Latvia Emigration and Immigration

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Finding the Town of Origin in Latvia

If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in Latvia, see Latvia Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

Latvia Emigration and Immigration

"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country.
Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.


Immigration into Latvia

Emigration From Latvia

The majority of Latvians whom left Latvia in WWII reside in North America (the US and Canada), across Europe mainly in Eastern countries and the former USSR with just as many in Western Europe and Scandinavian nations, and the rest in former Latvian lands in the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Belarus). The most Russified of the three Baltic states, Latvia struggles with the issue of national identity after one million ethnic Russians and other Russian speaking people settled there since 1940.[1] Knomad Statistics: Emigrants: 342,300. Top destination countries: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ukraine, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, Belarus, Norway, Canada.[2] "Other significant population centers:"[3]

  • United Kingdom: 124,000
  • United States: 96,070–102,000
  • Germany: 40,480
  • Canada: 30,725
  • Brazi: 25,000
  • Ireland: 19,933
  • Australia: 20,509
  • Russia: 18,979
  • Norway: 11,723

Records of Emigrants in Their Destination Nations

Dark thin font green pin Version 4.png One option is to look for records about the ancestor in the country of destination, the country they immigrated into. See links to immigration records for major destination countries below.

For Further Reading

There are additional sources listed in the FamilySearch Catalog:

References

  1. "List of diasporas", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diasporas#L, accessed 26 July 2021.
  2. "Latvia", in Knomad, https://www.knomad.org/data/migration/emigration?page=13, accessed 26 July 2021.
  3. "Latvians", in Wikipedia, accessed 26 July 2021.