"Kovalchek is Smith."

In Russian, it's the guy that shoes horses, a farrier. "Smith" is "kuznets". Or Kuznetsov, once it gets made into the genitive plural that language seems to prefer for family names that aren't adjectives, like Tolstoi, "the fat guy". Kovalchek is Ukrainian, perhaps?

Ooh! Ooh! My CDROM version of American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition (hereinafter referred to as AHD4 for the sake of brevity) tells me what maybe I should have seen already, that the word "farrier" ultimately comes from Latin "ferrum", meaning iron.