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Showing posts from March, 2013

Letters from Latvia

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Janis CIRKSIS was a highly organised person. Thankfully, he was also a little bit of a hoarder. Along with all of the photos and other documents that he kept were several hundred letters from Latvia spanning from 1947 until the mid 1970s, all neatly arranged in chronological order in a file folder and well preserved. A couple of months ago, I finished scanning all of these documents to PDF and I began making enquiries about having some of them translated.  A few weeks ago I received a translated copy of the first letter my father received from his family after WWII. I have always thought that these letters would contain invaluable details about  day to day life under Soviet occupation. What I hadn't expected was the amount of subtle information that speaks volumes - but that is for another post. The translation has also finally revealed the author of the letters! Initially, because my grandmother and my aunt both had the same first and last names, I was unable to determine who