Last Tokens of an Almost Forgotten Life

 

The story of my godmother and her parents now seems such a far-removed part of my childhood. Having discovered, this month, what I now realize about the life of Genia's parents, Michael and Lydia Melnitchenko, leaves me in an almost childlike state of wonder, even after all these years since I last saw them. They had seemed, in that time long ago, to have simply faded away in all but my memories.

For closure, though I can't find the necessary records to build a family history reaching back any more generations—yet!—I wanted to at least locate where they were buried. Even though current travel restrictions limit my ability to visit their graves, I still wanted to find their location.

This attempt, however, met with some restrictions. For one thing, I have yet to locate any record of the date of Michael Melnitchenko's death. He surely died in New York City, his adopted home after leaving his Russian Empire roots in the Ukraine, and even after having moved to—and then from—Marseilles. But accessing New York City vital records presents a challenge all its own. All I had, besides a guess, was that doubtful World War II draft registration card with the offered date of birth of January 11, 1897. 

Finding any final details on Lydia Melnitchenko was just as difficult—although I knew in her case, on account of her difficulties with post-traumatic stress, records might be even harder to uncover. And yet, it was for Lydia, not Michael, that I located a possible entry in the Social Security Death Index, fixing her date of birth as March 2, 1899, and indicating her death as occurring in April of 1977.

Despite the lack of documentation on either of Genia's parents, I did have one other token of identification. Coming from a Russian heritage, each of them would have customarily included a patronymic form of their father's given name, embedded within their own name. Thus, I already had found records showing me to look for Michael Ivanivitch Melnitchenko. In Lydia's case, her petition for naturalization included an Americanized form of her father's name—as Theodore—telling me to look for a patronymic version of the Russian name Feodor. And her daughter's travel documents to Brazil revealed Lydia's maiden name to be Leonoff.

Still, flying otherwise blind except for those patronymic hints, it was possible to run into trouble. In fact, remembering Lydia's sister's name was Alexandra, I did locate some naturalization paperwork for an Alexandra Fedorovna Leonoff—right patronymic addition (despite misspelling)—except for one thing. That Alexandra was married; her maiden name was Danilchenko.

Even seeking burial information for Genia's Michael and Lydia presented challenges. Conveniently, just outside New York City there is one of the largest Russian Orthodox cemeteries in the United States. What were the chances that the Mikhail Ivanovich Melnichenko and Lydia Feodorovna Melnichenko buried there were one and the same as my Michael and Lydia?

A look at the dates was not encouraging. Mikhail was born January 26, 1897, and died August 8, 1972. The variation in spelling was likely due to the fact that people in a New York Russian cemetery might want to spell names the way they were spelled back home in Russia. But that date of birth? According to our Michael's draft card, his date of birth was January 11—fifteen days earlier.

For the two Lydias, the situation was much the same, with her social security record showing she was born March 2, 1899, and only giving a month and year of death: April 1977. As for the cemetery's headstone photo, that date of birth was March 15, not March 2—thirteen days later.

After having chased after—and fallen down—that research rabbit hole last weekend, bringing me on the grand tour of the devastation unleashed during the Russian Revolution, I did benefit from one observation. Although genealogical researchers in the western realm of the British Empire need only remember to adjust dates from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in the mid 1700s, apparently the Russians didn't tackle that adjustment until much later in their history—in 1918—and, for religious purposes, sometimes still employ the Old Style calendar.

While the calendar switch from Old Style to New Style should have meant a difference of eleven days, the variance between headstones and the few documents in which I could find their dates verified certainly isn't so standardized. Could this represent not a date of birth, but a date of baptism? Or could someone have handled the conversion inaccurately? Or is this just a case of mistaken identities—two couples by the names of Michael and Lydia whose dates inconveniently almost aligned?

Lacking further documentation, I have to leave open the possibility of such a coincidence. However,  I couldn't help but notice a few other details. The inclusion of their patronymics takes the edge off that "coincidence" argument, for one thing. But in addition, coming from the vantage point of a Russian Orthodox cemetery, it reveals one other detail I had been wondering about.

Melnitchenko—or any surname ending in -chenko—has always been a name which made me wonder just how "Russian" Michael and Lydia had been. True, there is more than one way to spell that surname Melnitchenko (the addition of a "t" seeming to be a customary American slip), and the surname distribution reveals quite a few Russians as well as Ukrainians claiming that name. And of course, when our Melnitchenkos left their homeland—wherever it was—they left as subjects of the then-falling Russian Empire.

Still, I found it particular gratifying, in examining those headstones, to see Lydia's patronymic name rendered as the Ukrainians would have spelled it, not the Russians. Remember, even in her hometown on the far end of the Black Sea—which, too, would have been swallowed up as part of the Russian Empire when she was born—by the time she left it, that ethnically-diverse city boasted a significant proportion of Ukrainian residents.

Perhaps, in the end, though I still can't find any documents linking the Melnitchenkos to the generations preceding them, it may turn out that Michael, Lydia, and Genia, who always listed themselves as Russian in origin, were actually ethnically Ukrainian, and only politically the subjects of the Russian tsar.

 

One Problem About Finding Our Roots

 

There's one problem with that big, happy, universal ideal of everyone wanting to find their roots: not everyone can do it.

Not, at least, now.

