Twin Cousins?

 

The value to a family historian of finding a document which included not only country of birth, but city as well, cannot be understated. Finding information on Russian immigrant sailor Michael Melnitchenko was not difficult, thanks to his frequent appearance on lists for crew members of ships coming in and out of the port of New York, but they were not the fine details a genealogist would prefer to gather.

All I could tell from his occupational records was that his age placed his year of birth approximately in 1897. I knew, also, that he sometimes went by his patronym—written by Americans as Ivanivitch—or at the least, that the patronym was represented by what we would consider a middle initial.

And here was, out of the blue, a draft registration card for someone with nearly the same name—Michael Ivan Melnitchenko—also born in 1897. But in this case, the document added month and day of birth, plus the name of the specific city.

A genealogist could covet a discovery like that.

As it turned out—you can be sure I scoured every crew listing I had found on our Michael—there was a reliable record for his full date of birth. That date appeared, after he had petitioned to Americanize his surname, on a naturalization card in 1953—and not in the Pennsylvania of this other Michael's draft card, but listing our Michael's known address in New York City. The date of birth? January 11, 1897.

But wait! That was the same date listed on the other Michael's draft information in Pennsylvania: January 11, 1897.

While, before this point, it might have been possible to consider that the two Michaels could have been related—possibly two cousins both named after the same grandfather—the patronym would have complicated that consideration. But adding in the identical date of birth, I had this sinking feeling I was looking at two records for one man.

What was a New York sailor doing on the far end of Pennsylvania?

This is where I started delving into every possible exploration of this Pennsylvania puzzle. I looked up everything I could find on Michael's employer, the West Hickory Tanning Company. I learned everything from their being named as a defendant in a government anti-trust suit in the 1920s, to the tragic injuries befalling some of their employees in 1940 in the midst of building a new warehouse for the expanding company. I learned that the West Hickory Tanning Company dealt exclusively in hemlock dry hide product, and that their sales rep was a company located in Boston.

Perhaps that was the only reasonable link: that the company shipped their product via the Great Lakes up to the Saint Lawrence seaway and then down the Atlantic coast to Boston. How far we reach to make an unlikely scenario fit.

Whatever the story, there was one research glitch which I failed to address. Apparently, in digitizing some of the draft records for a few states, including Pennsylvania, the reverse of one card was linked to the front of the next card. Going back to check, sure enough, the card for Michael in Forest County had, for its reverse, the height and weight data for someone whose card was stamped by the draft board in Pittsburgh. The card I would be more interested in was attached to the record of a man living in Philadelphia, but looking closely at the stamp on the reverse, it was for Forest County, on almost the opposite end of the state.

That card, more to the point, contained the description of a man who stood five feet and eight inches, with a weight of 170. More to our liking.

Still, as I scoured all the records, I did notice one other detail. In the earliest of the ship's listings I could find for Michael, even he had listed his height as a taller figure: five feet and ten inches in 1924. Perhaps his occupational hazards over the years had weathered him in more ways than one.

That, however, was not the only occupational hazard Michael Melnitchenko had encountered during his long career crossing the Atlantic. In double-checking all the crew listings I could find for him, my eye once again had caught that unusual listing which contained Michael's name in 1943. It wasn't the typical listing of crew members, but one in which he was the sole entry on a page labeled "Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States." Why was a sailor entered on the passenger list for the S.S. John Rutledge?

It was on that form that, for place of birth, not only was the usual answer—Russia—given, but this time the listing also gave a city: Necolaeff. Turning back to that Pennsylvania draft registration card, I double checked the place of birth given there. That time, it was spelled Nikolaiev. For me, that was close enough—likely two different attempts at spelling a foreign name phonetically.

That, however, did not explain the scribbles and scrawled notes on the rest of that entry for Michael in the Alien Passengers manifest. Other than the startling note, "TORP," the comment, "repatriated seaman" also begged explanation. 

You know I had to follow up on that one. And the more I searched, the less the story seemed to add up.

Above: More to my liking, this reverse of the scanned card for Michael Ivan Melnitchenko, attached in error to the subsequent record, shows the local draft board where he would most likely have reported in April, 1942; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

 

One Name, Two People

 

One of the benefits embedded in the otherwise difficult challenge of researching my godmother's Russian heritage was a naming device often used by that people group. Broadly speaking, patronyms provide the incorporation of more than one generation's identity in a specific person's name. There are patronymic naming devices in many different heritages, but in the Russian heritage, the patronymic becomes an official part of a person's name, both in documents and when addressing a person verbally.

