Which means: “Dumb luck, my
friend, will sometimes find even you.”
It’s a family saying passed down from
my paternal great-grandmother, and when I questioned my dad, a second
generation immigrant from Europe , he just shrugged his
shoulders. “I have no idea what language that’s translated from.”
I have been working on family
genealogy for over a decade now. My mother’s side, while elusive in
particulars, is so far, not so interesting. My research stalls out in Pennsylvania
in 1798. My mtDNA testing reveals only that my mother’s people are Haplogroup
H, the most common European Haplogroup, AKA “vanilla.”
But when I started to research my
dad's side, all I had to go on was: "Your Grandfather was born in a
village (in Europe ) near three rivers beginning with the
letter B.” (Really, dad, that’s all you got?)
My father said that in the “old country” the ancestors lived in three
different countries, and yet never left their village cluster.
Piece by piece I teased it out:
immigration dates, census sheets, some help from internet cousins…. and clues
from WWI and WWII draft applications, where some men identified themselves as
being born in Austria, and others as “Poland in Russia.” Until one grandfather not only listed the general
region, but wrote down the name of his hometown: Bialawoda, Nowy Targ. (now in SE Poland .) Yet
we are neither Austrian, nor Pole, nor Russian, not even Ukrainian, we are Ruthenian/Lemko. Sometimes
called Rusniaks or Rusyn.
Throughout their history, our
people spoke at least six different languages: Polish, Slovak, Magyar,
Ruthenian, Ukrainian and possibly Russian (and of course the Church records are
in Latin). They used three different alphabets: Latin,
Greek Cyrillic, and Russian Cyrillic-- if they could read at all. They worshipped in at least five different
kinds of Churches: Ukrainian Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Roman
Catholic and Byzantine. Sometimes only because they selected the church nearest
to them that approximated their “true” religion. (This has been a PILE of fun
sorting out, lemme tell you and I still don’t have a clear picture.)
Professional scholarly DNA testing research provides
some interesting clues to the genetic make-up of these people, who lived tucked
in a Carpathian mountain valley for centuries.
My dad used to joke about his mother’s Asian appearance, saying that her
family came from a village so far east in Eastern Europe it was called
“China .” And
actually, he is right. Haplogroup I – one of the oldest EuroAsian Haplogroups
is found in studies of the Carpathian peoples.
They survived the invasions and
subsequent domination from the Wallachs, Romans, Turks, Mongols and Tatars (and others) & lost
many of their native sons and daughters through emigration until they were
finally nearly exterminated from their native land, first by Hitler (in a
general way, being targeted as “Poles”) and then by Stalin, who uprooted the
survivors and forcibly removed them from the SE Poland region. These people are resilient, if not so forgiving. A family joke goes like this: "What do you get when you cross a Rusniak with a Sequoia?" "A tree that can
hold a grudge for a thousand years."
We are a dying breed. No one
knows who we are. WE don’t know who
we are. (And smarter people than I are still arguing the point.) My grandparents spoke the old
language, but the last ancient speaker in the family has died. Our people came to America
in the “string immigration” fashion, then assimilated, and through fear or
shame, or benign neglect, failed to keep the memory of our ancestors
alive. Only now have I re-connected with
the Lemko heritage, vicariously, through books and scholarly articles on the
internet. I learned more about my ancestors through research than I did through
actual experience.
The one thing we all agree on are
the names for this group: Rusyns, Ruthenians, or Lemkos. There is a saying that these people use to
describe themselves and it only further blurs the ambiguity we all share about
our collective identity: "Po
Nashemo." It roughly translates
to: "People like us who speak our
language." Which, I guess, is how every group of people identifies
themselves.
And so I come full circle. While trying
to discover my ethnic roots, I discovered that I am everyone.
Another, interesting and sweet perspective can be found here: http://semanchuk.com/philip/ForstarDu/photograph.html
with kind permission of the author.
Another, interesting and sweet perspective can be found here: http://semanchuk.com/philip/ForstarDu/photograph.html
with kind permission of the author.
