Which Belogorodka (Bilohorodka)? 
Town Name Variations

Bilohorodka (Belogorodka) is currently located in western Ukraine, but the territory in which it is embedded has passed from one political and cultural entity to another over the centuries. The ethnic and linguistic diversity of the area--Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, Czech--along with transliteration from different alphabets (Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew), has produced a tangle of different spellings of the town name in documents. Belogorodka/Bilohorodka simply means "white town" and is a common town name throughout Slavic Europe. 

Many of us heard what we interpreted as "Belarutka" from our Yiddish-speaking ancestors. In the spreadsheet, we are tracking all of the spellings of the town name that the Belogorodka research group has found on different documents (ship manifests, draft cards, letters, etc.)--everything from multlinguistic transliterations to misunderstandings, misspellings, and misinterpretations. Searching for records with these different spellings periodically is a worthwhile exercise that can and does surface new documents, particularly for ship manifests. Please contact us (belogorodkafamilies@gmail.com) if you find a new one.

Which Belogordodka? The best way to disambiguate whether your ancestor was from "our" Belogorodka is to look for the presence of Volyn/Wolyn/Volhynia/etc. in their--or their relatives'--documentation. Volhynia was the larger region containing Belogorodka when many of our ancestors immigrated and they identified with it as their town passed between different larger political entities (Russia, Poland, USSR, etc.). They also sometimes used Zaslav as their town, as it was the larger administrative unit (oblast). We can also look at naming patterns, where your family went in the diaspora, who they married, professional connections, and where they were buried to help confirm.