Pasaulio lietuvis and the Lithuanian diaspora press

Anyone who has cleared out a Lithuanian grandmother's house knows the pile: a few years of a weekly paper tied with string, a stack of thin monthly magazines, perhaps a parish bulletin or two. Those pages are easy to throw away and hard to replace. They record who sang in which choir, who opened a bakery, who died and where they were born, and what an entire generation of emigrants argued about on Sunday afternoons. This page is a short guide to the best known titles of the Lithuanian press abroad, starting with the magazine published for Lithuanians around the world.

Pasaulio lietuvis, the worldwide monthly

Pasaulio lietuvis means "the world Lithuanian". It is the monthly magazine of the World Lithuanian Community (Pasaulio Lietuvių Bendruomenė), the umbrella body that links Lithuanian community organisations in many countries, and its board is the publisher. The first issues appeared in 1963. For its early years it was a modest information bulletin, and it took on the shape of a proper magazine in the 1970s.

The editorial office has moved with the organisation's people. The magazine was produced in Cleveland, Ohio, until 1974, and then in Chicago, apart from a short spell in Vilnius in the early 1990s. From 2003 it was printed in Punsk (Punskas in Lithuanian), the Lithuanian village in north-eastern Poland, and in 2006 the editors moved to Vilnius. It has also had an online edition since 2003.

What fills its pages is mostly the business of Lithuanian communities abroad: reports from national communities, news of Saturday schools and youth congresses, the World Lithuanian Community's own decisions, essays on language and identity, and notices of anniversaries and deaths. For a family historian the older volumes are useful mainly for names, places and dates of community events. Readers who want a fuller picture of the organisation behind the magazine will find it described in the heritage circle.

The papers that carried the news

Most emigrant families read a local weekly or daily rather than the worldwide monthly. A few titles stand out because of their age and reach.

Draugas

Draugas is the oldest of the group still in print. Catholic priests founded it as a weekly in Pennsylvania in 1909, and it settled in Chicago a few years later. It grew into a daily that went to readers far outside Illinois, and its obituary and anniversary pages are a standard source for Lithuanian American family history.

Tėviškės žiburiai and Mūsų pastogė

Both were born in 1949, when the refugees of the Second World War were arriving in new countries. Tėviškės žiburiai began in Toronto under a Catholic cultural society and later moved its office to Mississauga, west of the city. Mūsų pastogė first appeared in Sydney in January 1949 and became the main weekly read by Lithuanians across Australia. In both, the community notices and parish news are often more useful to a researcher than the editorials.

Europos lietuvis

The Lithuanian Association in Great Britain launched its paper in London in 1947, the same year the association was founded. The title has changed more than once over the decades, so library catalogues may list it under Britanijos lietuvis as well as Europos lietuvis.

Lituanus and Bridges

These two were written in English for readers who could not, or no longer could, read Lithuanian comfortably. Lituanus was started in 1954 by the Lithuanian Student Association in the United States and set out to explain Lithuania's history, literature and politics to an English-speaking public. Bridges, first issued in April 1977, is the Lithuanian American Community's journal for second and third generation readers.

Aušra

Aušra serves the Lithuanian minority in the Sejny and Punsk area of Poland. It began in 1960 and was edited in Warsaw at first, later in Sejny (Seinai), and has been based in Punsk since 1989. Its name recalls Aušra of the 1880s, the newspaper that opened the Lithuanian national revival.

How to find old issues

Back runs of these papers are scattered, but they can be found with some patience.

1. Ask the publisher first. Many of these papers keep their own bound volumes and will answer a polite letter. Give exact dates if you can; "sometime in the 1950s" is a lot of pages.
2. Try the large diaspora collections. The Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago, the American Lithuanian Cultural Archives in Putnam, Connecticut, and the Lithuanian Museum-Archives of Canada in Mississauga all hold long runs of emigrant periodicals.
3. Use the national library in Vilnius. The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania collects the Lithuanian press published abroad; its catalogue is searchable from the Lithuanian National Library site.
4. Check university libraries. North American universities with Slavic and East European collections often hold Lituanus and Draugas on microfilm.
5. Work from an event. A death date, a wedding or a parish anniversary narrows the search to a few issues. Obituaries in Draugas often appeared within a week or two of a death.

When you do find a run of issues, photograph the masthead with each page you copy so you know later which paper and date it came from. For other sources on emigrant life, the reference library lists further guides, and the home page has the newest additions.