How I found Fred

The short version of Fred's story is that his baptism record was online the whole time. I just couldn't find it by searching. If your family came from the same corner of the old Russian Empire, now Belarus and Lithuania, these notes might save you some of the months they cost me.

Start with the American paperwork, then look for the Russian copy

Fred's American records were frustratingly vague. His draft card, naturalization papers and death certificate said "Vilna," "Vil, Russia," "Vilna, Poland" or just "Russia." Vilna could mean a city, a whole province, or an interwar Polish voivodeship.⁸

The most useful American record turned out to be a Russian one. Imperial Russia's consulates in American cities kept issuing papers after the 1917 revolution, and their files survive on U.S. National Archives microfilm M1486.¹ Fred's file holds the New York consulate's 1920 certificate for his trip to Argentina, with his photo. It was issued on the strength of a 1904 certificate showing he had reported to the Vileika district military-service board, so unlike his American papers it names the district he came from.¹

Search church books by first names, not surnames

Russian Orthodox registers give the father's name in the order given name, patronymic, surname: Мартин Николаев Родзевич, "Martin, son of Nikolai, Rodzevich." In Fred's baptism the surname falls into the book's binding, and the volunteer who indexed it took the patronymic for the surname, so the parents went into the index as "Martin Nikolaev" and "Elena Yakovleva." A surname search for Radzevich, Rodzevich, or anything else, could never find him.²

What works is searching on the child's and parents' given names together, with a year range and a place, and leaving the surname blank. Where that fails, browse the film image by image.

Read the film, not just the catalog label

FamilySearch labels collections by the archive that holds the books. Fred's baptism is in a collection with Grodno in the title, because the National Historical Archives of Belarus has a branch there, yet the parish was in Vileika district, more than 200 km away. The card filmed at the start of each microfilm says which district and parishes the books actually cover. Check it before you decide a film is irrelevant.⁹

Godparents are family

Other Radzevich families lived nearby (an Ivan Rodzevich of Granich, in the same rural township, died in 1890³), so a matching surname proved very little. What tied the records together was the godmother. Anna Yakovleva Kozel, almost certainly Fred's mother's sister, stands as godmother at Fred's baptism in 1883 and again for his brothers John in 1876, Nikolai in 1881 and Sergei in 1885.² When the same aunt shows up in the next column, you've got the right family.

Matching names alone also produce false leads. A "Fadey Radsewitz" arriving on the Arabic in 1907 looked promising until the manifest showed a 41-year-old married man from a different province, bound for Pennsylvania.⁴

Keep the calendar straight

The Russian church used the Julian calendar, which ran 12 days behind ours in the 1800s and 13 days behind from March 1900. Fred's birthday was written as 10 June 1883, which was 22 June in America. Note which calendar each date is in, especially when you line up Russian and American records of the same event.

Spellings drift, so search by fragments

The church books write the family as Родзевич and Радзевич. Fred himself appears as Radewicz on his 1905 ship list, Radavitch in the 1910 census, Radwisch on his draft card, Rodwisch on his naturalization papers, Radzevich on the 1921 ship list, and finally Radavich. In Argentina's immigration database, every full spelling I tried came up empty. Fred only turned up when I searched the first five letters, Rodze, which found "Rodzewitch, Frederick," a miller, landing in Buenos Aires in September 1920.⁵ Anna's maiden name, Shupaka, turns up as Schrysaka on Fred's death certificate and Supeker on two sons' birth certificates.

Read the paperwork from late in life

For years the only clue to Anna's family was her obituary, which said she was born in Vileika. Then a 1966 Social Security earnings-record form⁶ turned out to name both parents, Ephriam Shupaka and Elizabeth Mynkoski, and to give a different birthplace: Krasne, the same parish area as Fred's family. Paperwork from late in life, like Social Security forms, often asks for exactly what the church books would tell you.

Count the folio numbers

Fred and Anna probably married around 1904. One place to look is the 1904 marriage register of the Molodechno town church, which is on film. For a while I thought entries 18 to 27 were missing. Then entries 18 to 21 turned up on a frame filmed out of order, and again on a later reshoot. What's really missing is sheets 62v to 64, entries 22 to 27, from late May to early June.⁷ A gap like that looks just like "no record." Write down the folio and entry numbers on every frame, including the ones out of order, and you'll notice when a stretch is truly missing.

Some films can't be seen from home

Some films in the FamilySearch catalog can be browsed from home, and some only at a FamilySearch center or affiliate library. Which is which changes over time, so recheck a film before planning a trip, and don't trust old notes that say a film is restricted. For records that were never filmed, the archives in Vilnius and Minsk take requests by email, for a fee.

Machines can find pages, but people have to read them

I used text recognition to search thousands of scanned pages for name fragments. It works well on typed consular letters and badly on nineteenth-century Russian handwriting. It's good for finding candidate pages and useless as a transcriber. Every record on this site was checked by eye against the original document, or, for Argentina, against the archive's database entry. Where a detail comes only from an index, the source note says so.

If you're working on families from the Krasnoe or Molodechno parishes, or the Vileika area, I'd be glad to compare notes: hello at radavich dot com.

Fred's story, with sources →