In the Russian tradition, the placement of that "middle" name—the patronym—reveals the connection to a person's father. The patronym thus is a combination of the name of the father and a suffix signifying "son of" (-ovich) or "daughter of" (-ovna), identifying two persons with that one person's name. In researching my godmother's father, Michael Melnitchenko, discovering the ship's manifest listing him as a crew member, though solely with his patronym and surname—"Ivanivitch Melnitchenko"—made me wonder if Ivan was, indeed, Michael's father's name.

Finding Michael Melnitchenko in other documents, even with the "middle initial" of "I," seemed to confirm I was following the right person. After all, how many people could there be, using a name like that?

That sense of research confidence should have been my warning that, perhaps, I was being lulled into a dangerous lack of skepticism. Just when we think we've got the case all but closed, something is sure to pop up and throw us a curve.

Sure enough, somehow I did encounter a document which made me question the assumption that I was viewing records for the one and only Michael Melnitchenko.

It was a World War II draft registration document which pulled me up short. That I even found the thing bordered on the impossible, for it was indexed at Ancestry.com as "Michael Juan Melnitchenko"—a sure sign of an unlikely culture mash-up. Upon inspection of the actual digitization, the "Juan," as I suspected, turned out to be "Ivan," a much more realistic match for someone with a surname like Melnitchenko.

Since I knew very little else about the man, other than approximations of the year of his birth from the ages he reported on the multiple crew listings I had located, all I could determine was that Michael was born about 1897—in Russia. Here, however, was a draft registration form for a Michael with a shortened form of what I presumed was his patronymic "Ivanivitch" and that same year of birth. What could possibly go wrong?

I always like to examine every line of a document before adding it to the collection of verifications for a given ancestor, and this was no exception. The more I looked, the more questions I couldn't deny were popping up—and, I have to admit, plaguing me with doubts that I had found the right man.

The draft card, for instance, had what looked like a reasonable approximation of the name I was seeking as well as the year of birth—not to mention, including not only the birthplace in Russia, but providing the name of a specific town—but I couldn't help noticing that this was not someone who resided in New York City. Forget that: here was a document signed April 27, 1942, when surely our Michael would be away at sea, earning his living.

The Michael in this registration card reported an address in West Hickory, Pennsylvania. Not only was that a location not in New York, but it was clear on the other side of the very wide state of Pennsylvania. Even worse, for occupation, this man had listed "tanner." Delving into the details on the reverse side of the card, I could see that this Michael had reported his height as five feet and eleven inches, with a weight of 181.

I remembered seeing such details on some crew lists, and flew back to those records to double check the stats. Sure enough, while Michael the tanner was five feet eleven, Michael the chief mate was five eight and 172—a different profile, indeed.

The more I puzzled over this one, the more convinced I became that I was looking at records for two different Michael Melnitchenkos, despite both being sons of Ivan. That meant I'd have to let go of my delicious find of the place of birth in Nikolaiev, Russia.

Still, the more I looked at the collection of documentation I had found, the more puzzled I became about the whole mess. Something was just not adding up in the narrative about the life of Michael Melnitchenko, at least in the pile of data amassed so far. There were a few other details which demanded I follow up on them. Embedded within his story, I wondered if there were yet another story. 

Above: Top line from the 1942 U.S. Registration Card for Michael Ivan Melnitchenko of West Hickory, Forest County, Pennsylvania; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

 

A Sea-Faring Life

 

The key to unlocking the hidden story of someone's family through the generations is to remember that genealogy represents a chain of events. That chain is best examined when we start at the end and work our way, step by step, backward in time.

So it is with discovering the story of my godmother's family. Though she was, in my ten-year-old eyes, the equivalent of Cinderella's own fairy godmother, my Genia the ballerina came from a family with real flesh-and-bone stories, some of them undoubtedly tragic—and almost none of them known to me, the child who had met Genia's parents so long ago.

While it was quite difficult for me, as a child, to discover much about Genia's mother Lydia in her incapacitated state in old age, I remember so clearly Genia's father. It was he who usually met us at the train station where we arrived from our suburban home about a half hour's ride from the big city. He was the one who would navigate us along the teeming Manhattan sidewalks, leading us to his small apartment perched high above the bustling street below.