While there's been a noble effort mounted, over the past many decades, to digitize the world's records so we can piece together the story of families from every country, we still slant toward European-centric, Latin alphabet-oriented record sets. There still are some countries for which, at least at the repositories which cater to genealogists on this side of the world, there are absolutely no resources available.

Take my difficulty in researching my godmother's roots. While Genia Melnitchenko was obviously born to parents having a surname which is readily recognizable to Ukrainians and Russians, there is a hidden tangle embedded in her heritage: the origin of her mother.

Lydia Melnitchenko was born with a surname also sounding quite Russian—rendered phonetically as Leonoff when she arrived in the United States—but she was born in a city whose residents didn't, as the foundation of their native language, use the Russian (or even Ukrainian) Cyrillic alphabet. 

That would leave me—if I could access any of the records in the native language of the country where Lydia was born—trying to read a script which looks something like this:

როგორ კითხულობთ ამას?

Translation: "How do you read that?"

My question, precisely. Or, to get more particular about how to read such documents: how would I even be able to access such records? If you look at the world's premiere aggregator of documents of genealogical interest, there are absolutely no records from Georgia listed as available at FamilySearch.org. Yet.

That means wondering how to learn the language of the Georgians, with its mesmerizing script, is not a challenge worth tackling right now—for me, at least. Which is probably just as well: the Kartvelian languages which emerged from the people groups of the south Caucasus region are unlike any other, making it, by definition, one of the world's primary language families.

I did, in my original foray into the possibility of just how to proceed with fudging my way through Georgian documents—if there were any to be found, here on the other side of this quarantined earth—find some interesting reflections on the experience of learning such a unique language. One blogging student, after the disorienting experience of a first attempt at learning not the vocabulary, but merely the letters of the Georgian alphabet, realized this must be the same feeling experienced by young students who are tasked with their first exposure to reading—and that, in their native language. Incredibly, I managed to find a post by a linguist who blogged about the comparison of English and Georgian. And a few websites which offer to teach the hapless genealogist the Georgian language—or at least offer some fascinating tidbits about this language spoken by only four million people. 

Yes, there are really people out there writing about the Georgian language. Just not the people who would be most likely to cut the deal necessary to digitize the vital records which have become stock in trade for family history researchers pursuing their roots in a place like Georgia.

Ჯერჯერობით

The Knack of Being Nosy

 

Since the habit of flipping pages and being nosy has stood me in good stead while researching my godmother's father's personal history, I thought I'd extend the courtesy to Michael Melnitchenko's wife, as well.

The only reason I had learned anything at all about Lydia Melnitchenko was that she was the customary chaperone for my godmother, Genia, during her early years traveling as part of a ballet troupe. Just as every passage to America for French-born Genia required reams of immigration paperwork, because she was traveling internationally as a minor, the same documentation needed to be completed for her chaperone from Marseilles, Lydia.

In the stacks of records I could find for Genia, of course her mother was always listed by her married name. If I hoped to push back the family history yet another generation, I would need to obtain her mother's maiden name, which passenger lists seldom required. I did, however, locate it in a later set of records which provided resources for my research goal: United States immigration records and Social Security applications.

Though Genia was born in Marseilles, France, and lived there with her mother while her father was earning his living in the ocean-going shipping industry, the family still very much identified as Russians. For people of Russian heritage, this naming tradition became a two-step, family-linking process.

Once the Melnitchenkos finally settled in New York City after the second World War, from Genia's own Social Security application, I learned Lydia's maiden name: Leonoff. And, a bonus for those researching family with Russian heritage, I learned Lydia's possible father's given name as well, thanks to the patronymic naming system.

That tip came disguised in index cards typed out from information on United States immigration applications, in which the women had an odd addition to their name, in the form of a man's given name inserted between the woman's given name and surname. Not quite a bona fide patronymic system, but let's just say it was Americanized.

I had first seen this on the card typed up for Genia's immigration paperwork, in which her given name was written as "Olga Eugenia Michael." Michael, of course, was the Americanized form of her father's given name. Thus, when I found the same type of card for Lydia, listing her as "Lydia Theodore," I figured that must have been her father's given name—or at least its Americanized version.

Theodore, of course, would not be how the name was written or pronounced in Russian. It is more likely it would have taken the form Fyodor. Add to that the traditional Russian patronym for a daughter of Fyodor—Fyodorovna—and we get the idea of what maiden name Lydia might have carried, back in the homeland of her Russian roots: Lydia Fyodorovna Leonoff (or possibly Leonov).

Despite having deciphered just what Lydia's name at birth might have been, I still faced substantial obstacles in being able to locate any documents from that early stage in her life, given the turmoil she had suffered in her homeland. Still, I hoped there would be a way to uncover at least a little bit more of her story, knowing how much the stress had silenced her as her life wore on toward its end.

Truth be told, I had always hoped there would be a way to find any relatives for the family at all. I already knew that Genia was an only child, and presumed that her parents had been alone in coming to this country from war-torn Europe. I always harbored that dream of discovering another family member.

That's where the lesson of being nosy and learning to flip pages came in. Just like I had for researching Michael's ordeal in surviving the torpedo attack on the ship where he had been serving during the World War, I once again started flipping pages for other records in which I had found the family listed.

This time, it was on the record of the final arrival in America of Genia and her mother, that I flipped a page and discovered there might be another family member out there. Her name was Alexandra, and she lived back in Marseilles.