Many state officials have personal files stored in archives, including teachers. What kind of information can be found in teacher files?
Recently I did a brief research on the Vidiņš family. Tt was known that Fridrihs Oskars Vidiņš, who emigrated to Australia, had a sister, Emma, who remained in Latvia. I searched for information about Emma in the archive’s database.
This database is accessible on-site at the Historical Archive’s reading room computers. It allows searches by a person’s name and surname. Of course, not all documents mentioning the individual are available in this database. However, some of the most important records can be found this way, such as citizenship files, pension files, officer files, and also teacher personal files. All of these documents pertain to the interwar period (1920-1940).
Teacher personal files are located in the Ministry of Education's collection (Collection No. 1632). The descriptions in this collection list all teachers whose files are stored in the archive, arranged alphabetically. These descriptions are also available in printed form in the reading room.
In this case, I first searched the printed descriptions but did not find Emma Vidiņa's name. However, I found an entry in the database for Emma Cveigelis, née Vidiņš. It turned out that Emma had married, and her teacher’s file was listed under her married name. Since I hadn’t known her married name prior to this research, I couldn’t locate her in the printed descriptions, where I had searched using only her maiden name.
So, what interesting information can be found in a teacher’s file? These files contain a wealth of personal information, including:
A passport copy with birth details;
Detailed information about education, including any courses taken later during her career;
Employment history, revealing when and where Emma worked as a teacher, as well as the subjects she taught;
The passport copy also contained information about Emma’s residence in Riga, allowing for further searches in house registers;
Other biographical details. For instance, in a request for a salary increase, Emma mentioned that her mother was seriously ill and that she was supporting her. This indicated that at that time, Emma lived with her mother, who was still alive;
An interesting detail was that the Ministry of Interior’s Emigrant and Refugee Department requested a statement from the Riga Criminal Police about Emma. No compromising information was found, and she was able to start working at the State Refugee Children’s Shelter. It seems that the reason for this check was that, like other refugees from the First World War, Emma had spent several years in Russia and had obtained her education there. The state needed to ensure that she was politically reliable and could work in the public service.
If there was a teacher in your family during the interwar period, it is certainly worth visiting the Historical Archive to locate their teacher file.
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