We would talk almost all the way, mostly my mom catching him up on news while my sister and I scurried along close behind them. I clearly remember looking at the leathery back of his neck, below his seaman's cap, and wondering what life had been like for him.

Now, after all those years, that I've taken up the notion to find out for myself about the Melnitchenkos, it isn't necessarily the wealth of digitized documents that may make this quest far easier than it would otherwise have been. It was Michael Melnitchenko's choice of occupation which provides me with a way to trace at least part of his life.

Michael—or, likely, Mikhail—was a seaman.

When, as a child, I first visited the Melnitchenko household in New York City, I had no idea Genia's father's name was Michael. For a child, an adult like that would of course be addressed only as Mister—despite the fact that I always called Genia by her name. That was, after all, what my mother did. 

Years later, I first located Michael's name through his daughter's records—the same way we would navigate any research problem. Only for that rule of thumb, "Start with yourself," I needed to substitute Genia in the prime position. 

The best places to find any records linking Genia to her father were her own travel documents. Though as a young dancer, she often was linked with her mother on passenger records, it was from records of border crossings and passports that the requested parent's name was often listed as her father, not mother.

I found a record giving her father's address in New York in a border crossing in Rouses Point, New York—one mile from Quebec in the northern-most tip of New York state—dated March 23 of 1950. That form helped me pinpoint when the Melnitchenkos actually established residency in the United States, as Genia stated that they had been in the U.S. from April 21 of 1947 through the point at which she had left for that trip to Canada in 1950.

Once again, the document helped verify that Genia's full name was Olga Eugenia, and that, although now "stateless," she had been born in Marseilles, France, on January 6, 1924. But the value of finding this document was that it provided the specific link naming her father as Michael Melnitchenko, and confirming their Manhattan address on Sixth Avenue.

Again, it was a travel document identifying Genia which enabled me to confirm her father's name. This time, though, I first needed the intermediary confirmation that, having arrived in America, the Melnitchenkos had requested to change their name to the shortened form, Melch. From an immigration card in Brazil for "Genia Melch," she reported her father's name as "Michel" Melch (likely translated from the English "Michael"). 

Having found the confirmation of Genia's father's name (at least in its Americanized form), it wasn't difficult to find him in his own travel records. Only this time, the senior Melnitchenko was not traveling for such glamorous reasons as appearing on stage around the world. His reasons for travel were far more practical: he was a seaman by occupation.

Though the collections of ships' manifests for crew members are far more limited than passenger records in general, I could find Michael Melnitchenko in several, making it possible to compose a (somewhat incomplete) listing of his years of service from the 1920s through the late 1940s. 

At the first, I found him leaving Marseilles barely two months after Genia was born, hired as a fireman for the S. S. Hirondelle. The valuable addition in that discovery was that it revealed an alternate name for Michael—a patronym, a useful indicator of lineage in many countries, including Michael's origin in Russia.

The litany of crew listings was by no means thorough, for the next entry I could find wasn't until 1943, aboard the S.S. John Rutledge. That record, itself, requires us to revisit to glean further details, but for now, it provides us the confirmation of that middle initial, "I" for the patronymic Ivanivitch, in this record. By that point, Michael was forty seven years of age, and had attained the position of chief officer.

Other manifests confirmed his position on the crew of various vessels: the S.S. Pio Pico out of New York harbor in 1944, the S.S. J.D. Ross out of Marseilles in December of the same year, the S.S. Robert Toombs arriving in New York from Port of Spain in August of 1945, and the S.S. Clyde Austin Dunning, arriving in New York harbor from France in May of 1946—with the added detail that Chief Mate Michael had, by then, claimed a "length of service at sea" of thirty two years.

While that little excursion through the preserved and digitized records of various ships' crew listings wasn't primarily to assemble genealogical information, it did provide a broader picture of who Genia's father was. If nothing else, it helped a former ten-year-old understand why the back of a man's neck could appear so leathery, long after those thirty two years of service on the open seas.

The records, though, helped provide some other details I hadn't expected to need. While Michael was coming and going from the port of New York, there was another record drawn up for a "Michael Ivan" Melnitchenko, which made me wonder whether I was tracking one person with that unusual name—or two.

