US President Donald Trump has nominated lawyer Keith Noreika, a specialist in banking supervision and financial regulation with Lithuanian roots, to become the next US ambassador to Vilnius. His nomination must still be approved by the US Senate.
Keith Noreika graduated from Harvard Law School. During Trump’s first administration, he served for six months in 2017 as the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a US Treasury bureau responsible for banking supervision and employing around 4,000 staff. If confirmed, he would become the first non-career diplomat to serve as US ambassador to Lithuania. Trump has also appointed non-career diplomats to ambassadorial posts in Latvia and Estonia.
Publicly available information indicates that Noreika was born and raised in Pennsylvania, where Lithuanian emigres began settling in significant numbers in the late 19th century.
Noreika himself has referred to his Lithuanian roots in an interview with the international financial law publication IFLR. In 2017, he took part in a fintech conference in Vilnius at the invitation of Lithuania’s Finance Ministry. “I am going there as a private citizen to share my observations on the interaction between financial technology and banking, and I am happy to do so given my Lithuanian heritage,” he told IFLR. During the same visit, Noreika also delivered a lecture to students at Vilnius University's Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Although Lithuania does not otherwise feature prominently in his publicly available biography, a closer look reveals information about his father, Alexander J Noreika, who died in 2014. An obituary published by James J Terry Funeral Home stated that, instead of flowers, donations in Alexander J Noreika’s memory could be made to St Casimir’s Church in Philadelphia or to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. St Casimir’s is a Lithuanian church that holds a special place in the history of Lithuanian Americans as one of the first and oldest diaspora parishes in the Diocese of Scranton. The obituary also notes that Noreika’s father, who grew up in South Philadelphia, attended St Casimir School, the first Lithuanian school in Philadelphia. He later studied at South Philadelphia High School and earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Drexel University. The obituary further states that he had three children: Gloriana, Maryellen and Keith.
Further traces of Noreika’s family history emerge through records on the genealogy website Geni.
It’s important to note that Geni is not considered among the most authoritative genealogy sources, as it operates on a Wikipedia-style model that allows users and genealogy enthusiasts to edit and add information. According to the site, Noreika’s paternal grandfather was Alexander C Noreika, who was born in Philadelphia in 1908.
His parents – Keith Noreika’s great-grandparents – were Anthony (Antanas) Noreika and Apolonia Noreika (Apolonija Noreikienė). Their birthplace is listed as Kaunas Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire.
Information about Noreika’s great-grandfather is also corroborated by a copy of his 1933 naturalisation document available on the genealogy website Ancestry.
The document states that Antanas was born in Kaunas in 1875 and married Apolonija in 1902. Later that same year, the couple arrived in the United States by ship.
The document also lists two children: Anthony and Alexander. The latter was the grandfather of Keith Noreika, now nominated to serve as US ambassador to Lithuania. This article was prepared with contributions from Stephen Nauyokas, one of the founders of the Lithuanian Heritage Project.
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