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.

 

Finding the Place Once Called Home

 

Finding the specific place of origin for our immigrant ancestors can be challenging. 

While as a general guide, we may know that an ancestor came from, say, Russia, when we consider just how large that country of origin might have been, we realize the size of the challenge facing us in our hope of narrowing the search to a specific city.

Furthermore, over time, locations sometimes underwent a change of identity—or even disappeared entirely—especially in war-torn regions and areas with border changes. And there is the burden of translating a place name from its spoken sound in one language to the way others heard the pronunciation, as rendered by the immigrant arriving in the new country.

So the question is: now that we've seen seaman Michael Melnitchenko arrive safely back at his home port in New York after the second World War, can we depend on the only two records we've found which reported his place of birth? Though the answer on each of the two documents we've found is different, at least they both approximate the same pronunciation. Let's see if that hint leads us to Michael's place of origin.

The first record we had found which provided a birth place for Michael Melnitchenko was a World War II draft registration card. Admittedly, I had my doubts that the card really was for our Michael. Though the middle name given had been poorly transcribed—as "Juan" instead of the more likely "Ivan"—the option of Ivan could have been an Americanized form of the patronym that Michael, as a typical Russian, might have used. But since the date of birth seemed to agree with other records, I'm willing to sweep all questions aside, at least while we explore the possibilities of a place of birth.

That first record stated Michael's place of birth was a city named "Nikolaiev, Russia."

The second mention we found was the passenger record listing his arrival back in New York City as a repatriated seaman, following the attack on the ship for which he had served as chief officer in 1943. That passenger record identified Michael's place of birth as "Necolaeff, Russia."

The problem was, once I tried finding either city in current records, I came up with zero results. There is no city called Nikolaiev, nor is there one called Necolaeff.

However, there is one city which could possibly substitute for those spelling variations, if we make a few allowances. The first is that we consider the phonetic similarities between the two spellings, and play loose with those details. The second is that we realize what the ears of English-speaking people might hear as the final syllable "-eff" might more likely be transliterated from a Russian spelling equivalent to "-ev."

One last detail: the only city name I could squeeze into a shape approximating either of our two options happened to be in a different country. That country, however, had long been occupied by Russia, thus rendering some cities in that country not one name, but two.

Thus, the seaport the Ukrainians call Mykolaiv was known for the entire time of Russian occupation as Nikolaev. 

If that was indeed the place of origin for our Michael Melnitchenko, there are some details which seem to corroborate this discovery. First of all, Nikolaev's long-standing history as a seaport and major ship-building center could possibly be the influence that led Michael to choose his occupation. Perhaps he followed in the footsteps of his own father. Given the position of Nikolaev in relation to the Russian Empire's ample grain exports from the nearby steppes, international commercial activity flourished by the late nineteenth century.

Another encouraging corroboration was that, despite the city being within what we now call Ukraine, at the time when Michael was born, almost two thirds of the city considered their ethnicity to be Russian, not Ukrainian. In all the documents identifying Michael Melnitchenko as a crew member of ocean-going vessels, he consistently reported himself to be Russian, and to speak the Russian language. Growing up in a city with such a history would seem plausible.

Of course, finding any records of Michael's family in such a city would present a challenge, as the government in charge of collecting those records is not the governmental body now responsible for that area. Furthermore, we can already surmise from the date of his daughter Genia's birth in France—January 6, 1924—that Michael and his wife had to have left Nikolaev some time before that point. Given the impetus of the Russian Revolution, the Melnitchenkos may have vacated their homeland long before Genia's birth.

There is one other detail which needs to be addressed, however: just how a seaman from the Russian Empire's Ukrainian coast came to marry a woman whose place of birth was on the very opposite side of the Black Sea.

 

Above: Excerpt from the November 23, 1943, passenger record of the S.S. John Rutledge, showing the entry for repatriated seaman Michael Melnitchenko, giving his place of birth as "Necolaeff." Image courtesy Ancestry.com.

 

Where to Go When You Don't Know Where to Go

 

You're desperate to discover more about your family's roots, so you're researching a new-to-you location, perhaps the homeland where your immigrant family originated. For documents, records, or simply the history of this new place, where do you go first? What's the best way to get yourself oriented to the location of reliable information resources?

Seems like I'm continually in that research dilemma. Last month, in pressing behind that 1870 brick wall for African American lineages, it took a week of instruction to give me hope that I can, indeed piece together a family tree for King Stockton using available documents. As for this month's research challenge—finding more details about the family of my godmother Genia Melnitchenko—I am once again in the same predicament. I have never before tried my hand at researching the type of ethnic heritage her parents claimed.