 

Above: Photograph of Genia Melnitchenko (listed as Genia Melch) from her application for temporary immigration to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1960; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Working With What We've Got

 

What we've "got" in our never-ending pursuit of our family's history is turning out to be far more than genealogists have ever had in the past. Unless you've been around, decades ago, to crank through microfilmed records one by one to find the one document you needed for just one ancestor, perhaps you don't realize how good we've got it now. Because of digitization, coupled with search capabilities, the speed at which we can locate records is stunning—at least in comparison to the way family history research used to be handled.

Of course, I'm not the first to notice that particular research perk. Perhaps it was a fitting finale that the last night I could watch the reruns of the SLIG course I just completed, "In-Depth African American Genealogy," was a date that made it—but just barely—into the month of February, Black History Month. In that week-long series of classes, one of the instructors, Michael Hait, passed along a thought which, though first addressing digitization of newspaper archives, applies just as handily to the research we attempt as family historians.

Mr. Hait drew from an article written by a professor of history at the University of Sheffield, Adrian Bingham. The article, "The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians," spoke to the transformational conversion of material of interest to those who wish to analyze history from source documents through the digitization process. What Mr. Hait wished to point out in quoting Dr. Bingham was that, because search times have been shortened, thanks to the quick access afforded us through digitized and searchable documents, the more time we can now devote to analyzing the content we've so quickly located.

That very dynamic was illustrated in our week-long course over and over, as a mind-boggling array of documents were accessed to demonstrate that it is, indeed, possible to trace the family lines of African Americans well beyond that perceived "brick wall" pre-dating the 1870 census. While it is possible, though, that doesn't mean it is easy. That's where the analysis comes in—plus knowledge of what's included within record sets, and how to track them down at the myriad (and often unpredictable) locations where they are stowed.

I thought about that dilemma often this past week, as I returned from that January class series to my planned research goals for this year. Perhaps it is King Stockton's family story calling out to me, making me realize I can't just drop my January goal completely, just because we have now arrived in February. Though I will continue with my yearlong research plans, at the very least, I hope to continue mentioning my progress on the Stockton family during the weekends, especially to share some of the resources and repositories we were introduced to during the SLIG course.

As it turns out, we have so much more at our digital fingertips for this type of search than we thought possible, and I can't just sit by and keep silent when I know sharing is what is most useful. After all, if someone hadn't shared those old oral histories with me, or told me about helpful resources I wasn't familiar with, I wouldn't even have gotten as far as I have with this project—or any other. It's when we share what we are doing that we help each other.

Meanwhile, like a well-oiled machine humming away in the background, those regularly-scheduled tasks will keep reaching to achieve new goals. I have, for instance, kept up that biweekly report—today being another report day—to note research progress on my main trees. In the past two weeks, I've added 183 individuals to my parents' combined tree, which now totals 25,152 profiles. While I didn't make any progress in the past two weeks on my in-laws' combined tree, I'll alternate to work on their tree in the upcoming cycle to augment the 19,845 already listed for my in-laws' families. And for the DNA tests I'm still tracking, though the holiday surge of new matches we once were accustomed to seeing in past years has this year shriveled to a dribble, I still am keeping an eye on promising matches as they appear.

Those, however, will be topics to review, along with sharing the background reports on King Stockton's story, during these quiet weekends. Come Monday, we'll switch back to the featured ancestor from that list of monthly research goals. Tomorrow, we'll return to examine what can be found on my godmother, Genia Melnitchenko—and in particular, any records which can reveal more about her father's heritage.    

The Lowly Consumer Versus High Finance

 

Sometimes, it takes the patience of a saint to be a lowly consumer. Here in the nether reaches of economic progress, we get the feeling that swirling far above our heads is a heavenly realm where high rollers decide the fate of the products we mere customers come to depend on.

In our family, it has long since become a joke that no matter what "cold cream" brand my mother selected as her favorite product, that selection doomed the issuing company to soon go out of business.

Fast forward to the current generation, and it appears my mother's mantle has fallen on my shoulders, thus precipitating the failure of several other product lines in my purchasing wake. Lip gloss, orange juice, shampoo—didn't matter; all gone from the marketplace once I, the lowly consumer, fell in love with them. All I wanted was a product that works—and works well—but apparently, that was not what interested the investors backing the companies which sold those products. Theirs was a far loftier goal.

