Need Last name origin of the name Chepko?

Question:

Need Last name origin of the name Chepko?

I have searched and search for a neighbor, and cannot find any records of the country it comes from.
Any ideas or suggestions, even educated guesses?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I found 2 different groups of immigrants with that surname using that exact spelling...there were another 100 using a close variant.

Three were Magyars (Hungarians), but six were from Poland. In Polish records I've found the same people using a number of variant spellings (very common because of the literacy rate being so low). 4 were from ?ydowo Poznań and also used the spelling Czepko or Ciepko/Ciepka. The others were from Szamotu?y. There were two other Chepkos who were Polish and came to the US, but they lived in France for several years and that's the "last residence" listed. Their hometowns aren't listed on the manifests.

Amongst the Magyar lines, I can find the records for a mother and child with the hometown listed, but I can't decypher the writing for the town. I can tell you they listed that they were moving to Sharon Pennsylvania and that the husband (Miso Chepko) had come ahead of the rest of the family and was already living in Sharon. I haven't found his immigration records to compare. There's also a 35 year old man named Paul Chepko, last living in Budapest but declaring himself a German citizen, who came over in 1902. His contact information in the US didn't film well and is pretty much illegible. But one thing is clear, he was probably a German-Pole who had been living in Hungary (based on all the margin notes, etc).

You're probably looking at two families (one in each country) where the names developed independently of each other. But in both cases, the immigration was in roughly the last 100 years, which isn't much digging to do. Find her grandparents' death certificates and you should have the answer to your question.

ETA: I also found a WWI draft registration for Chepko, Wladimir 18 Sep 1893 Selets Russia. He was living in New Castle DE. Selets is in what we now call Belarus. I also found our immigrant, Paul Chepko, was living in Westmoreland PA in 1917, his DOB was 20 May 1878. cheap ok Russian Italian.
All Italian names end in a vowel. (A, E, I, O...hardly U still a vowel though)

Maybe Polish or Greek, though?

Not sure. =]] There are 2 on the 1900 census living in Steubenville Ohio. They were born in Austria. However, they could have been Hungarian, Serb, Croatian etc.

The 1910 census had 12 living in Redstone, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Illinois, Donora Washington, and Mount PLeasant Pennsylvania. . Three were born in Hungary,
two in Russia, two in Austria and 5 in Pennsylvania.

The same surname can come from more than one nationality. The only way your neighbor would know if it is her family name is to trace her ancestry starting with herself and working back one generation at a time.
Anytime she wants to do this there are lots of people on this board that can give her or you some great tips and advice. http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/f...
has just 14, all in the USA, which strongly suggests it was something else in Europe (or spelled differently). Does your neighbor know who her parents were and when they died? ( Some people don't, sadly.)

If so, their birth, death or marriage certificates; obituaries, funeral home records, SSN applications or cemetery records may tell you who THEIR parents were. From there you work backwards, one generation at a time.

http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.c...
has 10 entries for the surname. Look there. You might get very, very lucky. Several persons gave you guesses... the problem with that is that genealogy is totally against guesses. The whole idea of research is finding reliable historical records that apply to your own individual ancestry, not just to a surname.
In order to find where your own ancestor came from, you start by working back from yourself, making sure that you document each step. Many times, person try 'jumping' ahead and sabatoge the whole thing, by missing records that may have the solution.
The best example might be looking at the census for 1930, which may have YOUR ancestor living with his/her parents. Not only will that include the birth place of each person in the house, it asks for where the person's parents were born.
99% of the time, the problem lies in looking for a general answer (where does the name come from?) instead of specific (where was gr grandpa Chepko born?).
All you need to do is shift your thinking in terms of what you are asking. Italian.