Finding places in Lithuania

Introduction

One of the challenges in finding information about one's Lithuanian ancestors is figuring out their place of birth, death or marriage in Lithuania. Usually this information is available to descendants of Lithuanian emigrants from ships' manifests, naturalization papers, social security applications, draft cards and the like. Unfortunately, in many cases the Lithuanian names of the geographical locations got severely mangled, as they were written down "by ear" by English-speaking officials. On top of that, due to long periods of Russian and/or Polish rule, use of the original Lithuanian names was suppressed, leading to use of Russified or Polonized location names, further adding to the confusion.

If you are searching for records from Russian Empire times, note that references to Kowno/Kovno/Kaunas, Suwalki/Suvalki, and Wilno/Vilno/Vilnius do not necessarily mean that your ancestors came from that specific city, but that the place they came from was in the corresponding governorate (gubernya, губерния) - a unit of administrative division during that time. The three governorates mentioned above covered the territory of modern-day Lithuania, apart from the south-western part, which was part of Prussia.

This page provides links to some resources which may be helpful in matching the historic location names linked to Lithuanian emigrants to corresponding modern Lithuanian geographical names.

Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland

The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries, published between 1880 and 1902 (in Polish), contains a comprehensive list of geographic locations with descriptions, including the Lithuanian ones.

The original site hosting the dictionary has very limited search capabilities, only exact location search is supported. One can also use this site to jump to a specific page in a volume, so it can be used to perform a binary search for a location.

The Polish Wikipedia page for the dictionary used to contain an alphabetic index (partial) for easy navigation. Now you need to use this page to access the index. Click on the starting letter you are interested in on the right-side panel, then in the "Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego" section click on pokaż to navigate.

While using this resource it's useful to remember a few rules which were applied when converting Lithuanian names into Polish ones:

The Lithuanian letter Š is usually converted to SZ.
Lithuanian Č is converted to CZ.
Lithuanian V usually becomes Polish W.
Traditional Lithuanian plural endings like -ai, -iai, -ės get converted to -i or -y ending. For example, Čekiškės becomes Czekiszki.

Lists of inhabited places

Lists of inhabited places, issued by the government of the Russian Empire, are available in the electronic format for the governorates of Kaunas (Kovno) and Suwalki. Those are pretty comprehensive, and include even the obscure locations with only few residents, however they are in Russian.

List of inhabited places of Kaunas governorate (1902), in DJVU format. Smaller and faster to browse, however may require a separate DJVU viewer. The lists are organized in alphabetical order by uyezd, so if you are not sure about which uyezd the place belonged to, you have to check all of them.
Same as above, in PDF format. Larger and slower to browse, but you probably already have a PDF viewer installed.
List of inhabited places of Suwalki governorate (1888), in PDF format. This one has an alphabetical list of locations at the end, so it's a bit easier to find, if you don't have further details (like uyezd, volost' or gmina) about the place.
The list inhabited places of Suwalki governorate is now also available in transcribed form for easier searching.
List of inhabited places of Wilno (Vilnius) governorate (1905), in PDF format. Lists are organized by uyezd and volost'. Unfortunately, there is no common alphabetical index, so if no further details are known, one needs to scan through the entire book for possible matches. Document quality is not great.
Lietuvos apgyventos vietos ("Inhabited places of Lithuania") is an inhabited places list from 1923, published on epaveldas.lt. Two nice things about it: it is in Lithuanian (issued after Lithuania has become independent in 1918), and has a full alphabetical index in the end, making it easy to find places without prior knowledge of where they are in Lithuania. Distances to the nearest railway station and post office are provided, making it easier to locate the villages on modern maps.
List of modern Lithuanian locations with flexible search capabilities (new).

Shubert's maps of the Russian empire

These are detailed maps of the Russian empire from the end of 19th century. Due to their scale (3 versts to 1 inch, a verst being an obsolete Russian unit of length equal to 1.0668 km or 0.6629 miles), they are also known as "three-verst maps" (трехверстовка). The maps are available online, start here, then click on the individual maps sheets. Territory of modern-day Lithuania is covered by sheets 10-1 to 10-4, 11-1 to 11-4, 12-1 to 12-4 (approximately).

mapire.eu

This site has a very nice searchable map which contains an overlay of old Russian Empire map from 1872 (might be actually same Shubert's maps described above) on top of the modern maps. Use the opacity slider in the top-right corner to make more of the modern map visible.

lithuanianmaps.com

The lithuanianmaps.com contains an impressive collection of maps of Lithuania and surrounding areas going back to 16th century. Includes some detailed/high-resolution maps.

maps.lt

For finding really small Lithuanian villages and settlements on modern Lithuanian map, maps.lt is known to work better than other online map providers. It also offers a search which will try to offer alternatives if an exact match cannot be found.

Google Maps

Google maps are occasionally useful due to their auto-completion feature. If you don't know the exact spelling, you can type "Lithuania" followed by a space and the beginning of the place name you are interested in into the search box. If you are lucky, you might get a relevant auto-completed result. One pitfall with Google Maps is that if there are multiple matches for a particular place name, it will only return one of them (by focusing the map on it), while maps.lt, for example, returns the locations of all matching towns/villages.

Questions, comments, suggestions? info at gen wooyd org