The Footprints of Vilkaviškis:
Mapping the Community in 1935
Every town is built of stone and wood, but it is defined by the families who breathe life into its streets. In 1935, a remarkable, hand-drawn map captured the heartbeat of our community, tracing who lived where, door by door, before the world changed forever.
This interactive directory is a digital reconstruction of that historic map. It allows you to search for the surnames of the families who walked these cobblestones, ran the shops, and filled the homes of Vilkaviškis.
How to search: Click on any of the alphabetical buttons below to open the directory for those surnames. Each entry will show you the family name, their street, and their house number as recorded on the 1935 map.
A Tribute to Dvora Dolev (née Adelson)
The interactive street directory you see below exists because of one woman’s extraordinary act of love and memory. Decades after leaving Vilkaviškis, Dvora Dolev sat down and painstakingly recreated the map of her childhood home entirely from memory.
With precision and devotion, she drew the streets, counted the plots, and populated the houses with the names of the neighbors, shopkeepers, and friends she grew up with. What you are looking at is not just a geographical layout—it is a map of a community preserved in the heart of a survivor. We owe her an immense debt of gratitude for ensuring these names were not erased from time.
Dvora at 18 just before she left
Vilkaviskis
A Note on Our Sources and the Missing Archives
Tragically, no official pre-war municipal residential records or town registries survive from Vilkaviškis. The archives were lost to the devastations of war and occupation.
Because of this total loss, our digital reconstruction relies entirely on the surviving fragments of history we have been able to gather to date: the memory-map of Dvora Dolev and the listings of the 1938 Lithuanian Telephone Directory.
If your family lived in Vilkaviškis during this era and their name is missing from our directory, please contact us. Together, we can continue to piece together the fragments and rebuild the map of our community, house by house.