For a long time, what this family knew about itself fitted into a few sentences: that we came from Russia, that grandfather Felix had been a soldier and a butcher, that they arrived by ship in 1904. Scattered names, approximate dates and a vague idea of a Lithuanian origin.
Today we know a good deal more. We know who Felix’s father was, and that father’s father, and the one before. We know which Baltic town the family left and in what year, how it reached the agricultural colonies of southern Ukraine, and why the surname changed shape so many times before settling as Smud.
This work brings all of that together in one place and in plain language. It is not an academic work and does not claim to be. It is written so that anyone in the family can read it from beginning to end, understand it without prior knowledge, and come away with a clear idea of where we come from. At the end there is a sources page showing where the documentation is kept, in case anyone wants to see it with their own eyes.
The rule
When something is supported by a document, the text says so. When something comes from what the family passed down from generation to generation, it says that too. The distinction is kept throughout, because both are worth something —but not the same thing.
A debt of recognition
Much of what follows would not exist without a typewritten document that Rubén, Alejandro’s son and Felix’s grandson, wrote in October 1996. At the time there were no digitised archives or online databases: Rubén rebuilt the story by asking those who could still tell it, above all Alejandro and Aida.
What stands out is that he took care to separate what he knew for certain from what he only supposed, and to note, in the middle of the account, the questions he could not answer. Thirty years later, when the original documents surfaced, almost everything he had written proved accurate: the arrival date, the name of the ship, the city where the family lived, Felix’s trade, even the Baltic origin of the surname. Without that text, many of the searches that paid off would not have known where to begin.
It is, for now, the only piece of this research of which we have a complete copy: the three pages are scanned and transcribed.