Finding Baltimore Lithuanian Records in the Catholic Heritage Archive

I have a number of Lithuanian immigrant relatives who settled in Baltimore, and I am also a leader in a Facebook-based group that is adding Lithuanian emigrants to Geni using information from census, naturalization, civil vital, and Catholic Church record datasets.  

Catholic Church records for Baltimore and surrounding areas in the Archdiocese are available at the Catholic Heritage Archive.

Naturalizations in particular give you much of the information you need to find the Catholic Church records.  Here is an example that I'll use in this post:

Joseph Budelis and his wife Magdalen were married in Sugar Notch, Pennsylvania, but their five children were all born in Baltimore.  Here is what I did to find the available baptism records.

First, a little background:  The first Lithuanian Roman Catholic parish in Baltimore was St. John the Baptist, established in 1888.  The congregation worshiped in three different buildings until 1917, when the Archbishop of Baltimore transferred the historic St. Alphonsus Liguori Catholic Church, a former German parish established in 1845, to the Lithuanian parish.

The Catholic Heritage Archive is a partnership of the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Philadelphia with Findmypast.  The records are freely available for anyone to view - you don't have to have a paid account with Findmypast.  You do, however, need to use (or set up) a free account with Findmypast to access the records.

That free Findmypast account also gives you the ability to use Findmypast to search -and sometimes that works.  You *can* see the search results, and you *can* view images of the records (but not their transcriptions) even without a paid account.  However, I am a firm believer in providing links to ALL possible sources, so I will be writing about two ways to find the records - especially since searching using just Findmypast does not always work.

Here are the record sets pertaining to Baltimore Catholic parishes in Findmypast:  

Here's an example of a search I did for the Budelis children in the Baptisms record set.  First, I searched for the last name Budelis, checking the box for "Include name variants."  There were no relevant results.  Then I tried a wild card search, last name "Bud*" - no need to check the box with that search.  

There were 142 results, with a promising one on the fourth page.  Magdalenam is a Latin variant of Magdalen, the birth and baptism years were 1917, the church was St. Alphonsus Liguori, and the father's first name was Josephi, a Latin variant of Joseph.  So I clicked on the icon to view the image.  It's at the bottom of page 319 of one of the baptism registers.  The mother's first name and the date of birth match up.  Note also that her record includes some information about her marriage:

I wasn't having any luck finding her brothers using the Findmypast search.  So I decided to switch directly to the records at the Archdiocese of Baltimore link on the Catholic Heritage Archive - because Findmypast wouldn't let me maneuver to other pages in the record set, and that is what I needed to do next.

Once you go to the link in the paragraph above, you need to choose a parish.  If a search in FindMyPast indicated a particular parish, go to that one.  If you are looking without doing a FindMyPast search first, you'll want to start with the parish with the most Lithuanians.

 You don't want to chose St. John the Baptist records.  You will get the records for a St. John the Baptist parish (primarily Italian) that took over the Lithuanians' third location before they moved into St. Alphonsus and adopted that name.

So choose St. Alphonsus Liguori - but be aware that the older records for the German congregation are mixed in with the Lithuanian parish records.  There are 20 record sets for this church - nine of which contain baptisms - and many have overlapping dates.

I have determined that the following record sets pertain to the Lithuanian parish:

Event Type                        Image Count    Year Range*

Baptisms                                166                1894-1907

Baptisms                                219                1907-1919 

Baptisms & Marriages**        70                 1890-1893

Burials                                     52                 1895-1958 

Marriages***                         151                1891-1920 

Marriages***                         147                1894-1920 

* The year range includes the index, which includes records that have not yet been digitized and/or released.

** Most of the records in this set are in Lithuanian, handwritten, and very hard to read (except for some baptisms at the end).  There are also lists of parishioners.

***  These two record sets are near duplicates of each other.  The internal handwritten index is more thorough in the one with the 151-page count, so I would try that one first.

Another clue that you've got the right book is that the first page of most (not all) of them identifies it as "formerly St. John the Baptist" and/or "Lithuanian Parish" and looks similar to this:

This particular record set, Baptisms 1907-1919, should include the first three children of Joseph and Magdalen Budelis.  There's an internal handwritten index, so I scrolled to the two pages of Bs, which were on images 3 and 4 out of 219 total.

