This photo shows the four Sibul brothers from Estonia: Karl, Heino, Ilo and Ago Sibul. Don’t you just love their adorable matching sailor outfits! The boys were born in 1904, 1905, 1908 and 1911, so I guess the photo was taken during the WWI years.
My first go-to search for Estonian genealogy is through Geni.com since many Estonians build their family trees there. In addition, I found quite a bit about them on the internet.
The four boys were the sons of Karl Eduard Sibul (1878-1945) and Rosalie née Mihkelson (1877-1954).
Their father Karl Eduard was a medical doctor and quite a renowned one. He became the first Estonian CMD of a major hospital in the Estonian capital in the 1920s. It was under his management that the Central Hospital of Tallinn became a state-of-the-art medical institution.
Education was valued in the Sibul family, and at least 3 of the four brothers graduated from university: Karl with a degree in engineering, Ago in business management, and Ilo with a medical degree like his father.
Heino Sibul
Heino Sibul (born in 1905) is the only one I have barely found anything on. According to a newspaper article about their father, he married a Russian woman and moved to Russia. But I don’t know when that happened, where they settled down or if they had any children.
Karl Sibul
Karl Sibul, the oldest brother and the engineer, was born on December 27, 1904, in Tartu. He fled in 1944 as Estonia had become the battlefield of the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the latter was firming its grip on Estonia. He ended up in a refugee camp in northern Germany. With his wife Johanna he emigrated as displaced persons to Detroit in the United States. He passed away in December 1973, and his obituary in the expat Estonians’ newspaper Free Estonian Word mentioned that he and his wife had moved to New Orleans after retirement. Karl had been widowed for a year and was planning to move back to Detroit to be closer to friends and family. Such a pity that the obituary fails to mention the names of his sons.
Ilo Sibul
While Karl was eager to get out of Soviet Estonia, his brother Ilo Sibul repatriated to Soviet Estonia in 1947. Ilo had graduated from Tartu Univeristy with a degree in medical science in 1932 and a PhD in 1936. He was a born academic, soon lecturing in the universities in Estonia and Thübingen, Germany. Whether it was his (or his wife’s) political views (as was rumoured), or Ilo’s dream of professorship in science, or both, that prompted him to return, we’ll never know. He definitely made his dream career come true in Soviet Estonia and has been celebrated as one of the most important scientists in biochemistry and sport medicine in Estonia.
He even has his Wikipedia page. He passed away in January 1979.
Ago Sibul
The youngest brother Ago Sibul was born on September 16, 1911, in Tartu. I could find his photo in the Estonian online Archives from when he was studying economics and business administration at the Tartu University.
He married Leida née Anderson in the 1940s and they had three children, one of them, Lembit Sibul, was a known humorist and actor. Ago passed away in October 2002.
I have uploaded the boys’ photo to Geni.com and hope to make contact with their descendants.
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