Well, let me amend that: I only knew what they claimed as it was reported to me in my childhood by my own mother, Genia's friend from those early years of her dance career in New York City. For a child, remembering all those details may seem hard, but actually, there wasn't much to tell. Genia's folks, I was told, were Russian, but they fled their homeland during some catastrophic time in history. All I knew was that they ran away to France, where Genia was born and raised.

I knew, also, that Genia's dad had been a sailor. I presumed, in my childhood simplicity, that meant he worked on sea-going vessels. In fact, my mother figured that perhaps his occupation was what enabled the couple to escape their homeland in the midst of crisis.

Those few details, however, were all I had to work with. There is no one left to ask—they are all long gone now. And how was a child to know whether the language those people spoke was indeed a bona fide dialect of Russian? I had to take their word for it.

So now, I start where I always start. First, I like to get a feel for the origin of a surname by using a few online resources specifically designed for that purpose. Then, I move on to resources which would provide an overview of researching that area; Cyndi's List for general direction, and the FamilySearch Wiki for pertinent guidance are most helpful there. As I compile my list of promising resources and begin the task of familiarizing myself with the basics of a region's history, I begin to get a sense of where to take my research next.

Let's see what can be found about Genia's birth surname, Melnitchenko. While many people use Ancestry.com on a regular basis, it may not be widely known that they do offer an overview of surname histories. I find these by googling the surname, rather than searching directly on the website. This time, when I searched for the surname Melnitchenko, however, I was dismayed to see Ancestry's response:

 

Sorry, indeed. This was not a promising sign.

The website did redeem itself, though, with a clickable lead to a listing of all people in the Social Security Death Index filing a claim containing the surname Melnitchenko. Thankfully, there were a few of them listed, including some from the New York City area where Genia and her parents once lived. That's a start.

Moving to another favorite website I use for a research overview on surnames, the Forebears site on surname meaning and distribution regretfully noted, "The meaning of this surname is not listed." Fortunately, they did provide a distribution listing and map. From that, I could see that the most likely place in all the world to find someone with that surname Melnitchenko would be...right here in the United States.

What happened to Russia?

Perhaps yet another go-to website has failed me. The Forebears website only listed one solitary entry for Melnitchenkos in Russia. There weren't even any spectacular entries for the eastern European countries—eight mentions for Estonia, and just one for Ukraine. That was it.

At that point, I needed to rewind back to the most basic of basic steps. I headed to Google to do a simple search on the surname itself. What should I find there, but a suggestion for an alternate spelling: Melnichenko, omitting that "t" ending the second syllable. 

Retracing my steps with that spelling variation vastly improved the reply on the Forebears distribution readout. Now, there were thirteen thousand families showing with that surname in Russia, and fourteen hundred in Belarus. There were entries for Melnichenkos in several other countries now emerged from the former Soviet Union, as well as an entry for a place I never even heard of—Transnistria.

Suddenly, my research world got a whole lot bigger.

I took a moment to see how many other spelling variations I could collect. Frankly, Ancestry's feeble attempt at providing options was laughable—including Mitchener and Pellicano—but I also knew that Wikipedia often has information on specific surnames. That turned out to be a great lead, providing yet another way to reformat the spelling of that surname I knew as Melnitchenko: why not substitute a "y" for the "i" in that same second syllable?

According to Wikipedia, the surname Melnychenko is one often seen as a spelling variant not only in Russia and Belarus, but in Ukraine. In fact, it is attributed as a surname of origin in the Ukrainian language. While my godmother's surname might well have indicated her Russian origin, as I had been told in childhood by my mother, this opened up another possibility. The Wikipedia article handily even provided me with the Ukrainian version of writing that name: Мельниченко.

I was already getting in the mood to delve into this newfound ethnic possibility when I recalled yet another unsubstantiated prompting. This one was dragged out of the deep recesses of my memory-of-useless-trivia, but one which I had tied to my godmother's name when I first saw it. During the most recent of news reports of the controversy involving Russia and the Crimean peninsula they dispute with the Ukrainian government, I had discovered a book written about the history of the Ukrainian struggle for independence. While I had had no compelling reason to be interested in the intricacies of eastern European diplomacy—well, let's just come out and call it brute force—there was one little detail that did catch my eye when I ran across that book.

The author's name was Melnitchenko.

Have you ever bought a book, simply because the author's name matched an unusual surname that belonged in your family's history?