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Saaga — Estonian National Archives
Estonia's parish registers, revision lists and soul lists, photographed and free. Lutheran registers in German, Orthodox in Russian, and the 19th-century revision lists that name a whole household at once.
https://www.ra.ee/dgs/explorer.php ↗
Last checked 2026-09-22. Tell us if this has changed.
The ground it holds
Record regions whose registers are filed here, and for which years.
- 1561–1721 Sweden in the north, the Duchy of Courland in the south
- 1721–1918 Russian Empire — the Baltic governorates — THE TRAP, and it is a surname trap. Serfdom ended here in 1816–1819, decades before the rest of the empire, and the peasantry had no hereditary surnames until then. Estonian and Latvian surnames were ISSUED between 1822 and 1835, parish by parish, often by the manor. Before that date your family has a first name and a farm name and nothing else, and no amount of searching a surname will find them.
- 1918–1940 Estonia and Latvia, independent
- 1991–2026 Estonia and Latvia
No places here yet
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