I cringe in these past five weeks, as an aficionado of genetic genealogy tests, when I hear news about changes in the direct-to-consumer DNA testing marketplace. Charging full speed ahead in one corner of this ethereal realm of high finance comes the announcement that an Australian genomics company has merged with Houston-based FamilyTreeDNA. Meanwhile, at almost the same time, Ancestry.com reverses its engines, retracting their AncestryHealth product and after the fifteen months the line was available to customers, announced that their intention, once again, was solely "deepening our focus on Family History."

While that is an encouraging sign to those who have been long-standing and loyal customers of Ancestry, you might say that those of us lowly consumers shell-shocked by virtue of my mother's mantle also falling on their shoulders are struggling with doubts—especially when we also discover that, in counter-direction, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that a concern out of the Cayman Islands, known as VG Acquisition Corp., has filed their intentions to merge with DNA testing company 23andMe.

In case that acquiring corporation's name doesn't ring a bell with you, think "V" for Virgin—as in, Sir Richard Branson, British billionaire. Suddenly, thoughts about figuring out who that random fourth cousin was whose name in my DNA matches I don't recognize shrink into the background. This is high finance—the kind that doesn't even care if I discover my great-grandmother's real maiden name.

As talks in high places hype dizzying amounts we can't even begin to comprehend in real life, all I can hope is that, unlike the demise of my mother's oft-bemoaned favorite brand of cold cream, these mystery-busting tools of modern genealogy will not become the casualty of plans made in places far loftier than our humble research hideaways.      

Finding the Right City

 

Finding aids are invaluable resources for the family historian, piecing together her family's story one painstaking step at a time. Sometimes, we seem to find those steps intuitively, and don't need assistance, but in my godmother's case, the quest for Genia's heritage was not a search through familiar territory. I certainly needed a finding aid for this new research adventure.

Those who have researched their European-origin ancestors can vouch for the troubles piecing together the location of cities or towns in the midst of a political arena prone to boundary disputes. A near-constant state of war can do wonders for the map-making industry; every decade seems to bring a new shape to countries, and even new names to cities now conquered by the enemy.

Couple that dynamic with the territory which Genia's parents once called their homeland. Russia was immense, and the empire covered multiple ethnic and political regions. Those who, when hearing the name Russia, think only of Moscow or Saint Petersburg, perhaps don't take into account the immensity of the empire's geographic control.

That one misconception might have cost me my genealogical bearings in trying to locate the birthplace of Genia's mother Lydia. Even following the perseverance it took to locate the actual name of Lydia's hometown, it wasn't as if I could simply plug in the name of the city and, presto!, pull up its location on a map.

Believe me, I kept a handy list of Russian city names at my fingertips, if only because my knowledge of such locations was limited to the two cities already mentioned. But once I felt that "Soukhoum" was the correct rendering of Lydia's birthplace, I noticed it was conspicuously absent from that little cheat sheet. Could I have gotten this wrong? Did I need to continue the search even further?

There is also, of course, that little detail of differing languages. What a place might be called in English is seldom the same as it is called in its native tongue. Witness Germany, which the Germans prefer to call Deutschland. An American functionary, diligently taking down the names and details of arriving passengers, might not know how a specific foreign-to-us location might have been written by those who actually lived there. The name might get written phonetically or, if heard incorrectly, then spelled incorrectly. And phonics in English are seldom identical to phonetic systems used in the home country.

So, where could a place like Soukhoum actually be located? The very word itself didn't look like a transliteration of a typical Russian name—but remember: the Russian empire covered a vast area which included many other ethnic groups.

The closest match I could find for Soukhoum was a city in what is now a disputed region of the dismantled Soviet Union. Even though the spelling was different—now rendered Sukhumi or Sokhumi—the fact that the name often dropped the final "i" and likely was pronounced almost the same lead me to believe this might have been the place where Lydia's family originated.

There is another reason why I'm drawn to this location possibility: those family stories. Legend or not, some oral family histories do contain a kernel of truth, and I find that bit of truth valuable in serving as a guidepost when we are pursuing hints in the dark (or nearly blindfolded, it seems). In Lydia's case, by the time I met her—in my childhood while she, incapacitated, was rapidly approaching the other end of her life—she certainly could not speak for herself. But my mother, who had known Lydia by then for nearly twenty years, would fill in the blanks for me.

