Zigmas Griganavicius’ Bonegilla card records that he was sent to Mount Gambier in South Australia, on 9 January 1948, to work with the State Department of Woods and Forests there. He was one of a group of at least 32 sent there.
He must have taken one look at Mount Gambier and the work expected, and turned around. He was back at the Bonegilla camp 6 days later, on 15 January.
There is nothing on his selection for Australia file to indicate why he might have found what was expected of him so difficult. He was young, having 5 months before turned only 20. The interviewers judge him suitable for heavy labour. At 5 feet 10 inches (1.8 metres) tall and weighing 180 pounds (82 kilos), according to his Bonegilla card, he should have been sturdy enough.
Zigmas Griganavičius photo from his Bonegilla card
He had 4 years of primary education only, so he was unlikely to be looking for a more skilled job. Could he have decided to move away from a personal issue?
Six weeks later, another job was found for him. He was sent back to South Australia, to Mr RO Burgh of Clare, to pick fruit. The Clare name will be very well known to Australian wine drinkers, so he may have been helping with the grape harvest. At the time, but no longer, the Clare region also was a major producer of fruits for drying, such as apricots in addition to suitable grapes.
Clare must have been kinder to Zigmas than Mount Gambier, because his next job, according to a card kept by the Department of Immigration, Adelaide Office, was with the South Australian Railways (SAR) based in Clare.
At some stage in 1949 he was sent to Leigh Creek, 400 km north of Clare, to work as a tractor driver for another State instrumentality, the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA). Leigh Creek was known for the mining of brown coal then used to generate the State’s electricity – in a State which now has generates three-quarters of its electricity from renewables, wind and solar.
The Department of Immigration card records that he was released from his “two year” contract to work where sent on the same date as most others from the First Transport, on 30 September 1949.
It also records that his personal file was sent to the Department’s Melbourne Office on 10 October 1950, indicating that Zigmas had moved there also.
We next come across Zigmas on the occasion of his marriage, on 7 April 1956, to Ramūnė Elena Barkutė. The wedding was celebrated in the church of St John the Evangelist in East Melbourne. As explained in this blog’s entry for Napoleonas Butkūnas, this church had been adopted by Melbourne’s Lithuanian community. The entry for Antanas Varapnickas points out that this may have been because a priest called Pranas Vaseris had moved there.
The Barkus family was well known to Melbourne’s Lithuanian residents since Liudas Barkus was actively involved in various committees of the time.
Zigmas became an Australian citizen on 11 December 1957, when living on Earl Street, in Melbourne’s inner southeast suburb of Windsor. Only one electoral roll with his details has been digitised by Ancestry. It’s a 1963 roll showing him now living on Clayton Road, Clayton, when this was a new, outer suburb of southeast Melbourne. He was working as a wood machinist. Ramune had become an Australian by then too and was working as a clerk, telling us that she was highly literate in English.
There’s only one digitised roll because two years later, the family left Australia for life in the United States. They departed on 18 June 1965. In its issue of 5 July 1965, Mūsų Pastogė reported that, in a letter written from a ship in Sydney Harbour, Zigmas and Ramunė regretted that they were not able to say goodbye to all of their family members due to the illness of their children. They were planning to start their American life with a stopover in Chicago.
Zigmas was born to Ona, previously Pukaitė, and her husband, Juozas Griganavičius, on 12 August 1927. He was born in the Riklikai village in the Ukmergė district. This was recorded on one of those American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) DP Registration Records that we are so fortunate to have still in the Arolsen Archives. His usual occupation was recorded as mokinys, Lithuanian for student. This makes sense when you consider that he was only 12 years old when Germany invaded neighbouring Poland to start World War II during his summer holidays from school.
Rasa has found an online database for notable residents of Anykščiai, a winter resort city about 100 km due north of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, if more by road. One of those notable people is an Albertas Griganavičius, whose parents happen to be Ona and Juozapas (the long from of Juozas). His brother Zigmas was born in 1927, like our Zigmas.
Albertas in described in an English translation as “Physician, civic activist, memoirist”. Later, the biography mentions that Albertas was a board member of the Lithuanian Neurosurgeons Society. Yes, a brain surgeon, if not a rocket scientist …
There were 5 children in this family altogether. The eldest, Petras (1923-2001) is described as a mechanical engineer and emigrant in Chicago. The next in age is Vytautas (1925-2008), who became a priest. Zigmas was the middle child. Next came Marija (b 1931), with the married name of Stalioraitienė, who became a medical professional. Albertas, born in 1934, died in 2015.
The database finds nearly 8,000 words to say about Albertas, when translated into English, including a few about his family. That’s much more than we are going to devote to Zigmas here, but we are now not surprised if Zigmas reacted badly to finding that he was expected to spend the next 2 years chopping down trees.
Juozapas or Juozas was a farmer, manager of the Svirnai manor farm and chairman of the Kavarskas parish committee. The Web describes Svirnai manor as a historic estate in the Anykščiai District, first recorded in 1593. Its ownership fluctuated frequently between different families until the 19th century, when the Tanski family acquired it. They were aristocrats originally from the Mazovia region of Poland. From 1944, with the Soviet invasion, the estate belonged to the State, of course, and probably became a collective farm or part of one.
Ona was no mere housewife and mother, either. The biography of her youngest son describes her as an educator, civic activist, and a tretininkė, a Catholic layperson who followed a rule of life approved by the Church. In addition to such devotions as daily prayers and fasting, the life focusses heavily on charity, community service, and helping the poor.
The influence of his family on Zigmas might have made him much happier helping with a harvest, probably a frequent activity in Lithuania, than doing what was expected of him first in Australia.
