“Sometimes you fall into shit-house and come up with piano on back.”

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.