One of those fill-in-the-blanks obtained from my mother was her conjecture that Lydia was from a southern location along the coast of the Black Sea. From her description, I had wondered whether the horrors Lydia had escaped from might have been the Armenian genocide, but my mother had thought that Lydia might have been born in the part of the Russian Empire known as Georgia.

It just so happens that Sukhumi is a city in a disputed region. One side of the argument claims Sukhumi is part of a separate country called the Republic of Abkhazia, while the status quo claim is that Sukhumi belongs to the country of Georgia—exactly what my mother had said, so long ago.

Being from a port city would fit in well with whatever story would explain just how a Russian seaman like "Michael" Melnitchenko might have met and married a young woman from Georgia. But that is only one simple strand of the possible story. Sukhumi, through the ages, had always been a cosmopolitan city, and despite the austerity of the Soviet Union, was even during that era considered a holiday resort. Their census records for the past century illustrate what a diverse location that city historically was.

For Lydia's husband-to-be to arrive in her port city homeland from afar is not an impossibility. But owing to the international flavor of the city, it could have been possible that he had been living there, himself, all along. It is near impossible, at this point, to tell. For one thing, there would be the challenge of deciphering records, if they could even be located—Georgia is not on the geographic list of available records at FamilySearch.org, nor is it even close to being listed at Ancestry.com—as records not kept in the Cyrillic script of the Russian language would have been written in the characters of the Kartvelian language of Georgian. I wouldn't even begin to know where to start.

There is, however, one other step we can take to see whether we can discover anything further on Genia's family. Next week, we need to trace the history of Genia's father, the Russian seaman M. Melnitchenko who eventually came to settle in New York City.

The State of Being Stateless

 

Turns out, researching my godmother Genia Melnitchenko's maternal line provides a good lesson in the necessity of grasping the history undergirding your family's story. In the case of Genia and her mother, Lydia, exploring historic events occurring during their lifetime not only helped explain why their records were sometimes stamped "stateless" but helped me locate a way to uncover Lydia's own origin.

Because I could not locate many records regarding Genia's parents, finding any information on the Melnitchenkos' origin required looking at as many passenger records as I could find—the one place where they showed up with regularity. Of course, for Genia's father "Michael," his occupation as a seaman left a bulging paper trail—and we'll explore more of that trail next week. But for Lydia, it seemed every record-keeper she encountered conspired to keep me from discovering even the most basic of details.

To start the search for Lydia's personal history, all I had was the constant of details on Genia's birth. Genia was born in Marseilles, France, on January 6, 1924. From that detail, shared in Genia's own paper trail years later, I knew I could pinpoint Lydia in Marseilles at least at the beginning of that year. But where did she come from, before ending up in France? It was those passenger records which led me to the answers I needed—but only gradually.

Because Genia began her professional dancing career at a very early age, I could find her in international travel records when she was a young fourteen years of age. Despite traveling as a professional "artist," on account of her age, she still had to travel under the supervision of her own mother, and many passenger lists cross-referenced Genia's entries with Lydia's.

Fortunately, at that early age, Genia had not yet begun using a stage name for performances, so finding records under Melnitchenko was possible. During a dance tour of North America—and under the name Olga—Genia apparently crossed the border from British Columbia into Washington state in early 1939 which, coupled with her mother's entry, alerted me to the fact that she didn't always go by the given name Genia. In fact, I learned to look for three given names—Olga, Genia, and the full name Eugenia—as well as to search for the three surnames she used during various times in her life.

In that border-crossing record, Genia's mother's card provided—or, let's say, almost provided—the details on her own origin. Just as Genia's card had stated her place of birth as Marseilles, the typist entering the details for Lydia apparently began typing that same word for Lydia's own place of birth: Marseilles.

That entry, however, was obliterated with a volley of "xxxxx" so that the requested information had to be added on the line below. As if that weren't enough to frustrate, whatever was typed in was superimposed on the preprinted portion of the form, so all I could decipher of the record-keeping wreck was a place name beginning with "Sou---" followed by the word, "Russia." As a finishing flourish, the anti-genealogy fates insured that the scan of the card was blurry enough to make deciphering the typewriting even more difficult.