Remembering that Petras was described as a mechanical engineer in Chicago, he may well have felt much more settled into his preferred profession than Zigmas felt while working as a wood machinist in Melbourne. Petras may have offered to help his brother find more satisfying work. While Ramūnė had family in Melbourne, Zigmas’ family in Chicago must have won the discussions.
In Albertas’ biography, Zigmas is described as a businessman in Chicago. He had moved to the Los Angeles district before he committed himself to becoming an American citizen on 17 September 1976.
The witnesses to his petition to naturalization swore that they had known him since 1971, indicating when he and his family might have left Chicago.
Various entries in Ancestry and Newspapers.com do not tell us much more about Zigmas than some changes of address. We do not know what business this “businessman” was conducting, or if he moved to another line of work.
There is confirmation of Ramune’s death on 20 February 2005, when she was only 68. She had been born in Lithuania in 1936, so was only 20 at the time of her marriage and 7 years younger than Zigmas. They had two sons, Victor and Edward in the English spelling, the children who were sick when the family sailed from Sydney Harbour. All of this is in an obituary published in the Los Angeles Times on 27 February 2005.
According to an entry on the Find A Grave Website, Zigmas died on Christmas Day in 2016, yet the photograph of the plaque for Ramune and Zigmas is blank where his details ought to be. The plaque tells us the Ramune preferred her middle name of Elena. There is no accessible evidence elsewhere in support of the death date for Zigmas. He was to be buried with her in the Laurel Cemetery, Murrieta, Riverside County, California.
The Griganavicius plaque in the Laurel Cemetery, with Zigmas' birth details only.
If accurate, he had passed his 89th birthday at the time of his death. He had been lost to Australia, though, for more than 50 years.
SOURCES
‘AEF DP Registration Record, Griganavičius, Zigmas’ Folder DP1297, names from GRIGAL, ALBERT to GRYGIENCZA, Michal (2), 3.1.1.1 Postwar Card File / Postwar Card File (A-Z) / Names in "phonetical" order from G, DocID 67239918, ITS/Arolsen Archives https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/document/67239918, accessed 5 October 2026.
Anykštėnų biografijų žinynas (Biographical Directory of People from Anykščiai, in Lithuanian) ‘Albertas Griganavičius’ https://www.anykstenai.lt/asmenys/asm_print.php?id=113, accessed 6 October 2026.
Australia, Electoral Rolls, 1903-1980, ‘Zigmas Griganavicius’ https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1207/records/91133150?tid=&pid=&queryId=31519525-0f15-4e34-8679-740afa5e3900&_phsrc=mmH97&_phstart=successSource, accessed 6 October 2026.
Bonegilla Migrant Experience, Bonegilla Identity Card and Memory Collection, ‘Zigmas Griganavicius’ https://idcards.bonegilla.org.au/record/203643701, accessed 6 October 2026.
Commonwealth of Australia Gazette (1958) ‘Certificates of Naturalization’ Canberra, ACT, 1 May, p 1362 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/240891896/25975951, accessed 5 October 2026.
Find A Grave, ‘Zigmas Griganavicius’ https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/174887914/zigmas-griganavicius, accessed 6 October 2026.
Los Angeles Times (2005) ‘Obituaries, Funeral Announcements, Griganavicius, Elana Ramune’ https://www.newspapers.com/image/192635355/?article=5299ff31-f626-457b-98cc-52114ee0ed77&focus=0.26300535,0.21829554,0.38208008,0.3228447&xid=3355, accessed 6 October 2026.
Mūsų Pastogė (1956) ‘Nauja Lietuviska Seima’ (‘New Lithuanian Family’, in Lithuania) Sydney, NSW, 2 May, p4 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/259365600, accessed 6 October 2026.
Mūsų Pastogė (1965) ‘Kiek As Sužinojau!’ (‘As far as I know’, in Lithuanian) Sydney, NSW, 5 July, p 6 https://www.spauda2.org/musu_pastoge/archive/1965/1965-07-05-MUSU-PASTOGE.pdf, accessed 6 October 2026.
National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A11772, Migrant Selection Documents for Displaced Persons who travelled to Australia per General Stuart Heintzelman departing Bremerhaven 30 October 1947, 1947-1947; 540, GRIGANAVICIUS Zigmas DOB 12 August 1927, 1947-1947 recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=5005777, accessed 6 October 2026.
National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, South Australia Branch; D4881, Alien registration cards, alphabetical series, 1946-1976; GRIGANAVICIUS ZIGMAS, GRIGANAVICIUS Zigmas - Nationality: Lithuanian - Arrived Fremantle per General Stuart Heintzelman 28 November 1947 recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=7199430, accessed 6 October 2026.
National Archives of Australia: Migrant Reception and Training Centre, Bonegilla [Victoria]; A2571, Name Index Cards, Migrants Registration [Bonegilla] 1947-1956; GRIGANAVICIUS ZIGMAS, GRIGANAVICIUS, Zigmas : Year of Birth - 1927 : Nationality - LITHUANIAN : Travelled per - GEN. HEINTZELMAN : Number – 914, 1947-1949 recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=203643701, accessed 6 October 2026.
US, Naturalization Record Indexes, 1791-1992 (Indexed in World Archives Project) ‘Zigmas Griganavicius’ https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1629/records/7943978?tid=&pid=&queryId=a91a67c2-25b6-44ce-8707-e756664dff1a&_phsrc=bUj251&_phstart=successSource, accessed 6 October 2026.
Wikipedia ‘Leigh Creek, South Australia’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Creek,_South_Australia, accessed 5 October 2026.
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