VA VA - Hampton, WhtMale 56-58, UP50445, poss name "Yulgen Bestmann" from Germany, Dec'17

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annpats said:
I wonder how long he's been in the US? He didn't have any German or US based identification, so even if he had the money and wanted to go home, no passport. Although he must've had one to come over in the first place.
He really had no bag of belongings or any papers etc at all? Just what he was wearing?!?
And to die in a shed in winter in Virginia, must be cold and lonely.
RIP.
Click to expand...

I think this entirely possible. I work overseas and one of my tasks is assisting distressed nationals of my country. In a case many years ago, my office received a call from a medical charity. A man who lived in a homeless community under a bridge for many years had told a volunteer that he was a citizen of my country and gave them a name. Lo and behold he was indeed a man who had gone missing from our country almost 30 years earlier. Thankfully he told someone while he was alive as he had nothing to prove who he was, or his nationality.

In a second case a man who lived in a small Asian village for many years died in a homemade shack with no identifying documents and was buried in an unmarked grave. His neighbours contacted us - he liked to drink with them and had spoken of a son in a small town - and the neighbours remembered the rather distinctive names of both. With some detective work we were able to find the son and identify the father.
 
ZaZara said:
If ever he would have gone to the USA, he might have been ruled out, but this is unlikely, since according to the link that you posted

Update:


Der Mann ist inzwischen wohl behalten wieder bei seiner Familie aufgetaucht.

The man has returned in good health to his family
Click to expand...
Oh no, that part wasn’t translated by google. So sorry!
 
I've just been poking about on family search and could he possibly be from the
Netherlands? There is a name Hilgren that could be pronounced as Yulgen
and the last names Bosman and Buseman . This could just be Americans
mispronouncing things JMO MOO I also say this as anAmerican,lol.
 
According to this link, very few surnames of Bestmann appeared in the US. The map in the link shows Illinois and New York as the states that had the most surnames in the 1880 census. Many have surnames that originated in other countries but were born and raised in the US. He may not be a foreigner.

My brother in law was born in the Netherlands and his first name has been butchered so much by Canadians he relented and 'adopted' the name most people call him. I suppose the same is true for many names that are difficult for English speaking people to pronounce.

Bestmann Name Meaning & Bestmann Family History at Ancestry.com®
 
bettyboop said:
I've just been poking about on family search and could he possibly be from the
Netherlands? There is a name Hilgren that could be pronounced as Yulgen
and the last names Bosman and Buseman . This could just be Americans
mispronouncing things JMO MOO I also say this as anAmerican,lol.
Click to expand...

I don't recognize Hilgren as a pure Dutch name. It would be pronounced as Hil(from Hill) and Gren (in English there is no sound like this for the G, it's like scraping your throat :))
 
noodlefreak said:
I understand that this is a long shot... But a french man would pronounce Jürgen and would be heard as Yulgɛ̃n.
Eric Bellaird has been in Switzerland and Deutschland but it is not clear for how long.
He was a teacher and it is very possible that he knew german. He has already used a fake ID in the Swiss embassy. His mother says he wanted to go on a boat. He was possibly last heard in England. Aberdeen, Essex.. His age, his height, and eye color fit.
What if he indeed got a job in a freighter e.g, travelled from England to US and disappeared. It is known to have lived homeless before..

The Doe Network: Case File 1405DMUK
Click to expand...

His info on Doe should be cleaned up. The Swiss embassy is in London, not Essex. And Aberdeen is in Scotland.

Who last saw him in Essex? Essex is a county, not a town. It would be nice to know his last location since to get back to Europe it would be fairly circuitous from Essex. Bus, train, ferry, plane, etc. He'd still have to go to London to start.

I wonder why he used fake id? Was it a fake Swiss ID? If he'd lost his French passport he could have gotten a replacement from the French embassy in the UK. Switzerland isn't in the EU.

Adding, I don't believe Eric is the Bestmann UID.
 
Bumping case up. It's an interesting one.

I found a missing German man with the last name Altmann (NamUs MP17746) who disappeared at age 31 from California in 1984. However I am sure it's not the same person. He would have had to somehow rather spontaneously go start a new life under an alias, eventually ditch a rental car, and the photos don't really look like a match. I think Mr. Altmann likely encountered misadventure with his vehicle. But it was something to consider briefly. JMO.
 
I looked again regarding the meaning and origins of both names the UID used and got a completely different set of answers. So first off, not sure how accurate this website is, but according to the link, the name Yulgen as a surname is identified as a Russian name, not a very common name, whether a first name or a surname. It also appears in Bulgaria and is equally as rare. Yulgen Surname Origin, Meaning & Last Name History
Then I looked up Bestmann on the same site. It is also a fairly uncommon name and is most often found in Germany. The link shows how many people have the name and where they are located.

Bestmann Surname Origin, Meaning & Last Name History

Learn the fascinating origin of the Bestmann surname; its meaning & distribution. Unlock your family history in the largest database of last names.
forebears.io
Since there was no translation of the name Bestmann on the forebears site, I used another one, and this one says the name could be related to a herdsman. Link: FamilySearch.org'.
Yet another site says the name refers to 'village leader' or 'steward'. Link:Surname Bestmann: Meaning Origin Variants

Since several of us on this site have investigated the origin of the name and come up with several different definitions from numerous sites I don't really think it will help identify this man so I'm not losing any sleep over it.