Well, at least I had "Sou---."

Of course, I couldn't just stop the search there. It is in the multiplicity of records that we find the way to piece together the actual story. Fortunately, Genia traveled often, and along with her came her mother. The ship which brought the two to North America resulting in that 1939 border crossing in Washington was the S. S. Georgic, arriving in New York harbor in October of the previous year.

There, thankfully in a carefully typed format, was the entry for both Genia and Lydia. Genia's entry was included on a page with her dance troupe, but Lydia's was entered on a different page. On October 1, 1938, Lydia declared herself to be thirty nine and a half years of age and a native speaker of the Russian language. For occupation, oddly, she, too, was listed as "artist," despite traveling solely as chaperone for her daughter.

For country of birth, there was no surprise: Lydia claimed Russia. But for the entry labeled "city or town, State, Province or District," the answer didn't exactly line up with the "Sou---" I had already found. This form declared Lydia's location of birth to be a place called "Sonkhoman."

If you have raced ahead to try and find "Sonkhoman" for me in the listing of cities in Russia, you may have discovered what I already found: there is no such place. Granted, I will need to spend some time scouring any accessible historic maps of old Russia, or find a reliable gazetteer of the region.

Or...I could just heed my own advice and keep looking for more passenger records. Maybe, just maybe, another less-hapless clerk will have gotten the details right.

That, in fact, was what let me hit the jackpot, in a way. On April 21, 1947, the S. S. William Ford Nichols, arriving in Norfolk, Virginia, from France, included two names of interest on the ship's manifest: Olga and Lydia Melnitchenko. From their ages and Genia's characteristic occupational entry as dancer, I could tell these were the same two I was seeking, but there was something strange about their entry on the passenger list.

Yes, Lydia the housewife and Genia the dancer had indicated they could speak both French and Russian, and that their "Race or People" was Russian. And yet, for their response on the section labeled, "Country of which citizen or subject," each of them had entered the word, "stateless."

A note handwritten below the passenger listing provided more information, although in abbreviations. 

Line two, signifying Lydia's entry followed by Genia's for line three, bore a term which, at first, looked to me like the name Hansen, followed by the word "stateless" in parentheses. In essence, the reason both women were identified as "stateless" was because of the time period in which they were traveling. In 1947, after the close of World War II—as at the close of the previous World War—there were many displaced persons unable to obtain travel identification from the country of their origin. 

While the ditto marks on that entry referred to a previous line with the abbreviation "Fr PP"—most likely indicating "French passport"—the explanation for what turned out to be a Nansen passport was that it was a document originally devised in response to the new Soviet Union, in 1921, revoking the citizenship of Russians then living abroad.

If the Melnitchenkos could demonstrate that they were, indeed, out of the country by 1921 to confirm their eligibility for a Nansen passport, that helps me pinpoint the time at which they left for France—or wherever they first stopped after fleeing their homeland.

That specialized passport, first promoted by Norwegian stateman—and renowned polar explorer—Fridtjof Nansen, had originally been used after the close of World War I and through 1938 for what became known as "stateless" refugees. While Genia and her mother were certainly claiming that provision during their travels long after 1938, when the Nansen International Office for Refugees handling the processing of such claims closed, another department under the auspices of the League of Nations continued the work of refugee advocacy after that date, through their office in London—which may explain why some of the Melnitchenkos' travel documents referred to London as issuing office.

That little dose of history helped confirm the difficulties I had been told about in their family stories, and may well help pinpoint some dates in the Melnitchenkos' timeline of homeless wanderings. However, let's not forget that we arrived at the point of locating that very passenger record for a different reason: the quest to discover just where Lydia, herself, had been born.

Thankfully, this passenger list did not include clerical ineptitudes. Nor did it suffer from mishandling in the digitization process. Loud and clear, the document delivered the goods. Lydia—at least according to the passenger list for the S.S. William Ford Nichols on April 21, 1947—was born in a place in Russia called Soukhoum.

Great. Now, all we need to do is determine just where, exactly, that place called Soukhoum was located, back before the Russian Revolution.

Above images: Top two handwritten excerpts from the 21 April 1947 passenger list of the SS William Ford Nichols, courtesy Ancestry.com; below image of a sample Nansen passport as it would have been issued in France, courtesy National Library of Norway via Wikipedia; all documents in the public domain.