Sure enough, it had Magdalena indexed under Budkeviciu, but it also had her brothers Joseph and Leonard:

 

Note that the last name for Joseph was originally spelled Butkevicius, and later as Boudelis - that's why he didn't come up in my searches on Findmypast.  Here is Joseph on page 259 of the baptism form book, the second one on the page - note that the date of birth, May 6, 1915, matches that on his father's naturalization petition:

Leonard's baptism record is currently not available.  The index says it's on page 373, but the records online only go through page 371 - so close!

And here is a link to Magdalena's baptism record in the Catholic Heritage Archive.  Please, when you are entering data in sites like Geni, include ALL the possible sources to view the original record.

If Magdalena's brothers had not been in the index?  Then I would have scrolled to pages with baptisms after the dates of birth listed in the naturalization, and found them that way.  Internal handwritten indexes - if they even exist - are often not complete, so don't assume a baptism (or marriage, or death/burial) isn't in a register just because the name is not in the internal index.

I have found records for other Lithuanian emigrants in Baltimore in other parishes - this is where the search function in Findmypast is helpful.  

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

Nineteen Years Ago Today: Twelfth Night, 2007

This is a post copied from my old LiveJournal from Saturday, January 6, 2007:

Jan. 6th, 2007 04:25 pm

Twelfth Night

( Bling-bling )

Breathless gave me some nice stuff for Christmas and Epiphany:

[From left to right in the photo above]

[1] a silver necklace with malachite and painted jasper, and matching malachite earrings. We go back a long way on malachite (the first piece of jewelry he gave me 25 or so years ago was a malachite and silver ring), but the painted jasper was new. It's called that because the striations can look like they are painted onto the stone.

[2] Another gift is a good example of that. [3] He also gave me a necklace of mother of pearl and tiger's eye.

Current Location: home
Current Mood: jubilant
Current Music: Alison Krauss + Union Station "New Favorite" album

--------

Some of the links above take you to better photos of these pieces.  Mark took this one of me wearing his Christmas Eve gift (the malachite and painted jasper) along with my son Eric on January 2, 2007, just before I took Eric to the airport to fly back to Washington.

I also wore it when I (finally) got my driver's license updated to our address - so this was on my license until the 2018 renewal.

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

Nineteen Years Ago Today - Christmas Eve in 2006

It's Christmas Eve 2025 as I write this, and seems to be a good time to post it, although I probably gave this to Mark much earlier.  I still have this ornament on my tree:

And of course there was a little gift card to go with it, and of course he kept it:

This is the post about his gift that inspired this ornament:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2025/03/march-25-2006-another-early-birthday.html

I wrote the following about Christmas Eve 2006 in my online journal:

Christmas Eve was very nice. We opened our gifts since we were going to be gone all the next day. We gave Eric* an MP3 player (Creative Zen 1GB), Napster gift card, and an extra set of Skullcandy ear buds, plus a couple little things (like a Tervis mug with our county courthouse emblem). We'll be going out shopping later this week, for some new (size 16) shoes, among other things.

I got Breathless all sorts of little stuff, some of which were things I wanted too, like a rain chain. I gave him his big gift back in November, a model ship** he wanted from the Blue Moon Gallery in Grapevine.

Breathless got me a beautiful necklace of silver and malachite [and painted jasper] with matching earrings,*** and a black Coach leather bag. Breathless got me a brown leather Coach bag about 25 years ago that I'd kept and used mainly for special occasions over the years, but I've been using it daily for nearly a year now, so it is nice to have an alternate.

--------

* My son Eric was visiting for the holidays.  We went to Austin on Christmas Day to visit my family there, his grandparents and my siblings, his aunts and uncles, and his cousins.  Today I'll just be seeing my siblings.

