Sometimes he has made his best guess of the name, which he indicates by following the name with a question mark. Sometimes the writing is indecipherable, in which case he leaves the space with only a question mark. Sometimes, Professor Deych notes, the words are difficult to decipher because the paper is damaged. Professor Deych reports that titles are given in Cyrillic script, sometimes using a Russian word, but sometimes in Yiddish, Ukranian, or Hebrew. First, this work reinforces Alexander Beider's observations in his A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames in the Russian Empire that Jewish surnames were not evenly distributed.
Some names concentrate more heavily in some geographic areas, and are almost unknown in others.
In addition, the surnames probably do not follow the pattern for the Jewish population as a whole. Fridman, the most common surname reported by Beider, appears only 10 times. For instance Benyamin, with all its biblical lineage, does not appear a single time in Bessarabia, Vilna, or Vitebsk, but occurs with some frequency in other guberniyas. The largest number of given names appear neither in their Hebrew nor Russian versions, but in the Yiddish equivalent. Khaim, Shmul, David and Berko are a bit above 100.