Dead ends on all searches for name

Question

I've been trying to find anything about my great-grandfather Solomon Cheplivourstza--the surname has been spelled several different ways, even on the same document. He died in about 1915 and there is no trace of his existence other than a single photo.

I have never been able to find out anything about his family or where he came from--searches of his name (including "fuzzy" searches) come up empty.

I do have a copy of a Russian-issued passport for his wife (my great-grandmother) Miriam Cheplivourstza nee Soifer (she was actually Ukrainian, from Mohyliv-Podilskyi, but Russian Empire at the time); see attached. When I found this I realized that as per the Cyrillic writing it was actually probably originally closer to "Cherlivoursa" or something like that--but that still gave me no leads.

(FWIW, searches on JewishGen show a couple of other people searching that name; they're cousins of mine and have come up as empty as I have.)

Does anyone have any ideas where I can go from here?

I've tried spelling variations, including Soundex. The only family we know is his wife (my great-grandmother, who died in 1959 & is the only surname info I have), his daughter (my grandmother), and his 3 sons. The big problem is that this all takes place in Mohyliv-Podilskyi >100 years ago. IDK if there even WERE street addresses let alone what they'd be. Plus, any references would be in Cyrillic. We've been searching for info about him for at >20 years and have nothing. But what's really frustrating is that we can't even find possible family of his.

I have pretty much everything that it's likely possible to find on the US side. As far as Solomon Cheplivourstza, US addresses won't help--he died years before his family came here. His eldest child (my grandmother) was six when he died, so the only one I know of in the US who knew him was my great-grandmother, who died in '59. My grandmother died in '06, and I never heard any stories about her father's family from her.

Answer 1

This is a good example of how the big-box genealogy sites don't serve us well for doing genealogical research. They expect us to search for people by name, when their names can be one of the most variable things about them.

Even though sites don't make it easy, you'll have to employ different search techniques and research strategies for finding things.

• Work up a list of all known name variants and search for each one. learn how to use wildcards to replace vowels if the vowels vary wildly, or to search for the name with the begining and end but with an asterisk in the middle.

• Think about how the name would have sounded to clerks and enumerators and how they might have spelled it and search for those variants too.

• For searching in historical newspapers, learn about getting around difficulties in text generated by OCR (optical character recognition).

• Make a list of things about your great-grandfather that can act as identifiers, and search for those instead. (ex: search for all men in a census county born in a certain date range, with a birthplace of Russia or whatever place it would have been known at at the time the record was created)

• Search for members of the household that have different surnames (e.g. married daughters who might be listed as survivors in an obituary)

• If you know the street address (in the US / new country), search for neighbors, then browse from there. Make use of the numerical (street) listings in city directories.

• Make a list of known associates and search for them.

• Learn to evalutate record sets by the time they cover (date range) and the locations they cover. Learn how the records are arranged, and what finding aids and indexes may exist for them. Get familiar with Soundex and other means of dealing with name variations when searching.

Resources:

• Stephen P. Morse's One-Step Web Pages has many tools, including a section on Dealing with Characters in Foreign Alphabets and on Phonetic Matching and Soundex
• YouTube: Smarter Searching: Look for Records Not People, a video by Ancestry's Crista Cowan from her Barefoot Genealogist playlist
• Win the OCR Text Battle - Change The Letters in Your Search article at The Ancestor Hunt
• QuickLesson 11: Identity Problems & the FAN Principle a case study by Elizabeth Shown Mills on her Evidence Explained website, finding a woman named Mary Smith