**  The link to the photo of the ship (which is also pictured in my last post) reminded me that one of my other gifts to him was a base for an old clock that had belonged to his father, which you can also see in the photo.  I still have all of these, and I'm still using the rain chain, although it's been moved to the left of where it is in this photo from 2019:

*** More about this necklace in a future post.

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

Nineteen Years Ago Today: Holiday Preps

This is a post copied from my old LiveJournal from Monday, December 4, 2006:

Dec. 4th, 2006 12:37 pm

holiday preps

Got a lot more done this past weekend. On Thanksgiving weekend (Saturday), we bought a couple poinsettias (red), a small tabletop rosemary tree, a fresh wreath, and some of those cinnamon-scented pine cones. I also put out some of the few decorations I'd brought with me (the stuff family or friends made or gave to me), so the house looked somewhat festive when Breathless' daughter and her family came to visit that Sunday. Oh, and I made some Christmas cookies (pecan puffs) for them to eat and take with them.

Above:  The wreath we got, hung inside the front door so we could smell it!

Below:  One of the decorations I'd brought with me, that my mother made.

I was expecting to be alone this Christmas, so had originally planned not to put up a tree until I could find a fake lit tree on sale after the holidays. For so many years in the Pac NW, my son and I would go to a tree farm and cut a fresh Doug fir. I don't think you can do that here in Texas, although I know there are farms with pines and cedars - I don't like the former and I have family members who are highly allergic to the latter). Nevertheless, Breathless wanted to have a "real" tree this year, so we bought a cut 6' Doug fir this past weekend.

He'd picked up some tree lights on sale earlier in the week (many of mine had burned out, and I gave those that worked to my son), and he also got some red rope lights cheap. We put those up outside yesterday afternoon (MAN! Was it cold and windy!), and it makes the top (non-brick) half of the four columns out there look striped, like candy canes. I'm thinking next year though we might put these on the back porch (there are only two columns out there, but we can double the amount of lights on each) as I think I'd like something a little more old-fashioned for the front, maybe some lighted garlands to wrap around the posts instead. That's something I definitely need to buy on sale after the holidays, as I am picky about how realistic the fake greens look.

He also got me a real (mostly cedar) garland for the mantle (which I have intertwined with some sparkly white netting), and when we got the tree, they gave me as many trimmed branches as I wanted. I think I will make those into some sort of swag to hang on the front door, with some wide red velvet indoor/outdoor ribbon I have.

Above:  The mantle with much of the stuff talked about in the post.  More in a future post about the painting, and more below on the plaque in front of the fireplace.

Below:  The door swag I made.

Today he is supposed to put up the tree lights, so I can decorate (with all the ornaments and icicles I DID bring) tonight. No hurry.

Current Location: lunch break at work
Current Mood: jubilant
Current Music: computers

--------

In a reply to a comment on December 6, I added:

"The tree has lights and ornaments now. Breathless picked out such a good tree (very full) that I am not sure it needs icicles. I had so many ornaments that I put some on the garland on the mantle, and will do a very small Pac-NW theme tree (ferryboats, various whales, an eagle, a salmon, etc.) for the guest room where my son will be sleeping. I also did not hang any of my bell ornaments - may add those to the garland (which has Texas ornaments) as well, or put them on doorknobs."

Above:  Eric with the main tree on Christmas Eve.

Below:  The small Pac-NW tree I put in the guest room for Eric.

"I've been collecting ornaments since I put up my first tree of my own in 1979 (a 3' one in Corpus Christi, where I had my first "real" job after getting my bachelor's degree). Now I really have way too many for a 6' tall, very full tree! I plan to give my son the ornaments on his theme tree (forgot to mention it also includes Seahawks ornaments - he's a big 'Hawks fan), plus some others, but I suspect I'll be storing his until HE puts up that first tree of his own!"

--------

Below are a couple more holiday decorations.  I will tell the story of this "Beware of the Trains" plaque in a future post.

Above:  The candy cane mice were made by my aunt, Sister Jean Marie Guokas.

Below:  I decorated the masts of Mark's ship with tiny wreaths.

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

Nineteen Years Ago Today: 2006 Christmas Card and Newsletter

Nineteen years ago on this date (which was a Saturday in 2006), I was sending out my Christmas cards (homemade this year) and the print and e-mail versions of my annual holiday newsletter.  

