Topic: Archives
The image above is from LVVA, fond 7349, op. 2, vol. 177, which contains letters mostly to the Estonian Governor General Bengt Horn (dated 1658). Why are they preserved in the archive of the Livonian Governor General. In the top left corner there is an inscription (A-138) which sheds light on the matter. This was a type of marking used by the Estonian State Archive when the archive of the Estonian Governor General was catalogued in the early 1930's. The idea was to show where the item was kept before the documents were rearranged according to modern principles. Based on the catalogue produced as a result of this work it seems likely that this letter should today be in EAA 1.2.225, but it's obviously not. Why? Most likely because of events during WWII, when several archives were evacuated (in some cases as far as Troppau). As some volumes from the archive of the Livonian Governor General are missing today it's tempting to think that they were mixed up with something else and have ended up in other Eastern European archives (documents from the archive of the Dukes of Courland have long after the war been found both in the Czech Republic and in Ukraine). And: if items which should be in Tartu are found in Riga - perhaps the opposite can be true as well? EAA 1. (the archive of the Estonian Governor General) is large and I don't yet know how closely the volumes have been examined after 1945.
