Roots home / Research library / Chopko Brother Research — Deceased Brother of Janice (Chopko) Cochran

Chopko Brother Research — Deceased Brother of Janice (Chopko) Cochran

Research date: 2026-10-25 Requested by: Joel Cochran (via parent agent) Scope applied: Deceased relatives and public obituary / cemetery / SSDI records only. No birth dates, addresses, or contact information were sought for living private individuals, and people-search aggregators were not used as a source for living people.

Bottom line

No conclusive identification was found.

No obituary, cemetery record, or SSDI record located in this search names a deceased Chopko man and ties him, in the same source, to siblings George Chopko, Richard (Rick) Chopko, Jerry Chopko, and Janice (Chopko) Cochran — or to any combination of two or more of those four names as survivors / siblings.

In particular, no deceased "Robert Chopko" / "Rob Chopko" was found in any obituary, cemetery, or SSDI source searched, and no source was found that confirms Joel's recollection of "Robert / Rob" as the name. That name remains UNCONFIRMED. It is also possible the brother's name was not Robert, that he died before the online-obituary era, that his record is under a variant spelling, or that his obituary did not list siblings by name.

Do not treat any same-name person below as the brother. They are listed only to show they were checked and ruled out, or left unresolved, and why.

What Joel supplied (the test every candidate had to pass)

A verified match therefore needed a source that did both:

  1. Showed the man was deceased (obituary / cemetery / SSDI), and
  2. Tied him explicitly to George, Rick, Jerry, and/or Janice — e.g. a survivor list naming them as brothers/sister.

No candidate passed both parts.

Chopko parents

Not found.

No obituary located in this search named Janice's parents, and no Chopko parent obituary was found that lists children George, Richard/Rick, Jerry, Janice, and a deceased son together.

Finding the parents' names and hometown is the single most useful next lead — a parent's obituary usually lists every child, living and predeceased, in one place.

Candidates checked — all ruled out or unresolved

1. Robert Chopko of Ann Arbor, MI — appears as a living survivor in 2018 and 2023, no deceased record found

2. Robert M. Chupka II — different spelling, different family

3. Robert T. Chop — not a Chopko

4. John "Chaz" Chopko, Elmira, NY — no sibling tie

5. Francis John Chopko, Ph.D., Pennsylvania — brother was Paul, not the target group

6. Michael J. Chopko, Stroudsburg / Swiftwater, PA — older generation, different family

7. Andrew Chopko, Wilkes-Barre, PA — sisters were Rosemary and Jean, parents Andrew and Mary

8. Mary D. Chopko, Elmira, NY — a Chopko mother in another family

9. Susan "Susie" Irene Chopko, Scottsdale, AZ — married-in Chopko, different family

10. Other Chopko obituaries reviewed with no target tie

Each of these was returned by a "Chopko obituary" search and checked for a George / Rick / Jerry / Janice survivor tie. None contained one:

Obituaries / searches for the known living brothers and for Janice

Per scope, living people were not dug into. They were searched only as a way to find a deceased brother's or a parent's obituary that might name them as survivors:

Conclusion from this leg: If George, Rick, and Jerry are living, this search correctly found no obituaries for them — and it also found no parent's or brother's obituary that lists them alongside Janice.

What was searched

Search engine: web search (browser.search), multiple query batches, 2026-10-25.

Exact / combined-name queries

Name queries

Geography queries

Database / aggregator queries (deceased records only)

Sources that surfaced and were read in snippet / page form: Legacy.com, TributeArchive, Echovita, funeral-home sites (Jennings-Calvey, Hansen Mortuary, Ware-Smith-Woolever Funeral Home), Fold3 / Forces War Records SSDI index pages, AncientFaces (SSDI-derived), Find a Grave / BillionGraves indexes.

Limitations of this search

Suggested next leads (for Joel / family, not guessed here)

  1. Chopko parents' first names and hometown. That unlocks a parent-obituary search, which is the record most likely to list all five children at once.
  2. Approximate years: roughly when the brother was born and when he passed, and where he was living at the time. Even a decade narrows SSDI and newspaper searches sharply.
  3. Confirm the name with Janice or Mark directly if possible — "Robert / Rob" is currently only Joel's uncertain recollection.
  4. Mark Cochran's Ancestry tree (mentioned by Joel 2026-10-25 as possibly existing): if it includes Janice's side, it may already name her parents and siblings.
  5. Local-paper route: South Bend Tribune / Mishawaka / Elkhart / Plymouth obituary archives, and the relevant Indiana funeral homes, searched by the parents' names once known.
  6. Direct Find a Grave surname search for Chopko burials in Indiana and Michigan, checked plot-by-plot for a family group.

Verification standard used

Back to the research library