I don't have an exact copy of my homemade card, but I believe on the front of it, along with the words "New Degree," I included parts of the graduation announcement for my Master of Science in Library Science degree, as I think I had plenty of announcements left over from May.

Inside the card, I had the words "New Job!  New House!  New Love!" as well as our names and new address, my phone number, and one of my e-mail addresses.  I'd gotten business cards at work, so that provided the illustration for the job, while a photo of the house from June and a photo of the two of us from August provided the other two illustrations.

As I wrote to my sister-in-law June on this day, "Yes, I am one of those people who does a dreaded newsletter (since 1986)!  Two years ago I started e-mailing it to most people to save postage and to be able to include more color photos (expensive to print out) as well as links to various web pages, and now to my online journal."  The e-mail version (not pictured here) included the two photos from the inside of my card, plus a bonus photo of the back of our new house.  You can click on the images below to make them larger and more readable.

Above:  Page 1 of the print version of my annual holiday newsletter.

Below: Page 2 of the print version of my annual holiday newsletter.

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

Nineteen Years Ago Today: Sunday, November 26, 2006

We hosted Mark's son Drew (and his dog Cana) on Thanksgiving Day in 2006 (which was November 23), but he headed back home to San Antonio the next day.  (We didn't take any pictures.)  Mark's daughter Kim had also invited us to her home in Allen for Thanksgiving Day, so we invited them to come out to our house later that weekend.  She and much of her family came Sunday from about noon to about 4pm.  We played frisbee in the backyard, and walked down to our historic courthouse square, where we toured the Old Hood County Jail and Museum.  We had barbeque and apple pie (probably homemade by Mark) and ice cream for lunch.

Above:  Mark, Luke, and the twins (Adam and Drew, not sure which is which) walking from our backyard down to the courthouse square.

Below:  Luke peeking in one of the cells in the Old Hood County Jail and Museum.

Above:  Heidi, one of the twins (still can't tell them apart), and Luke playing frisbee.

Below:  Mike and Kim relaxing on the chair-and-a-half in our living room.

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

Epson FastFoto FF-680W Scanner Review - Part 5 (the end)

This is Part 5, the final part, of my review of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-speed Photo Scanning System - other parts are here:  Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4.

At the end of Part 4, I said I would use this post to talk about how easy it was to set this scanner up (with one minor glitch), the things I didn't test (and why), and what I would use - and not use - this scanner for.

Scanner Setup

I carefully unboxed the scanner (since I will need to repack it to send back later) and followed the instructions on the enclosed "Start Here" poster.  After unpacking, you go to www.fastfoto.com/getstarted in the USA to download the software.

Clicking on the blue "Download FastFoto Software" button brought up this page:

I clicked on Epson FastFoto FF-680W on the lower right, which led to this next screen, where I clicked on the Downloads tab (far left) and selected my operating system:

Finally, the "Drivers and Utilities Combo Package Installer" link became available, so I clicked the Download button (lower right):

After agreeing to the license, I had to select some installation options.  I went with all the recommendations, and decided to send usage information to Epson as well, since I was testing the product.  Then I clicked the Next button at the bottom.

After all the software was downloaded and installed, I followed on-screen instructions (as noted in step 4 of part 2, Install software, on the "Start Here" poster), and plugged in the scanner.

Next came the first surprise - selecting your connection method.  I was under the impression this was only a wireless scanner.  Wireless can be spotty in my house, so I was pleased to see USB cable as a connection option, and chose that.

Here's where things got weird.  While I was still on this Connection tab, the screen went mostly blank, and nothing happened for a while.  Then I noticed two blank buttons at the bottom of the screen.  Being the type that believes sometimes you have to break something to fix it, I clicked on the darker of the two buttons, the one on the left, figuring it was supposed to say something like "Next" or "Continue" or "Yes" or "Accept," and the other, lighter-colored button to its right said the opposite.

When I did that, I had a pop-up window that was just as cryptic.  It said EpsonInstaller with a big question mark, and Yes - No buttons.  I picked yes.

