Chopko Parents: Wave 2 Research (2026-10-25)

Target: the parents of Janice (Chopko) Cochran of the South Bend / Mishawaka, Indiana area. Her known brothers (from Joel): George Chopko, Richard (Rick) Chopko, Jerry Chopko, and a fourth brother who died, whose name Joel recalls as possibly Robert / Rob (unconfirmed).

Wave 1 found no record tying a deceased Chopko to this family and did not identify the parents. Wave 2 dug from different angles: the SJCPL Obituary Index queried directly, the SBAGS Grave's Registration Project C file read in full, cemetery transcriptions, a complete pull of the national SSDI / Numident Chopko file, and city-directory routes. Free public sources only, deceased people only.

Bottom line: Janice's parents are still NOT identified, and that is now a much stronger negative than wave 1's. Every St. Joseph County index that should hold a Chopko of the parents' generation was checked directly, and the surname does not appear in any of them. The Chopko surname's entire documented US footprint in these records sits in Pennsylvania coal country, Chicago, Detroit, and northeast Ohio, with zero Indiana entries anywhere. Details, with sources, follow.

1. SJCPL Obituary Index: the full Chopko list is EMPTY

Source: St. Joseph County Public Library Obituary Index, https://www2.sjcpl.org/db/obits/ (index of South Bend Tribune and other local papers, 1913 forward). Queried directly through the index's own search (POST to its record list), surname CHOPKO, all entries:

• CHOPKO: 0 records. None. No obituary, death notice, funeral note, or memorial announcement for any Chopko exists in the index.
• Spelling variants, also zero: Chopka, Chapko, Csopko, Chopco, and the fragment "hopko" (the index's search matches fragments, so a Chopko under any first name or partial spelling would have surfaced).

Method validation, so the zero can be trusted: the identical query method returned 91 records for COCHRAN and 59 for REEDER (including Max Reeder, rec/480039, found in wave research earlier today). The search works; the Chopkos simply are not in it.

Near-miss, checked and ruled out: the fragment "Kopko" returns 5 records, all Kopko / Kopkowski, a different family: Mary Elizabeth (Bonte) Kopko (d. 2022, Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands), Donald E. Kopkowski (1986, Rolling Prairie), Edward Kopkowski (1986, Rolling Prairie), John W. Kopkowski (1994, South Bend), Marie T. Kopkowski (2005, New Carlisle). None is a Chopko mis-indexing; the Kopkowski men of Rolling Prairie / New Carlisle are their own family.

What this means: if Janice's parents had died in St. Joseph County with any notice in the Tribune or the Mishawaka papers from 1913 on, they would almost certainly be in this index (it caught every other family line in this tree). Their absence points to the parents dying elsewhere, dying without a local notice, or the family's South Bend chapter starting with Janice's generation. It does not prove they never lived in the area.

2. Cemeteries: no Chopko stone in St. Joseph County in any index searched

• SBAGS Grave's Registration Project, letter C file, read in full (South Bend Area Genealogical Society; every recorded stone in every St. Joseph County cemetery in the project: St. Joseph Cemetery South Bend, St. Joseph Mishawaka, Highland, Fairview Mishawaka, Cedar Grove, St. Casimir / Polish St. Joseph, Riverview, South Bend City, and the rest, keyed in the project's cemetery key at https://sbags.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cemkey.pdf): the C file (https://sbags.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/graveC.pdf) contains zero CHOPKO and zero CZOPKO entries. Full-text find validated against control surnames present on the same pages. Scope caveat, stated plainly: the Grave's Registration files run to death years around 1939, so this rules out a Chopko stone from the project's era; parents who died after about 1940 would fall outside it.
• St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery, Mishawaka, INGenWeb transcription (http://ingenweb.org/instjoseph/cemeteries/stjosephsmish/stjosephsmish.htm), full text searched: no Chopko (and the family pattern there is German / Italian / Belgian, not Slovak).
• Find a Grave / PeopleLegacy / BillionGraves index searches for Chopko burials in Indiana: no Indiana Chopko burial found anywhere. The only Chopko burials the indexes surface nationally in the Midwest are outside Indiana:
  • Paul Chopko (b. May 6, 1915, d. Jun 5, 2008), US Navy WWII, Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, Elwood, IL, Plot C4-77 Row B Site 15. https://peoplelegacy.com/paul_chopko-2z2f6k
  • John D. Chopko (1866-1948), Fern Knoll Burial Park, Dallas, PA. https://peoplelegacy.com/john_d__chopko-5Z010s
• No Chopko couple of the parents' generation (b. ~1910-1935) buried together was found in any cemetery, in any state, in these indexes.

