I keep hitting roadblocks researching my grandparents and their ancestors.

[sybylla]

2. The frustration is real.

It's also doubly hard if you're dealing with cyrillic or other alphabets.

I got lucky with a family in Hungary. The census had both alphabets and all entries in 3 languages, one of them being German. I could read through the entire census for the city they were from and have a chance of finding them.

Have you tried the old RootsWeb bulletin boards that became part of Ancestry? In the old days, you could look for a Lithuanian help page. There you could be given likely birthname possibilities, links to possible resources in English, translation help, and more.

I got a load of help on my Swiss ancestry at RootsWeb.