National identity is Eastern Europe is a notoriously difficult thing to parse out from the vantage point of 2018. While the modern state system has created definite boundaries, passports, and other forms of identification, things in the nineteenth century were more porous and plastic. Looking at contemporary maps of more or less homogeneous nation-states in 2018 and projecting these borders back in time is a fundamentally wrong way to go about this. Vilnius in 2018 might be a city in which a majority of its inhabitants identify as Lithuanian, but this was not the case a century before where most of the population either spoke Polish or identified as Jews.

In the case of the Baltics in the nineteenth century, the region was ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse. Of these three categories, the last two were arguably the more important for identity, especially for those regions of the Baltic under the control of the Russian Empire. The 1897 all-Russia census used religion and language as a basis of identifying individuals. Jews who resided in the Pale of Settlement were considered Jews by the census officials even if they only spoke Ukrainian. In the case of the Baltics, there was certainly a large, self-identified Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) community that were the descendants of German colonists from the medieval crusades. There were also those Germans who migrated from Central Europe during the rise of the Romanovs who acted as a service nobility to the tsars. Much of the old Romanov military's leadership were German or the descendants of Germans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But being "German" in this imperial context was also being Lutheran. The Romanov's extended limited toleration to the Lutheran faith, which stood in strong contrast to its growing persecution of the Latin faith (Catholics and Uniates) which St. Petersburg increasingly identified with rebellious Poles in the nineteenth century. The Baltic German community also self-presented itself as a loyal national community to the Romanovs. They had enjoyed a degree of privilege as imperial servitors, but the unification of Germany coupled with growing tensions between Berlin and St. Petersburg meant that this community presented itself as a different types of German than those in who lived in Bismarck's Germany.

Nonetheless, the leaders of this community also argued that German leadership was essential for the Empire's interests in the Baltic. The Baltic German elite controlled a disproportionate amount of land in the region, dominated the region's school system, and its ideological partisans considered the non-German peoples (however defined) of the Baltic as culturally and socially inferior. This threading the needle between subordinate imperial subjects and a dominant local elite was an unstable construction in the nineteenth century and did not survive the First World War. The Baltic Germans had the misfortune of not only being identified with the lost cause of the Kaiserreich-regardless of how loyal they were to the Empire- but their local domination of society was unthinkable given the post-1918 rise of national states. A good many Baltic Germans ended up as refugees in the various civil wars and conflicts that proliferated in the aftermath of the Russian Revolutions.

Many of these refugees ended up within Germany, which tended to identify citizenship on the basis of jus sanguinis (by blood), meaning a person could claim to be German by virtue of their heritage. This was not always a clear-cut case as some applicants might have claimed German descent and not have spoken much German but claimed German heritage to get out of what was a very violent period in the regions' history. By the same token, the 1920s also saw the advent of a more structured and restricted immigration system around the globe. In the case of the US, some "nations" were welcome, others were not under the Immigration Act of 1924. Some immigrants would try to game the system by hewing to what were the acceptable categories and avoiding those which had much greater barriers for entry into the US.

This is why it is a good rule of thumb to ask "who is doing the questioning?" when researching genealogical research and the subject if national identification comes up. National identity was not a neutral question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and people often had an interest in answering it to their advantage.