Apparently, whatever I did must have been the right thing (I did tell my contact with Epson about this issue).  This screen related to Epson FastFoto Setup popped up, pertaining to where you wanted scans to be saved and what to name them.  I changed the setting for "Your scanned photos will be saved in this folder" from the default (for my computer) C:\Users\Owner\Pictures\FastFoto to E:\FastFoto (since my E hard drive is where I store all my data), but left the default file name alone.  (These can both be changed on the Organization tab in Settings, and you can always specify a different folder or default file name before scanning a batch.)

The Enhancements settings also popped up.   I set the scanner to do auto enhancements (brightness, contrast, and saturation), remove red eye, and restore faded colors.  I also chose to follow the recommendation to apply these enhancements to a second copy of the photo, and not to the original scan.  These can also be changed, on the Enhancement tab under Settings, before you scan each batch.

I believe at this point, the next screen to appear was the start screen for scanning:

What I Didn't Test (and Why)

1.  I didn't test connecting the scanner to my wi-fi network.  I prefer the hardwire USB connection, and I have the perfect little table (on rollers, and with a drawer and lower shelf) to put the scanner on and have it near the computer when I'm using it.

2.  I didn't test some of the additional features of the FastFoto software that you can apply to completed scans, such as Share (only to e-mail like Outlook, not web-based email like Gmail), Upload (to Dropbox or Google Drive; requires linking to your accounts with those services), various Edit features on images you select (rotate left or right, crop, restore color, reduce red eye, add/edit/remove a date, enhance brightness/contrast/saturation, and undo all), and of course Delete.

3.  I didn't test the Invoice/Receipt Manager in the ScanSmart software, because that required signing up for a trial.  

4.  I didn't test the supplied carrier sheet. It is used to scan certain items rather than sending them through the automatic document feeder without it:

• fragile, folded, irregularly-shaped, irreplaceable, perforated-edged, torn, wrinkled, or too-curled photos;

• folded items* (such as graduation invitations);

• valuable original documents or artwork; and 

• anything too-small (smaller than 2 × 2 inches) or too large (bigger than legal-size paper).

You are supposed to load these originals one by one using a carrier sheet, which is considered a consumable item (i.e., you can purchase more of them).  I didn't want to damage the one that came with this test machine.  Also, my flatbed scanner handles these items just fine - and I have to do them one-at-a-time there too.

* The user's guide indicated you could scan envelopes, if loaded properly (front face down, point of the flap pointing to either side, not up or down), without using the carrier sheet.  However, every time I tried to scan one, it would jam.  This was disappointing as I have a number of letters to scan, with envelopes decorated on both sides, and was hoping to use the Epson FastFoto FF-680W to scan both envelope sides at one time.

How I Would Use the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Scanner

This scanner excels at scanning smaller (8" by 10" or less) standard print photos, black-and-white or (especially) color, particularly if there is any information written or stamped on the back.  It is also excellent for scanning double-sided documents (or multi-page single-side documents), especially if you want to save them as searchable PDFs.  I've also found it handy for scanning both sides of postcards and unfolded greeting cards (but sadly, not their envelopes).  It's also very good (and faster than on a flatbed scanner) with paper business cards and plastic cards (IDs, etc.), although I don't see much need to scan any beyond what I already did.  The scanner is very fast, even at 1200 dpi, and the ability to scan duplex AND to apply enhancements and corrections to an image is a plus.

I would use the Epson FastFoto FF-680W scanner in addition to my 20+-year-old Epson Perfection 3200 Photo flatbed scanner.  The latter would be better (and faster when only scanning one side) for anything that would need to be scanned in the carrier sheet on the FF-680W, and for envelopes.  In addition, I can scan slides and negatives (35mm and three larger formats) on the Perfection 3200, and I do a surprisingly large number of those.

  

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

Epson FastFoto FF-680W Scanner Review - Part 4

This is Part 4 of my review of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-speed Photo Scanning System - other parts are here:  Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 5.

So a quick confession here - when the review scanner first arrived, after getting it set up, the first thing I scanned was not photos, but some documents.  I was getting ready to send some VHS tapes (home movies from her childhood) to my daughter, but I wanted to copy the notes about each video before sending the originals to her.

