I am an American/Australian who married a man who has Latvian ancestry. I come from a long line of family historians and have been researching my own family history for many years. In 2014, my father-in-law asked if I would be interested in looking into the background of his deceased Latvian father. The only information we had about him was a few vague family stories, a handful of old damaged photos and some diaries written in Latvian. But it was a starting point.

When I made contact with a distant cousin in Seattle I found out there was a connection with the famous Latvian writer Elza Rozenbergs, known better by her pen-name Aspazija. I started researching Aspazija and finding out about her. It didn’t take long to realize that she was from the same area as my father-in-law’s grandmother and that she also had an interesting dual name: ‘Rozenvalds’ and ‘Rozenbergs’. It was also clear that almost nothing was known about Aspazija’s father’s family. There was no one who could help or give me any information on the Rozenvalds/Rozenbergs line. But this was the family I needed to know about to connect to ours! It took a couple more years of research before I came across the true relationship between our family and hers.

It was directly due to this family connection that I was able to come up with the information about Davis Rozenberg’s family history. It was the little key that was needed to bring together the scant information available. Even though my husband’s connection ended up being a step relationship with Aspazija rather than a biological one I was still very interested in mapping out her family. I had already done so much research and realized that I had the ability to put this mystery together to share with others who were also looking for this information. And in the end, the maiden name of my father-in-law’s grandmother came from Aspazija’s family and if her grandfather hadn’t married his third wife, Anna Rudzis, then the sequence of events that led to the birth of my own children would not have happened.