In genealogy research, it’s always worth searching for digital versions of books, letters, and periodicals held by national archives or libraries. This includes both local and international archives. The wealth of information kept in these archives can provide rich insights into both specific research subjects and their local historical contexts.
The National Digital Library of Latvia provided insights today for the Iņķis family members I’ve been researching. The library is free to search, and provides a large (and growing) archive of periodicals, newspapers, books, and more. https://gramatas.lndb.lv/
Little Birds
Cover of the 1895 Little Book of Birds.
Today’s finds included:
Maza putnu grāmatiņa : putniņu apraksti (1895), (Little Book of Birds: Descriptions of Birds): a little book written by Janis Iņķis.
Mūsu bērnos mūsu nākamība (In Our Children Our Future) (1909), also by Jānis.
It also included an encyclopedia (!) entry for Jānis’ brother Richard Jēkabs Iņķis, who was also a preacher. I’d known that Richard attended seminary in the United States before relocating to Brazil, but this entry gave much more detail, noting that he graduated from Newton Theological Seminary in 1915. With that information, I quickly found a graduation notice in the Boston Globe. It noted that not only did Richard graduate, he gave a graduation address, entitled “The Awakening of Modern Russia”.
Colby Hall
Newton Theological School, circa 1913.
This is an especially interesting title, given that in May-July of 1915 the Russian Supreme Command evacuated around 500,000 Latvians from Courland, in advance of the German invasion. It then shipped 30,000 railway cars full of resources and munitions out of Riga, Latvia’s largest city, along with all its factory workers. Riga was devastated by the loss of industrial manufacture.
It was also during this time that his uncle, Karolis Iņķis, was preaching (and perhaps teaching) in the Evangelical Christian community in St. Petersburg.
Richard graduated from Newton’s undergraduate program in June, 1915, after studies at Rochester Theological Seminary’s German Department, as well as the Porto Alegre Seminary in Brazil.(1)
So, I’m quite interested to see what Richard’s perspectives may have been on current events. Among my current research tasks is not outreach to Andover Newton Seminary at Yale (Newton merged with Andover in 1965, and became Yale’s seminary for congregational ministry), to determine if they have a copy of Richard’s graduation address in their archives, for
References
(1) The Institution Bulletin, Newton Theological Institution, 1913, p15. Accessed via Internet Archive 2 Dec, 2024. url: https://archive.org/details/institutionbulle0006newt/