Utėnai, Smilgiai parish, Panevėžys district municipality, Lithuania

My daughter will be leaving soon on a trip to the Baltic countries, so I wanted to post these previously-unshared photos from Lithuania taken by my third cousin Osvaldas Guokas (her third cousin once removed), of our ancestral village of Utėnai, two kilometers southeast of Smilgiai and in Smilgiai parish, and part of Panevėžys district municipality.  

Some of our Guokas ancestors were from Utėnai, with marriages in the late 1700s, births particularly between 1807 and 1819, and deaths in the 1820-1853 range (including my third great-grandfather, Antanas Guokas, in 1820).  By 1852, our ancestor Jonas Guokas (my second great-grandfather) had moved to Čelkiai, about nine kilometers northwest of Smilgiai, where his 12th (of 18!) child, my great-grandfather Kazimieras (later Charles) Guokas, was born in 1863.

Osvaldas visited in early June, 2017, and took the following pictures.  Of the first four, he wrote that he found "old wooden houses....19th century.  It's like my grandparents' house; memories from childhood. Flowers like near the house of my grandma, white windows, doors with a strange mechanism that was very difficult to use in childhood....[you] can see an outhouse near the house [to the right in the background in the first photo]....no toilets inside the house in those times.  An old woman, that I met in this house, let me take some photos. She says that one old Guokas is still living in an old house in the Utėnai area."

Osvaldas also visited a cemetery in Utėnai.  He wrote, "It is very old, with only two crosses we can see in the cemetery. It is small...we can see stones around the cemetery territory."

"One [above]- Narakas (surname), 1901.  Another [below] -  Dominykas, I can read it only with my fingers. It is some surname but it was impossible to understand."

© Amanda Pape - 2024 - e-mail me!