Still unrun (needs a live browser session, not a text fetch): Find a Grave's own per-cemetery surname search inside St. Joseph Cemetery (South Bend), Highland, Fairview, and Cedar Grove, and the Michiana Genealogical Index cemetery search (an interactive form). These are coverage gaps, not negatives.

3. SSDI / Numident: the whole national Chopko file, pulled and read

Source: SortedByName's Chopko set (SSDI Death Master File + Social Security Numident transcriptions), https://sortedbyname.com/letter_c/chopko.html and its three index pages (208 entries claimed; 201 entry blocks parsed and read in full for this pass).

• Zero entries mention Indiana, South Bend, Mishawaka, or a 46xxx last-residence ZIP. Zero. No Chopko in the entire public SSDI / Numident file ever drew an Indiana connection that this source records.
• Zero entries for any Richard Chopko, and zero for any Janice Chopko.
• The surname's documented clusters, all outside Indiana (candidates in the geographic sense only; NO link to Janice's family is shown by any of them):
  • Lackawanna / Luzerne County, PA (the largest cluster, Carpatho-Rusyn coal country): Dickson City, Throop, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Olyphant. Families include George Chopko & Helen Polacheck (Wilkes-Barre), Nicholas Chopko & Stella Malski (Olyphant), Stephen A. Chopko & Mary Spcecaik, Mike Chopko & Elizabeth Bunbera / Bendic (Duquesne / Dixon City lines).
  • Chicago, IL: Peter Chopko (b. Jul 12, 1883, in the former USSR; SS claim filed Chicago 1949) & Sophie Gataluk; their daughters Julia (Chopko) Cesaretti (1917-2001) and Lillian (Chopko) Hennings (1916-2002). Paul Chopko, the Elwood IL veteran above, is the Illinois cluster's other burial.
  • Detroit, MI (the family's stated Michigan ties make this the nearest cluster geographically, still unlinked): Frank Chopko & Caroline Yacek, whose daughter Mary Frances Chopko was born in Detroit Jul 8, 1923 (d. Jun 3, 1992, Detroit ZIP 48239); George Alexander Chopko (b. May 13, 1894, PA; Michigan-issued SSN; SS claim received at the Detroit Mack Ave office Mar 31, 1953; d. Mar 1953); Alexis Chopko (Michigan-issued SSN; d. May 1984); Ann Marie Chopko (b. 1923 Titusville, PA, daughter of Joseph Baron & Marie Habatz; d. Nov 13, 1992, Detroit ZIP 48228).
  • Northeast Ohio: Michael Chopko & Betty Kondike of Newton Falls (son Raymond E. / Ray Richard Chopko, 1928-2005); Albert Ray Chopko (1920-2005, son of Mike Chopko & Elizabeth Bendic, d. ZIP 44444); George E. Chopko (b. Jun 4, 1912, PA-issued SSN, claim at Scranton, d. Oct 17, 1994, Youngstown OH ZIP 44515); and the Cleveland Ukrainian line, Wolodymyr Chopko (1907-1965) & Rose Hunka.
• Reading of the whole file: Chopko is a Slovak / Carpatho-Rusyn surname whose US bearers concentrated in the PA coal fields and the Chicago / Detroit / Cleveland diaspora. Janice's South Bend family does not appear in the Social Security death record at all, which happens when the parents died before SS death reporting covered them, never held SSNs under this spelling, died outside the US system, or when the family's paper trail runs under a different spelling than Chopko.

4. The deceased brother: the Robert test

Every deceased Robert Chopko in the national SSDI / Numident file (exactly one man, two entries for the same record):

• Robert James Chopko, b. July 30, 1961, Scranton, PA; son of George F. Chopko (father) and Joyce A. Kulick; SSN issued in Pennsylvania; d. March 14, 1996, age 34, last residence ZIP 18509 (Scranton, PA). Source: SortedByName Chopko index pages, https://sortedbyname.com/letter_c/chopko/index_2.html and index_3.html (entries "CHOPKO, ROBERT" / "CHOPKO, ROBERT JAMES").

