Lithuania? I’d heard of it. My name came from there. In truth, it was more a rumor than a place. The ancestral home, if one ever existed, was not in this tiny nation on the Baltic Sea, but the humble streets of Cicero, Ill., where my great-grandparents had managed to start a tavern and produce two children, one of whom sired my father.
As a child, I’d never been curious about my ethnicity, but as so often happens, that began to change as I grew older. None of us had ever been to Lithuania or knew anything about it. Ours was a family without a heritage, but as the sole witnesses to the immigrants’ drama have passed away, I’ve grown interested in that elusive history. When the opportunity to travel to Vilnius emerged last year, I jumped at the chance.
This summer, no doubt, hundreds of other Americans will be returning to the Old Country in search of something we like to call `roots.’ More interesting than sightseeing, the quest for `lost’ relatives, successful or not, makes for a memorable travel experience, one that will introduce you to a culture like no other.
You’ll do well to gather as much information as you can before you leave. You can’t show up at the Lithuanian archives, for instance, hand over a name and expect information about your ancestors. Chances are, the man or woman behind the desk won’t speak English and will insist you provide native town names, birth dates, parents’ and grandparents’ names. I’d learned, for example, where my great-grandparents had been baptized, a small town called Ramygala. This fact, along with the birth years, helped the archivists in Vilnius find two baptism certificates, which provided the names of the villages both great-grandparents were from.
Before you go or once you get there, you’d also do well to learn as much of the language as you can. A little bit of effort goes a long way, especially with people in the countryside who often don’t speak a word of English. Still, if you can’t say much more than “I’m lost” and “Where’s the toilet?” you’ll need help. It won’t be hard to find. Able English speakers abound, and they can make your trip more fun. I embarked to Ramygala with one Solveiga Kazlauskaite, a nimble-tongued university student I’d met in a bar. She was a great help in explaining what I was looking for.
You should also realize that, though churches are known to be resources for baptism certificates and wedding records, their custodians, the priests and nuns, can be even more helpful. Saulius, the stout, friendly pastor of Ramygala’s high-spired cathedral, invited us inside his rectory for coffee, cake and whiskey, called some elderly parishioners for the directions to the villages we were looking for, then took it upon himself to drive us there.
As you travel deeper into your ancestry’s birthplace, be prepared to find it greatly changed from what it was or how you would like it to be. In other words, don’t expect peasant charm to be oozing from potato fields. There were reasons your ancestors left, and some of those reasons may still exist..
Still, the pastoral countryside was lovely that August day as we tooled down one dirt road and then another. We eventually arrived in Mazeniai, a humble collection of aged cabins and barns.
One of the villagers we spoke with gave us a phone number by which I could reach members of one of the Jaskunas families. This help led to a phone call from Regina Jaskunas Vaitoskiene. By that time, my Lithuanian was good enough to make out about a third of what she told me–it seemed she was convinced her grandfather was my great-grandfather’s brother. She instructed me to call her daughter, Rosita, who spoke English and lived in Vilnius. This I gladly did, and a week later I traveled with Rosita to Panevezys, the medium-sized town to the north where her parents were living.
I found there not only her parents, but her sister and brother, uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews. I found a clan, waiting for me on the porch of a large, half-finished house.
A lavish banquet progressed from smoked meats to chicken to cabbage rolls as we tried to hash out the details of our ancestry. With the help of Rosita’s translation, her excitable mother and two middle-aged aunts relayed all they knew. Their grandfather Audrius had had four brothers, all of whom had immigrated to America before the first world war. Nothing else was known of these brothers, but given that the parents of my great-grandfather Jurgis Jaskunas had the same names as Audrius’ parents, it seemed likely that Jurgis and Audrius were brothers.
Should you get this far in your search for roots, you can expect to be celebrated like a minor messiah. In Lithuania there is a saying, “Everyone’s a relative,” as it is no uncommon occurrence for natives to discover new batches of cousins. But it’s not everyday an American relative falls from the sky, and my appearance was toasted as something of a miracle. Time after time we raised out shot glasses full of homemade schnapps or vodka and thanked the powers that be for reuniting the American Jaskunas family with their long lost cousins.
Even as the conversation drifted into grim memories of difficult times in Lithuania, the afternoon was somehow joyous. Audrius’ son Antanas, a corpulent old man, had tears in his eyes the entire time I was in his house. He was touched beyond reason that an American had returned, had remembered his Lithuanian family.
Before I left him, we went outside and I took a picture of the man standing straight up before his house, cane in hand, eyes fixed sternly on the lens. I realized that, though I’d learned little about my great-grandparents (no one here had known them), it’d been a privilege to meet those who endured the century on Lithuanian soil. While my father was growing up in dreamy small-town Iowa, these people were surviving two world wars, a harsh Soviet regime and exile. Yet even that past is losing reality, becoming the stuff of legend. Antanas surely won’t be around much longer; nor will his stories.
