Latvia

For some reason, this blog has become extremely popular in Latvia. I think this is another of those blog URL highjacking things, only now I've been highjacked into Latvia. Not that I know very much about Latvia; I did go to school with a NZ-born Latvian girl, whose name was Mara and wore her hair in two long plaits and was very clever. There was a small Latvian community here in Christchurch, mainly people who managed to escape after Soviet Russia took over after the war. The Christchurch community was surprisingly diverse back in the '60s; people think it was very monocultural, but in my neighbourhood we had a Polish couple, German, Dutch, Scots, Brits from all over and Hungarians, all part of the big European diaspora after the Second World War. The children of these immigrants are now in their fifties with children of their own, and sadly some of the cultural links are only maintained in the family name and a few bits of family lore. The inheritance from the female side is doubly invisible; once a woman marries and changes her name who she was and her own culture largely disappear.
    One of our genealogy customers was surprised and delighted to find that his great-grandmother was Swedish. Her existence as a native of Sweden had been blotted out by her name change, and the old-fashioned notion that there was something "a bit off" about not being a born and bred NZer.
  So hello, Latvians, welcome, whatever reason you have for reading this (you were referred by a porn site, maybe - I knew it).