Identifying an Americanized Russian name: Sonet

[Sarah Marie Parker-Allen]

I concur with Jules - there are far too many possibilities here.  My
great-grandfather went from Iudel-Leib Pakelchik to Louis Parker.  There
are probably thousands of different Eastern/Central European names that
made the transition to "Parker;" searches using Soundex have produced
variations I could not possibly have invented.  It's *completely* arbitrary
that he didn't go for Packer, which several of the cousins seem to have
done.  For a while he was calling himself "Leo," too - I'm struggling to
identify when he made the switch; it's possible he alternated between them.

The best place to start is actually to find a locality, if you can.  At
JewishGen <http://www.jewishgen.org/jgff/> you can register that you're
searching for particular surnames in particular towns; I'm sure you can do
something similar with non-Jewish genealogy research sites (I've just never
tried.)

Oh, and as a pro tip: everyone said "Russia."  *Everyone*.  Iudel-Leib was
born and raised in the part of Lithuania that got turned into the Kovno
Ghetto - yet at as late as 1940 he was still telling enumerators that he
was from "Russia."  Probably because the place had been four or five
different countries between his birth and 1945, and because he left in
1905.  Anyway, judging from the pages of the census that he shows up on,
none of his neighbors from Eastern Europe ever got more specific, except
for the people from Poland and Romania.  The enumerators would write
"Russia - Yiddish" in the place-of-origin column, presumably as a signal of
"not as in Moscow, guys."  (There's a separate column for language spoken -
in the place-of-origin column, you also find "New York" and "Massachusetts"
and so forth, for children whose language is listed as Yiddish.)


On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 5:48 PM, Jules Levin <ameliede at earthlink.net> wrote:

>  On 04.05.2014 12:41, Margaret Samu wrote:
>
>   Dear Colleagues,
>
>  An acquaintance wrote with the following question that I did not know how
> to answer:
>
> "I am trying to help a friend with her husband's family tree.  His great
> grandfather came from Russia around 1890 and when he arrived his last name
> was changed to Sonet.  Do you have any ideas of Russian names that might
> have been changed to Sonet?  I figure it was probably a longer name.
> Possible spellings of the start of possible names would be helpful."
>
>
> This woman needs to get involved in genealogy.  There are plenty of web
> sites.  Does she have all the family information with complete names as is
> known?  For example, does she have this ggf's full name from his
> tombstone?  How does he show up in the US Census of 1900, 1910?  Is there
> an application for citizenship?
> My ggf came in 1891, and the name was changed.  But unknown to any
> descendents, the new name appeared only in the census of 1900.  In his
> application for citizenship in 1897, the original name was used!  With due
> respect to my esteemed colleagues, SEELANGS is not the place to deal with
> this problem!   She needs to record all family data (the tombstone info for
> all descendents who are dead, for example--and contact the cemeteries--all
> info is on line.  Then get involved with ancestry.com, for example--they
> found my ggf's citizenship application.
> Jules Levin
> Los Angeles
> PS If the ggf was Jewish, she should start with Jewishgen.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  My first thought is that it is not necessarily a Russian name, though if
> the family is certain that it was changed from something else, then it
> might have been. If you have any suggestions, please do let me know.
>
>  Best regards,
> Margaret
>
>    =========================
> Margaret Samu
> SHERA President
> www.shera-art.org
>
> Art History Department
> Stern College for Women
> 245 Lexington Avenue
> New York, NY  10016
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-- 
Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
lloannna at gmail.com
http://lloannna.blogspot.com

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