Looking for any records of my ancestors with last name Shmushkowicz in Baranavichy, Russia now Belar
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I found a page that lists possible spellings of your last name at https://www.radzima.net/eng/user/10163.html. Do you think any of those are possible spellings? They look VERY similar to what you typed.
As far as the place name, spell it "Baranowicz" at this site, and you'll see a list of possible towns by that name. https://www.radzima.net/eng/search_place/
Can you tell which, if any, of these places is the right one?
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Glenn, Thanks so much for trying. The spelling sounds like Shmushkovitz, and I can't find anything like that in Baranowicz (Baranavichy) in the mid to late 1800’s. Been looking a long time. I found the towns long ago (Goroditsche also), but no Spektor or Szmushkowicz families. Appreciate your efforts.
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Marlene,
What religion did your ancestors belong to?
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Jewish
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That's helpful to know. What resources have you already tried searching?
JewishGen is always a good place to start.
You can also see what kinds of records are available and which archive they are now stored in by using the Routes to Roots website. Just type in the name of the town (they use the spelling Baranovichi) and see what comes up. Keep in mind these records may not be available online and you may need to contact the archive/repository for more information.
If you have already searched for records in Baranavichy, I would recommend looking at nearby Jewish communities to see if you can find them there. You can use the JewishGen Communties database to do so. Here's the link to the page for Baranavichy.
I would also recomend checking out the https://forum.j-roots.info/ site. They have a great forum on there with many Russian and Ukrainian researchers. The site is in Russian, but can easily be naviaged using Google Translate. If you are using the Google Chrome browser, just right click anywhere on the page and click Translate to English. If you are using a different browser (Safari, Firefox, Edge, etc.) you can still use Google Translate, but just with some extra steps. Go to translate.google.com and change the language settings to translate from Russian to English. Paste the URL: https://forum.j-roots.info/ into the Russian box and then click on the link that shows up in the English box. This will take you a translated version of the site. If you have your own post or question you want to share on the forum, you can write out your post in English first and then put it into Google Translate. Just be sure you are using short, simple, to the point sentences, otherwise Google Translate doesn't do a very great job.
For your line that is now in modern-day Ukraine, there are a few more resources available that you might try. JewishGen is always a good starting point. Another one is the database https://pra.in.ua/en. It's kind of like the Ukrainian version of Ancestry. It's not Jewish specific, but you can find Jewish ancestors there sometimes. Also, there are digital scans of records from Gorodische available through Alex Krakovsky's Wiki site. These are revision list records, similar to a census. You can access them here. The easiest way to find the records on the Wiki page is to do a Control find search for the Cyrillic spelling of the town name - Городище. The records themselves are not indexed and so you'll need to search through them page by page. They are likely in Russian. Routes to Roots (mentioned above) is also something that will be useful for you to see what records are available for the town. Hopefully that didn't overwhelm you with information and provided you with some new places to try searching
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Ellie, You are absolutely wonderful to provide me with an abundance of new resources to look for my ancestors. I am deeply appreciative and want to thank you so much! Stay healthy, Marlene 😀
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Of course, happy to help! Let us know how your research goes and if you have any more questions!
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