Lonken Lonkin
The handwritten name on the front page of the passport looks roughly like this.
Transliterating the family name, one obtains Lonkin, if we ignore the final character. The 'i' would be sounded like 'ee' in seen. In the portions of the passport written by officials, it is always written Lonke. The final character is a 'ch'.
A search through Google will reveal many web pages carry these words.
The most suggestive finding is that Lonken was a town in Poland with the polish name of Lakie and, since 1938, Friedrichssee. in Schlochau, or Kreis Schlochau, or the area of Czluchow, Poland. In 1772, Joseph of Aubracht Pradzynski, a member of the land aristocracy, was living there and Prondzinski's were there until at least 1865. Lonken and the Lonkener See are mentioned in the 1919 Versailles Treaty. Could it be that our ancestor (or some ancestor of his) took the name of their native city when they migrated to Grodno?
If you search on Lonken you will notice many dutch or belgian websites. This is because there is a dutch word of the same spelling that means "to flirt", "to ogle" or "to look at" if you enter 'Lonken -naar' , without the quotes you will filter out most of these pages.
There are several people mentioned with the surname Lonken or Lonkin. The most touching was Elena Lonkin, 62, who died on Sunday December 2, 2001 about midday, in an an explosion on bus 16 on the bridge of Hagiborim street in Haïfa.
There are many pages on Lonkin (Lon Hkin), a city in Myanmar.
As it happens, lonke is yiddish for meadow or lawn and is mentioned in a song Yidl Mitn Fidl. That page has the word in hebrew which I have copied below.
