Česlovas Gedgaudas

Česlovas Gedgaudas
Born	1909 Kaunas, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	1986 Los Angeles, California, United States
Nationality	Lithuanian
Alma mater	University of Paris
Occupation(s)	Diplomat, translator
Notable work	In the Search of Our Past

Česlovas Gedgaudas (1909–1986) was a Lithuanian diplomat, translator, polyglot, and amateur historian. He is best known for his pseudohistorical book In the Search for Our Past, in which he promoted the claims of Jurate Rosales and Aleksandras Račkus that the Goths and Vandals were Baltic peoples, and not Germanic or Slavic.

Biography

Gedgaudas was born to the noble house of Gedgaudai. His father, Mykolas "Mikas" Gedgaudas, was an artillery commander who participated in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence.

Gedgaudas attended and graduated from the Institute of Political Science at the University of Paris. He later worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania and the Lithuanian delegation in Rome. From 1945 to 1952, he lived in Paris, working as a translator at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France. During these years, he expanded his knowledge of Indo-European languages at the Sorbonne. (Gedgaudas wrote that he knew fourteen languages, nine of them classical.) He was writing his doctoral thesis on comparative linguistics, but it was never finished.

Later in his life, Gedgaudas moved to the United States, living in Chicago and California.