National Library of Latvia. In Copyright
Ansis Dučkens was born in 1901 in Jelgava, a city in central Latvia. His father was a well-known citizen there, owning a pharmacy near the church of St. Anne. After having received a Master of Arts in Pharmacy at the University of Latvia in 1940, Ansis started working at his father’s store. In 1944, however, he emigrated to Germany, only to move to the United States six years later. He certainly wasn’t the only Latvian crossing the ocean at that time: between 1949 and 1951 alone, about 40.000 Latvians went to live in the States, often with the help of the U.S. government. Today, over 100.000 Americans are of Latvian descent, with large communities in New York, Illinois, Florida, Massachusetts and California. The latter also became the new home of Ansis, who eventually settled down in Palo Alto and taught at Stanford University. This image dates from the 1940s and depicts the pharmacist flanked by his pet dog.
