---
title: "The history"
url: https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/
lang: en
work: "The Smud Family: A Jewish Family History from Ludza, Latvia to Entre Ríos, Argentina"
author: "Mateo Smud"
licence: CC0-1.0
summary: ""
---
# The history

- **About this document** — Why it was written, and for whom, and the debt to three pages that a grandson of Felix typed in 1996 and that the archives ended up confirming. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/about-this-document/
- 1. **Where the family came from** — Zmud meant “the one from Samogitia”. Everything else follows from that word, from the town of Ludza and from a census taken in 1858. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/where-the-family-came-from/
- 2. **The generations before Felix** — Falk, David and Koppel: three names that come from real documents, and a marriage that, according to Chaim Freedman, links the family to the Vilna Gaon's descendants. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/the-generations-before-felix/
- 3. **Felix** — A butcher like his father and uncles, a soldier in the war against Japan, a deserter in order to keep a promise. He died four years after arriving. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/felix/
- 4. **The record that changed everything** — How a Mariupol synagogue register, a grandfather's name and a gravestone in Paraná turned out to be the same story told from two continents. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/the-record-that-changed-everything/
- 5. **Malke** — Ester Malka, Malke, Molke, María Esther: four names for the same woman. And a Sephardic tradition about her family that no one has yet been able to document. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/malke/
- 6. **The voyage** — From Berdyansk to Bremen overland, and from Bremen to Buenos Aires in the hold of a steamer, calling at Lisbon, the Canaries, Bahia, Rio and Montevideo. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/the-voyage/
- 7. **Entre Ríos** — Orphaned, and with bookkeeping diplomas, the three siblings find work in rural Entre Ríos: Maciá, Aranguren, Ramírez, Paraná. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/entre-rios/
- 8. **Felix's siblings** — Moshe, Pesach, Hinda Ana, Manyik and Tybel. And the branches that left for Australia, New Zealand and the United States in the early twentieth century. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/felix-siblings/
- 9. **What we still don't know** — Whether Khana Reizel descended from the Vilna Gaon, where Felix was born, why Marcos was born in Mariupol, where the Noels came from and what lies above Falk. Six unanswered questions. — https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/history/open-questions/

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The Smud Family · genealogical research by Mateo Smud, published under CC0 1.0. Machine index: https://smud.mateosmud.xyz/en/llms.txt