One thing I did find interesting though, was a connection to Bulgaria through Germany. As of December 2022 there are nearly 500,000 Bulgarian nationals in Germany thanks to a bilateral trade agreement between the two countries. Conversely, Germans are an ethnic minority in Bulgaria numbering 436 in 2001. Interestingly enough, most of the Germans who arrived in Bulgaria a few hundred years ago went because of ore-rich mines. I couldn't help but think that W. Virginia is also blessed with enormous reserves of coal. I know a few years ago I read an article in the Toronto Star regarding mining in W. Virginia and how, instead of digging mines they were blowing the tops of mountains. It has many health concerns as well as poisoning water sources forever. Link:
e360.yale.edu

A Troubling Look at the Human Toll of Mountaintop Removal Mining

For years, the coal industry has dismissed the idea that mountaintop mining adversely affects people living nearby. But research by Indiana University’s Michael Hendryx provides stark evidence that this widespread mining practice is leading to increases in disease and deaths in Appalachia.
e360.yale.edu e360.yale.edu

Could this be a connection, no matter how tenuous? I'm usually not a fan of isotope analysis since it seems all over the map sometimes but in this case I don't think it would hurt.
 
branmuffin said:
I looked again regarding the meaning and origins of both names the UID used and got a completely different set of answers. So first off, not sure how accurate this website is, but according to the link, the name Yulgen as a surname is identified as a Russian name, not a very common name, whether a first name or a surname. It also appears in Bulgaria and is equally as rare. Yulgen Surname Origin, Meaning & Last Name History
Then I looked up Bestmann on the same site. It is also a fairly uncommon name and is most often found in Germany. The link shows how many people have the name and where they are located.

Bestmann Surname Origin, Meaning & Last Name History

Learn the fascinating origin of the Bestmann surname; its meaning & distribution. Unlock your family history in the largest database of last names.
forebears.io
Since there was no translation of the name Bestmann on the forebears site, I used another one, and this one says the name could be related to a herdsman. Link: FamilySearch.org'.
Yet another site says the name refers to 'village leader' or 'steward'. Link:Surname Bestmann: Meaning Origin Variants

Since several of us on this site have investigated the origin of the name and come up with several different definitions from numerous sites I don't really think it will help identify this man so I'm not losing any sleep over it.

One thing I did find interesting though, was a connection to Bulgaria through Germany. As of December 2022 there are nearly 500,000 Bulgarian nationals in Germany thanks to a bilateral trade agreement between the two countries. Conversely, Germans are an ethnic minority in Bulgaria numbering 436 in 2001. Interestingly enough, most of the Germans who arrived in Bulgaria a few hundred years ago went because of ore-rich mines. I couldn't help but think that W. Virginia is also blessed with enormous reserves of coal. I know a few years ago I read an article in the Toronto Star regarding mining in W. Virginia and how, instead of digging mines they were blowing the tops of mountains. It has many health concerns as well as poisoning water sources forever. Link:
e360.yale.edu

A Troubling Look at the Human Toll of Mountaintop Removal Mining

For years, the coal industry has dismissed the idea that mountaintop mining adversely affects people living nearby. But research by Indiana University’s Michael Hendryx provides stark evidence that this widespread mining practice is leading to increases in disease and deaths in Appalachia.
e360.yale.edu e360.yale.edu

Could this be a connection, no matter how tenuous? I'm usually not a fan of isotope analysis since it seems all over the map sometimes but in this case I don't think it would hurt.
Click to expand...

:) Thank you for these searches and reporting about your findings.

IMO, if it were up to me, I'd prefer a DNA analysis instead of isotopes, combined with genetic genealogy.
The name Bestmann is entirely normal to me, I see no reason to think immediately that someone made that up. BUT I also know that homeless people who do not want to be traced, often use an alias, or even various ones.

Not sure about Yulgen / Jürgen, I can pronounce both names, twist the L and R a bit and make them sound similar. I guess we will find out about that one when we do.

If Mr Bestmann is indeed German and Bestmann is his name, and he entered the US (or Canada) legally, shouldn't there be records?
 
ZaZara said:
:) Thank you for these searches and reporting about your findings.

IMO, if it were up to me, I'd prefer a DNA analysis instead of isotopes, combined with genetic genealogy.
The name Bestmann is entirely normal to me, I see no reason to think immediately that someone made that up. BUT I also know that homeless people who do not want to be traced, often use an alias, or even various ones.

Not sure about Yulgen / Jürgen, I can pronounce both names, twist the L and R a bit and make them sound similar. I guess we will find out about that one when we do.

If Mr Bestmann is indeed German and Bestmann is his name, and he entered the US (or Canada) legally, shouldn't there be records?
Click to expand...

I, too, prefer DNA analysis and I'm sure they have it. It's a relatively young case so I never understand the reluctance to rely on DNA labs to speed up the process. Instead, you've got multiple police officers year over year, dusting off files and plodding through them only to find they've got no more info so just plonk it down again. If I ran a police organization I'd definitely allocate more funds to resurrecting cold cases using DNA, instead of hours of man power sifting through the same old information. You can't get blood from a stone but you can get DNA from blood.

You would think there would be records if he did enter either country, legally, but I don't know whether than name has been checked as a possible. Considering he passed away in 2017 and he appears to be in his late 40s to me, maybe early 50s, he would have been born in the early 1970s which was before Germany's unification. Seeing images of when the Berlin wall came down, due to a confusion of language as to how East Germans could cross, thousands of them passed through the gates with no requests for identification. Who knows if our UID was one of those individuals.

When someone uses a pseudonym, they could be running from someone or something, or could just be trying to reboot their life to be something other than it was. I wish we knew more about the way he spoke, whether he had an accent, etc. He reminds me of Mostly Harmless who had hundreds of pictures taken of him blasted all over the internet yet it took a couple of years to identify him. MH never revealed his real name to all the hikers he interacted with. A sin of omission rather than a lie. Maybe that's what this man did, too.
 
Maybe it's to be found among the Turkish diaspora in Germany?
 
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