Smud · Zhmud · Zmud · Zhmood · Zhmuydya
Surname origin
Where the word comes from, how it changed from one document to the next between 1858 and 1904, and why that alone does not say which family anyone comes from.
A What the word means
This family's oldest surname was not Smud but Zmud, as the 1858 census writes it. It comes from Žemaitija —Samogitia—, a region of western Lithuania that the Slavic languages called Żmudź (in Russian, Жмудь). Zmud meant roughly “the one from Samogitia”: a common way of identifying someone by where they came from.
It is a toponymic surname, a name taken from a place. And that matters: a place-based name points to an origin, not to a family. In Lithuania, “Zhmud” was a common surname that simply meant “the Samogitian”.
B How it changed from document to document
The word was shortened and adapted to each language and to each clerk who wrote it down. In this research there are three moments when it was written in a document we have seen:
- 1858Zmud«David Falikov Zmud»The 1858 census
- 1899Zhmud«Zhmud»Marcos's birth record
- 1904Smud«Smud or Smod»The 1904 immigration register
Between those three forms there are others that are not dated in any document of this research: Zhmood, the transliteration English-language reconstructions —starting with Chaim Freedman's— use for the family in the colonies, and Zmud, an intermediate step in the account and the surname of Leon Moises Zmud, whom family tradition makes Felix's brother with no document to confirm it. Some branches kept earlier forms: there are people named Zmood in Melbourne.
Every known form, along with those of each given name and each town, is in name variants.
C Which family this is
A Jewish family living in Ludza, in present-day Latvia. In 1846 David Zmud moved south to the agricultural colonies of the Russian Empire; by about 1850 he was in Novy Zlatopol, where the 1858 census records him. The next generation moved to the ports of the Sea of Azov: Berdyansk, where Felix's family lived, and Mariupol, where his son Meyer's birth was registered in 1899. In 1904 Malke crossed the Atlantic with her three children to Buenos Aires, and the siblings ended up in Entre Ríos.
Ludza → Novy Zlatopol → Berdyansk · Mariupol → Buenos Aires → Entre Ríos
What links the Entre Ríos family to the Novy Zlatopol one is not the surname: it is the 1899 birth record, which names Meyer, his father Falik and his grandfather Kopel, and the Paraná gravestone, which repeats, on the Argentine side, Marcos's Hebrew name and his father's. The story is told step by step in the record that changed everything, and laid out in the timeline and the family tree.
D Other families with the same forms
There are two ways of sharing the surname without sharing the family, and it helps to keep them apart.
Other words that ended up spelled the same way. The Croatian Smuđ —the name of a fish—, the Polish and Czech Smuda, the Polish Żmuda or Zmuda: on arriving in Argentina, any of them could end up written Smud. In the city of Buenos Aires there are families named Smud that, as far as is known, have no connection to this one and no Jewish or Samogitian origin.
And the same origin is not enough either. A great many people left Samogitia, and every family that left the region could end up identified by the same word without any kinship between them. There are Zhmuds in Estonia, and Zhmuydas in Russia and Belarus, with no connection to this line.
E What is not enough to prove anything
- Are all Smud families related?
- No. This research documents one line and does not claim that other Smud, Zmud or Zhmud families are related to it.
- Is Smud the same surname as Zhmud?
- In this family, yes: the same person appears as Meyer Zhmud in 1899 and under the surname Smud in 1904. That does not make every Smud a Zhmud, or the reverse.
- Does the surname prove Jewish ancestry?
- No. This family was Jewish, and its documents say so —a synagogue, a Jewish farming colony—, not its surname. There are Smuds of other origins.
- Does bearing the name Zhmud prove descent from this family?
- No. Most Lithuanian records with that surname are not this family. Only a document linking one person to another proves it.
- So what does prove anything?
- The document, and nothing else: the 1858 census, the 1899 birth record, the 1904 register and the Paraná gravestone. Spelling, alphabet and region help you search; they do not establish kinship. All sources