I cannot match it to any existing place name, and the spelling you have there "TZ" for the "C" is indicative of either a different location in a different country ( that is how it would be spelled in Polish or a few other Slavic languages), or the hungaricanized place-name from this region.

Can you please provide more information - where did she live, where did she get married and when, to whom, from where, what her religion was, or attach to your post a scan of the record from which you got this place name so that I can review all of the information in a better context? Based on what other piece of information or record do you believe that she was born in Serbia? Is the information you have on her birth from a primary source like original vital records or a secondary source like index or a village book? All of these things must be taken into consideration before a place of origin can be confirmed and every even the tiniest bit can help.

If she was Jewish then there is a possible match in period records for the surname BOTH (BOT) in Romania, village of Săpânța, Hungarian language place name is Szaplonca.

http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szaplonca

but without more information that is just my best guess based on available period public records.

I appreciate your help and comments.

This side of my family moved to the Volhynia region of what was then Russia in the mid 1800s. The records that I accessed were from the St. Petersburg databases provided by the Odessa3 website. Much of my family from this period can be found on this website, and many of my family members moved to the region from Poland and areas further west.

That said, I have accessed a death record in these archives for an Anne Victoria Bensch (nee Both) who died on November 20, 1893. She was 68 years old and born in what is written as Sapolitza. I had always assumed that this was in Poland, however a recent search on Google came up with a WWI record of a French soldier dying in Sapolitza Serbia ( http://www.memorial-genweb.org/~memorial2/html/fr/complementter.php?id=2027384&largeur=&largeur=1280&hauteur=1024).

She would not have stayed in the area for very long however, because I show records for children of hers being born in Przybyszow, Radomsko, Lodzkie, Poland in September 1847. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybysz%C3%B3w,_%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA_Voivodeship) This is quite a bit north of Serbia.

Through this post I am attempting to follow this lead. My understanding is that the area did have some German farmers at the time and the possibility exists that this branch of my family tree was from Serbia.

I appreciate your help and any further information you might have.

Thanks,

Nick

I would discard the WWI death record - it is an online transcript of a record in which the place name was recorded by a non-native speaker, so the spelling is off and not in the direction you need it to be ( ie it is distorted by French native speakers, not a German, Polish or Hungarian or Serbian transcription) . To see if this is more than a chance match you will need to check military records and literature for movements of the regiment in which that soldier served to determine where exactly he died - my guess is that either he died in a place in Serbia which *sounds* similar to how it is written there ( which as I said I am unable to identify so way off from the original spelling), or the country where he died is wrongly identified as Serbia and that Sapolitza from his death record is somewhere not here.

Yes, there were many ethnic Germans living in this region who came throughout XVIII and XIX century as colonists but the usual, logical migration path would have been from (today) Poland to Serbia, not the other way around. There are a lot of colonist records available, and even the few who did not like it and returned back home were recorded but I do not see BOTH family in any records that would match "Sapolitza" village over here even remotely and give wind to the theory that maybe her family did come to (today) Serbia as colonists, she was born here but then soon they all decided to go back. In any case, without corresponding location to check that remains only a very distant possibility that you should revisit in the future but only after searching for her closer to where she lived, was married, had children...

Since you have her in the records in Poland in 1847. concentrate on locating her origin over there - use the local pages in Polish language and try to match the surname in localized spelling with a location in Poland as the most logical place of origin for her.

This is the Wikipedia page in Polish which lists place-names in Polish and German: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niemieckie_nazwy_geograficzne_w_wojew%C3%B3dztwie_zachodniopomorskim#S

Based on the context you provided, I would try to look up if BOTH surname or any alternate period spellings are found in the records for the village of Sąpol(n)ica over there in Poland, because it is both phonetically and geographically a more plausible match to what her death record lists as her place of origin than anything I was able to come up with in this region.

Also consider possible misreading or misspelling in the original record so search for *apolitza, Sopolitza, *obalitz*....as a valid place name - if the priest who wrote her death record was not from the area where she was born he would have written the closest to what he heard.