they were closer to Pociuneliai than the town of Krekenava itself, so that's why they appear in the Pociuneliai books. (That's not to say, of course, that some of the documents won't be found in the Krekenava books, though, so I'll need to search there in the future too!!).

Like I said before, these books are likely a massive source of family history information. They really need to be dug into, the Russian script notwithstanding.

Just one final note to conclude. The reason these documents are written in Russian is because, until 1918, Lithuania was under Russian Imperial rule and the Lithuanian language was forbidden in an attempt to "Russify" the population.

It didn't work.