Olga milaya, >My father Pavel Abusin was born in the town of Kropotkin = >(Krasnodarskaya Oblast) in 1916. I have no details or contact > = >with his family (most of them died in the 1933 famine). >There = > isn't much information about Kropotkin anywhere nor about the > = >name 'Abusin'. I've heard it's a Cossack name. Anyone any = >ideas on Abusin - on Kuturkin and Novikov too ? > I am the son of a Terek Cossack whose parents perished in the same Stalin-induced famine. My father's unit fled the overrunning reds in the Crimea after the collapse of the white army. He was taken to Turkey on a British ship and from there travelled to Sophia, Bulgaria and then to Paris. There he joined an equestrian exhibition (djigita) company whose touring landed a group of 150 Cossacks destitute in Cleveland Ohio when the tour collapsed in 1926. My father met my mother there; my twin brother & I were born in Dec 1929. We grew up among these men, their wives and their children, our earliest playmates. I came to recognize which are Katsap names and which are Cossack. I am quite certain that the first two surnames if not all three you list are Cossack surnames. Note that my surname is spelled in French. In English it should be Anikushin. Your origins in the Krasnodarskaya Oblast (from whence comes the best tea on earth, in my opinion) makes you a Kubanka. The Terskii and Kubanskii were (are again) Cossacks of the line from the time of Ekaterina II (Catherine the great) through the Murid (Shamyl's) uprising in the 1850's in Dagestan (see "Prisoners of the Mountains" for an update of the story but the same glorious scenery) to WW I. My brother & I are trying to research the genealogy of our father, the fate of the other of the 150 and of expatriate Cossacks in general. We would like to form a home page to serve as our Stanitsa on the Info highway where Cossack descendents can exchange data, ideas, messages i tak dali. We have heard that the LDS (Mormons) have been microfilming records in the N. Caucasus. My brother has ordered from them several reels (from among 56) of microfilm that are supposed to contain census data from pre-revolutionary times. If you like, you can post him directly to keep posted on his progress. His Email address is gralexan@freenet.columbus.oh.us Tell him to keep an eye open for Koropotkin data. I have researched our mother's (a Slovak) genealogy using the LDS materials and facilities. I have had resounding success and have our roots back to the early 1700's. I hope for similar success in researching our father's line. The Slovak records survived many skirmishes, clerical in-fighting between native priests and Hungarian interlopers, two world wars and the Soviet debacle so maybe we can hope that the Orthodox priests in Kropotkin and Soldatskaya were equally as perspicacious in preserving their books. Anyway, good luck in your search and keep in touch. William Anikouchine Santa Barbara CA USA