Test result: UNCONFIRMED, and the evidence leans against. For him: the name Robert, the right generation (b. 1961), an early death at 34, and a father named George, which echoes the family's George. Against him: he was born in Scranton, lived in Scranton, and died in Scranton, in the heart of the unrelated-on-current-evidence PA cluster, and no record ties him or his parents to Indiana, Michigan, or anyone named Janice, Richard, or Jerry. A brother of Janice's who lived and died in South Bend / Mishawaka would be expected in the SJCPL index (Section 1: zero) or the SSDI with an Indiana ZIP (Section 3: zero). On the records as they stand, Robert James Chopko of Scranton is a same-name man from the big PA Chopko cluster, NOT identified as Janice's brother. If Janice's brother died young in Indiana, he left no SSDI / Numident trace under the Chopko spelling in the public file.

5. City directories: no Chopko household in South Bend in the routes searched

• Internet Archive: a full search for "chopko" returns 9 items, none a South Bend or Mishawaka city directory (an artist file, a federal court case, a parish book, podcasts); the combined query chopko AND "south bend" returns 0 items. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=%22chopko%22
• LDS Genealogy (ldsgenealogy.com), which hosts indexed Polk South Bend directory parts and census indexes: the only Chopko hit on the whole indexed site is the 1940 census of Throop, Lackawanna County, PA (a Chopko household there: John b. ~1901, Margaret b. ~1903, Vera b. ~1911, and children), i.e., the PA cluster again, not South Bend. https://ldsgenealogy.com/PA/1940-Census-Throop-PA.htm
• So no Polk directory entry naming a Chopko head of household + spouse in South Bend / Mishawaka was found in any digitized, indexed directory route. (Unindexed directory scans on paper at SJCPL were not searched; that is an in-person / live-browser gap, and per Joel's standing rule no paid library query was made.)

6. Ethnic / parish angle

Chopko's documented US distribution (Section 3) is the classic Carpatho-Rusyn pattern: PA coal parishes first, then Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland. South Bend's Slovak and Rusyn families worshipped in the same west-side ethnic parish belt as its Polish and Hungarian families (St. Casimir is Polish; Slovak families in the area appear in Hungarian / Slovak parish orbit, e.g., Our Lady of Hungary and Sacred Heart). No Chopko appears in any South Bend parish-adjacent index searched (SJCPL index, SBAGS files, cemetery transcriptions), so the parish angle produced no local anchor either. It is noted for the next wave: if the parents exist in South Bend records at all, a baptism / marriage / funeral entry in an ethnic parish register is the likeliest place, and those registers are not name-indexed online.

7. Explicit NOT-FOUND list

1. Janice's father's name: not found in any source searched.
2. Janice's mother's name (maiden or married): not found anywhere.
3. Any Chopko entry in the SJCPL Obituary Index, under any spelling: zero (verified against a working control search).
4. Any Chopko burial or stone in St. Joseph County, IN in the SBAGS Grave's Registration C file, the Mishawaka St. Joseph's transcription, or Find a Grave / PeopleLegacy / BillionGraves indexes: zero.
5. Any Chopko with an Indiana death, residence, or ZIP in the full national SortedByName SSDI / Numident Chopko file (201 entries read): zero.
6. Any Richard Chopko, anywhere, in the SSDI / Numident file: zero entries. Any Janice Chopko: zero entries.
7. Any Chopko household in a digitized South Bend / Mishawaka city directory route (Internet Archive, LDS Genealogy): not found.
8. The deceased fourth brother: not identified. The only deceased Robert Chopko in the national file is the Scranton man in Section 4, unconfirmed and geographically against.
9. Unrun routes (gaps, not negatives): Find a Grave per-cemetery surname searches inside the named county cemeteries and the Michiana Genealogical Index cemetery search (both need a live browser session); Hoosier State Chronicles newspaper search (fetch failed this pass); SJCPL's paper city directories and ethnic parish registers (not name-indexed online; no paid query made, per Joel's no-fees rule).

8. What would actually settle it (for the parent agent / Joel)

• Janice's own marriage record (to Mark Cochran, St. Joseph County): Indiana marriage records of that era often name both parents of bride and groom. This is the single highest-value record and was outside this pass's assigned angles.
• A sibling's record that names parents: an obituary or SSDI Numident for the deceased brother, if he can first be pinned by name and place, or George / Rick / Jerry's marriage records.
• The 1950 census (NARA, free): a Chopko household in St. Joseph County in 1950 would name the father, mother, and the children together. The name index needs a signed-in FamilySearch session or ED browsing by address; no Chopko household was located through the free indexes searched here.
• Joel-side knowledge that would cut the search in half: the parents' first names from Janice herself, whether the Chopkos were in South Bend before Janice's generation or arrived with it, and whether the family was Slovak, Rusyn, Polish, or Ukrainian by parish.