These notes were all double-sided, so I decided to use the FastFoto scanner to quickly scan both sides, since I needed to mail the tapes later that same day.  The Epson FastFoto software was installed, so I used that.  It only lets you save the scans as JPEGs or TIFFs, so I saved them as JPEGs.  I didn't write down all the settings I used, but I got some images so I can refer to the information on them later if needed, and sent most of the originals on to my daughter, back in the cases with the tapes they described.  There were three sets of notes that matched tapes that had already been digitized, so I sent her JPEG scans of those notes and kept the originals.

As I've been using the scanner and reading the user guide more thoroughly, I learned that the Epson ScanSmart software was more appropriate for most documents - especially ones like these, black on white.  It also had the capability to save the scans as PDFs - and as searchable PDFs.  So I decided to re-scan the originals I still had.

These original documents were created in 1993 to 1995 on a dot matrix printer.  Here are the steps I went through to scan them.

When you start the Epson ScanSmart software, you get a screen like this:

I first clicked on the Settings button in the upper right corner, which opened the following menu:

I clicked on the button that said Scan Settings, to see what those were.  That opened up this separate window.  These were the default settings, so for the time being, I left them as they were (note the scan resolution is 200 dpi).  I clicked the save button, which returned me to the previous screen.

I next selected File Name Settings from the menu on the left.  I left this with the defaults as well, which included checking the box for automatic naming using optical character recognition (OCR) - I was curious to see how that worked.

Next I went to Save Settings in the menu on the left.  Since I wanted to test saving these documents as PDFs, I clicked on the Options button for that choice, which opened up a new window.

Here's the window for PDF settings.  I left these as they were.  I had to look up a PDF/A file.  It's a standard format used for archiving (hence the A) electronic documents - more info here.  In this case, I don't need that, nor did I need any of the Security settings, such as setting a password to open the file.  I clicked OK, which took me back to the previous screen, pictured above.  I was done with settings, so I clicked the Close button.  

That took me to the screen that comes up when you start the software (the first image in this post).  I was ready to click on the big blue button on the left, to scan double-sided.  But first, I needed to load the documents into the automatic document feeder (ADF) of the Epson FastFoto scanner.

For documents, you load them top side first, but with the fronts of pages facing the back of the scanner, instead of the front - the opposite of photos (which face forward).

After loading the documents and pressing the big blue "SCAN double-sided" button, it took about 10 seconds (at 200 dpi) for the software to scan both side of four pieces of paper.  I got a screen that allowed me to review, edit (delete, rotate, or crop) and/or re-order the scans.  Everything looked good, so I clicked the Next button at the bottom right of this screen.

This leads to a screen where you have lots of options on what to do with your scanned image - save (to computer), attach to email, send to Google Drive or Dropbox or Evernote or Gmail or Microsoft OneDrive, print, save to Microsoft Word or Excel or PowerPoint, and (on a trial basis) manage invoices and receipts.  I chose Save.

The software will plug in the default name from the File Name Settings I discussed earlier in this post.  I guess OCR couldn't generate a name, perhaps because these were 30+-year-old dot matrix documents scanned at 200 dpi.  No matter.  I wanted to change the file name to something more relevant for me anyway, as well as change the folder where it would be saved.  You could also select the file type ...

... which gave you a number of options - PDF, searchable PDF, JPEG, TIFF, Multi-TIFF, PNG, and BMP.    

I chose Searchable PDF, and thus also needed to select the OCR Language (the default is English).  Then I clicked the blue Save button at the bottom right corner of the screen.

The OCR does work, as shown in the screen grab below when I opened the PDF with Adobe Acrobat.  I decided, however, that the 200 dpi scan was too "grainy" and rescanned the documents at 300 dpi (still grainy) and 600 dpi (okay), which is what is shown below.  Remember, this is dot matrix printing and the papers are more than 30 years old.  I'm happy with what I got.

One more post for this series, where I'll wrap up with how easy it was to set this scanner up (with one minor glitch), the things I didn't test (and why), and what I would use - and not use - this scanner for.
 

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!