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Formation of the Kaunas Regional Archives
I'd like to say a few words about the formation of the various holdings of the Kaunas Archives. It seems so very simple. Kaunas was the central city of the former Kaunas province, or Kaunas guberniya, so we would expect that all of the archives should be left there. Why are they missing? The problem is that in the second half of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century there were lots of Russian institutions, functioning in Kaunas and in various smaller towns. All of them kept numerous records.
We have a long bureaucratic tradition and an enormous amount of records, especially court records. In 1915 the First World War broke out and the Germans were coming. All of these institutions had to be evacuated hastily. It was the summer of 1915. They had to take the records with them, at least the most essential, the most valuable, or the records they needed in their everyday work. So in July, August, and September of 1915 all of the Russian institutions of Kaunas guberniya were evacuated, with part of their records. They were evacuated to various towns in Russia and they continued functioning there. They kept their records there. But part of their records that were non-essential perhaps, or that they didn't have space or time to evacuate with them, were left in the places they had been created: in Kaunas and various other towns.
The Germans occupied the territory and there was nobody to take care of these records and they were abandoned. I don't think that anybody destroyed them on purpose. But they were left without care. There was a shortage of paper so they were used as paper, they were used to make fire, they suffered from water, from snow, from everything. Lots of these records, especially from small institutions such as police institutions, various small courts, and town dweller's administrations in small towns, were almost totally damaged and they did not reach us.
As for the records that were evacuated to Russia, the institutions functioned until 1918. Later, after the Revolution they stopped functioning and these records were also left without any proper custody. They fell into the hands of the Soviet officials. Well, that was not so bad at the time, at least these officials took care of them. Their repositories were sealed and locked, and they remained there.
When the independent State of Lithuania was established, the Lithuanians began gathering all of the records that had been left in the various small and larger towns of the country, and they were brought to Kaunas. In 1921 Kaunas Archives was established. At that time it was the Central State Archives of Lithuania. Now it is the Kaunas Regional Archives. According to the peace treaty with Russia of 1920, in 1921 Russia began to send back loads of records that had been evacuated from Lithuania to Russia. These records were coming back for about ten years, but some of them were returned only after the Second World War and some perhaps never. They are still in Russia.
And what does that mean? When the records of one institution are taken apart and moved from place to place, evacuated, re-evacuated -- they suffer and suffer a lot. What are left are remnants. It is just chance if some essential record for genealogical research is left at all. These records were kept in Kaunas until WW II. After the Second World War, in 1939 and, later, when the capital of Lithuania became Vilnius, under the Soviets, they started to move the records from Kaunas to Vilnius.
We call historical records those that were created up until 1918. It was decided that all historical records should be moved to Vilnius Archives. But they had no space, so the temporary repository for these records of Kovno guberniya was Kaunas. But we were just the temporary repository, just a warehouse for these records. Nobody worked with them and the problem is that nobody tried to create any suitable information - finding aides. They were just stored and a general sort of inventory was made.
An inventory is just a list of files, and it can be made in different manners. We have inventories made in chronological order. That means that the records of some institutions, lets say of the Chancellery of the Kaunas Governor, are listed in volumes and volumes, ranging from 1843 up to 1915, just in chronological order. There are about 33,000 of these records listed in about twelve volumes, without any alphabetical indexes -- personal or geographical -- just chronological order and that’s all. So looking for information in these inventories is a very time consuming process at the very least.
These inventories were made in the post war years, when the staff of the Archives not only lacked qualifications, but they were hardly literate. This is evident from the inventories. The quality of the inventories is far from satisfactory; some of them are just impossible to use. But that's the state our records are in. In the 1990's the Vilnius Archives and our Archives came to the agreement that these records of Kaunas guberniya, which were still in Kaunas, should be kept there, perhaps forever. Now we have them and we have started working with them. But I can't tell you of any system according to which the records between Kaunas and Vilnius archives were divided. There is none. The records of some institutions of Kaunas guberniya were already in Vilnius and they won't be moved back. But what remains in Kaunas, we have them, and will have them.
When we started receiving genealogical requests, we knew little about the possible sources of genealogical information at all. It's certain that we have no vital records. Whatever we had, I repeat, we gave to the Vilnius Archive. Another well-known source of genealogical information, that is the Revision and Family Lists, but we have few Revision and Family lists. We have started to look through our holdings in order to try to find some other possible sources of genealogical information.
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