The Smud FamilyAsk

Where the surname comes from

Žemaitija

The region of western Lithuania from which the surname comes. The Slavic languages called it Żmudź, hence Zmud: “the one from Samogitia”.

The family’s oldest surname in a document —the 1858 census— was not Smud but Zmud, and 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.

This is worth bearing in mind when searching archives: in Lithuania, “Zhmud” was a very common surname and simply meant “the Samogitian”. Most of those Lithuanian records are not this family.

What happened here

  1. c. 1725

    The oldest name in the published tree

    Family trees published online start the lineage with Leizer Zhmuydya, in Lithuania. None of the three generations before Falk has a supporting document yet.