Record Atlas
5 eras · 1561–2026 · 94 places

Livonia, Estonia and Courland

Riga, Tartu (Dorpat), Tallinn (Reval), Jelgava (Mitau). Which empire held this ground in which years — and, the part that matters, which archive that means.

Where researchers lose records here

1721–1918 — 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.

Whose archive this ground was

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1561–1721 Sweden in the north, the Duchy of Courland in the south Saaga — Estonian National Archives · Raduraksti — Latvian State Historical Archives · Riksarkivet — Digitala forskarsalen · FamilySearch

Lutheran parish registers from the seventeenth century where they survive, kept in German by a Baltic German clergy over an Estonian- and Latvian-speaking peasantry.
1721–1918 Russian Empire — the Baltic governorates Saaga — Estonian National Archives · Raduraksti — Latvian State Historical Archives · FamilySearch

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 Saaga — Estonian National Archives · Raduraksti — Latvian State Historical Archives · Lietuvos archyvai (Lithuanian State Archives)

Civil registration begins, and the 1935 Latvian census is a full household listing. Baltic German names are Estonianised and Latvianised in these years, by choice and by campaign.
1940–1991 Soviet Union — Estonian and Latvian SSRs, with a German occupation 1941–44 Arolsen Archives · Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names · Bundesarchiv

The 1941 and 1949 deportations, and the Umsiedlung that took almost the entire Baltic German population to the Reich in 1939–41. If the family was German-speaking and disappears around 1939, it did not die; it was resettled, and Germany holds the file.
1991–2026 Estonia and Latvia Saaga — Estonian National Archives · Raduraksti — Latvian State Historical Archives · FamilySearch

Estonia's Saaga is free and complete enough to be startling; Latvia's Raduraksti needs only an account.

The rings are approximate — deliberately. They exist to shade which filing system a place fell under, not to adjudicate a border. A place near a ring's edge should be checked against both neighbours.

See the whole span, 1561–2026, on the map →

The map takes a range, and a range that crosses one of the rows above is where records get lost: the family never moved, and the archive on the far side of the handover will tell you it holds nothing.

94 places on this ground

41 FamilySearch collections reach this ground

Ranked with the regional ones first — a collection for a province is usually a better lead than a national index, though the national index is often where a name is actually written down. A free account opens the images.

All record regions · The map