The surname
The family’s oldest surname was not Smud but Zmud: that is how the 1858 census writes it. It comes from Žemaitija —Samogitia—, a region of western Lithuania. The Slavic languages called that region Żmudź, and the surname came from there: Zmud means roughly “the one from Samogitia”. It was a common way of identifying someone by where they came from.
Over the generations and across countries, the word was shortened and adapted to each language and to each clerk who wrote it down: Zhmuyd in the 1853 list, Zmud in the 1858 census, Zhmud in the 1899 Mariupol birth record and finally Smud in Argentina. Trees published online write it Zhmuydya, and reconstructions, Zhmood; no document of this research shows either of those two forms. Some branches kept earlier forms, which is why there are distant cousins named Zmood in Australia and Zhmud in other countries today. Within this family, they are all the same word.
Ludza
The family lived in Ludza, a town now in eastern Latvia that then belonged to the Russian Empire. In documents of the period it also appears as Lutzin or Lucin. It had a large and long-established Jewish community.
In 1846, David Zmud left Ludza. Together with other Jewish families from the same area he moved south, to the agricultural colonies the Russian government had opened in what is now Ukraine. The state offered land to Jewish families willing to take up farming, and many accepted: it was one of the few ways out of the restrictions that weighed on them.
By about 1850 the family was settled in Novy Zlatopol, one of those agricultural colonies, in Ekaterinoslav province. That is where the oldest document we have appears: an 1858 census that records the whole family under one roof, with names and ages.
The 1858 census
That census lists David, aged 40, and his whole household. It records him as “David Falikov Zmud”. In Russian, “Falikov” means “son of Falik”: thanks to that single word we know, with a document in hand, what David’s father was called.
The same page lists his sons —among them Koppel, aged 20— and Koppel’s wife. In other words, in 1858, when the census-taker came through the colony, Felix’s grandfather, his father and his mother were all there, counted one by one.