In the summer of 2021, the son, now a US citizen, appealed to us with a request to restore (issue a duplicate) the death certificate of his late mother, who lived in the last century in the Republic of Uzbekistan and died there.
Of the documents, Son submitted only his birth certificate, which indicated a certain district and region of the Uzbek SSR, where he (the son) was born and they lived in this city for some time.
At the request of the lawyer of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the authenticity of the submitted birth certificate was confirmed, in which family members, that is, the son, father and mother, have the same surnames written.
According to the son, it was determined that their family had moved to a new place of residence, to another city of Uzbekistan, Samarkand, where it was decided to organize a business trip, from the city of Tashkent.
When applying to the registry office of Samarkand in the archival documents of this city, an act record of the death of a woman who died on the same day of the same year (to which the son pointed out, with the same surname and date of death) was found. The initial letters of the name also coincided, and the ending of the name had a discrepancy.
When talking, the son continues to claim that his surname and the surname of his parents are identical, and his mother's name does not correspond to reality, that is, the name is different from that in the act record.
Here we have come to the conclusion that the search is going down the wrong path. Again they began to talk with members of the son's family and restore memories bit by bit, linking fragments from the memory of those years of the family's life into a single thread. Then the real search work to establish the truth began.
Requests were again made to the district and region of the Son's birth for the presence of act records of kinship, registration of the marriage of his parents, from which the maiden name of his mother was clarified.
The next step, we decided to visit the city cemetery. Funeral books were examined for the presence of the burial of a woman with the alleged surnames, by the common surname of the family and by the established maiden name.
And finally our search was crowned with success, the grave of a woman with her maiden name and the name indicated by her son was found next to the grave of his father. Photos of the tombstones were sent to the son and received confirmation that this was the grave of his mother.
Returning again to the registry office, they picked up the archival documents and found a corresponding act record of the death of the mother, indicating her maiden name. At some point in her life, after marriage and after the birth of a child, she decided to regain her maiden name, which, in addition, none of the living relatives guessed. Thus, initially we were issued a death certificate for the namesake, and only as a result of our investigation was it possible to restore the death certificate.