A search for one family's roots in Ukraine
by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly
As the world marks the new millennium, many Ukrainian American organizations are celebrating their 50th anniversary in the United States - those that were transplanted here from Europe's post-war refugee camps or established here by those refugees. Many Ukrainian American families - like mine and, maybe, yours - are, or could be, celebrating our own golden jubilees in this country and, I hope, using the occasion to gather and preserve information about ourselves and our forebears: who they were, how they lived, what they endured and achieved.
CONCLUSION
My great-great-grandfather Yoakhym Bihun, like Taras Shevchenko, was born a serf, but, unlike Shevchenko, he also died a serf, two years before "panschyna" (serfdom) was abolished in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1848. And if he and his offspring knew about Shevchenko and his poetry, the knowledge, more than likely, did not come from reading the "Kobzar." Like the other serfs/peasants in Nyzhnii Strutyn throughout most of the 19th century, he probably could neither read nor write. But he and his kind were the seedbed of Ukrainian nationalism, as Poland and Russia would find out in the next century.
His grandson Stefan - my grandfather - by all accounts, probably was literate. He was, after all, the village church "diak" (cantor) at the turn of the century; a member of the village council that in 1898 voted to upgrade the existing one-grade village school to two grades. A few years later he moved his family to Stryi so that his children would have access to at least a secondary-level education.
Life was not easy for serfs under the panschyna system. Yoakhym and the other villagers spent at least three days of the week working the fertile fields of the Polish landlord Strutynski - Sundays excluded, of course - and during the remainder of the week they would tend "their own" meager plots of the pan's (the landlord's) marginal lands along the Chechva River and Syhla Creek.
Like the others, Yoakhym grew mostly potatoes, cabbage, onions, beans, rye, corn and some other vegetables, as well flax to feed and clothe himself, his wife, Anastasia, and their children. They lived in a rustic, one-room house, in which the traditional pich (oven) dominated the all-purpose room, emitting its smoke into the thatch-covered attic.
One of their children, Mykhailo, my great-grandfather, was 11 when Yoakhym died. Two months later he became an orphan when his widowed mother also died at the age of 33 of "natural" causes.
I could go on with this narrative, but I think I've said enough to make this point: names and dates suffice to construct a family tree, but you need more to turn it into a family history.
How did they live? What did they eat? How did they dress? What did their house look like? What were their customs and traditions? And how did they fit into the larger picture that was influencing their lives?
I'm not an expert on genealogical research, but I've found a number of things very helpful.
For getting the "larger picture," don't discount the obvious: a good history book, like Orest Subtelny's "Ukraine: A History." But I've found that it is the close-ups that really make your family's history come alive. And that requires visiting the places where your family lived, looking around and talking with the people there; going through and analyzing family documents and letters; talking to older members of your family.
A large dose of good luck also helps a lot.
When I visited Nyzhnii Strutyn last May, I began, as I had three years earlier, in the cemetery, photographing every Bihun tombstone I could find, until I noticed a young woman placing flowers on a recent Bihun grave. I introduced myself, told her about my mission and asked about her connection to the deceased. It was her brother, she said. She could not help me personally, but she offered to take me to an older Bihun couple living at the edge of the village who, she thought, might be helpful in my search. They could not help. They, as well as the second and third households I visited, simply had no recollection of things pre-dating the previous generation.
But luck smiled again in the fourth: a Lutsiv household. The family had just finished Sunday dinner with their son Vasyl, a publisher visiting from Ivano-Frankivsk. They re-set the table for me and my friend, and while we were eating - including a locally famous "strutynskyi" borsch - we talked about the village and its history.
Then, as if manna from heaven, Vasyl Lutsiv handed me a small soft-cover book of 100 pages or so, titled "Nyzhnii Strutyn: Istorychni Narysy". It was a book about the village compiled by M. M. Semkiv, which Mr. Lutsiv had published a year earlier. The book had answers to just about any question one could have about the village: its history, its people and its culture, including a complete cycle of wedding ritual songs. It describes the houses the villagers lived in, and the food they grew and ate; it lists those killed fighting in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and families exiled to Siberia.
The book also includes drawings and photographs, among them a 1916 picture of my aunt Anna Bihun Jezerska (my father's eldest sister, Teta Asya, as we called her), who was born there and later taught school there as well as in Stryi, Lviv and Cleveland.
My visit to Stryi was interesting, but not very fruitful. I saw the church where my grandfather served as diak, but I couldn't find his grave in the cemetery or any other evidence of his having lived there. I'm not writing Stryi off yet, however.
The next stop was Lviv, to visit the Central State Historical Archives. Before setting out for Ukraine, I checked the InfoUkes genealogy homepage on the Internet (http://www.infoukes.com/genealogy/), where I found some useful general advice about how to go about looking for one's roots, links to other relevant genealogical websites, as well as the document folder numbers of the vital statistics and marriage records of the Greek-Catholic church in Nyzhnii Strutyn that are preserved in the Historical Archives.
Knowing bureaucracies, I was not betting my plane ticket on the possibility of obtaining permission to actually look through some of these folders at the archives. But, luck was still with me.
Before starting my roots search in western Ukraine, I happened to attend the presentation of a newly published collection of writings by Milena Rudnytska in Kyiv. I photographed the event, including its two editors, Martha Bohachevsky Chomiak of Washington and Myroslava Diadiuk of Lviv, and promised both that I would give them copies of the photographs when I had them developed.
I developed the photos in Lviv and called Ms. Diadiuk to ask where I could drop them off for her. "I work at the Historical Archives," she responded. Seeing manna coming from heaven again, I asked if it would be possible to see the Nyzhnii Strutyn files. Of course, she said. Within the hour I was in the archives eagerly, but ever so gently, looking through some of the original files.
I found references to a few Bihuns in the mid-1800s, but it was obvious that the task would take weeks and not hours, and would require research expertise that I did not possess - even though I finally got to use some of my Jesuit-taught high-school Latin I thought I would never need. Ms. Diadiuk said the work could be done by a fellow research assistant, Halyna Sviedentsova, who, time permitting from her other assignments, could do the work within a few weeks. And she did.
Lady Luck had to overcome yet another major problem: the only documents that survived from Nyzhnii Strutyn were from 1836 to 1865. As it turned out, those 29 years of documents contained the key 19th century Bihun family links: my great-great-grandparents Yoakhym and Anastasia died, my great-grandmother Olena Kravtsiv was born and later married my great-grandfather Mykhailo. Further links to my grandparents Stefan and Anastasia were verified through references in 20th century church birth and marriage documents from Stryi and Lviv.
There are still many loose ends to be tied up in the Bihun saga, including the maternal sides of the family history, which I'm tempted to leave for others of this and future generations to pursue. Why deprive them of the joy and satisfaction?
For the most part, however, much of the basic and background family information is in hand - enough to start getting the family history into a presentable form and getting the wheels turning on a 50th anniversary reunion.
If my story piqued your interest in giving some attention to your own family history, I'm glad, and I have a few more suggestions.
In our case, I think we should hold the reunion at the Fedorka farm near Colver, a small coal-mining town in central Pennsylvania. We spent our first few months living there, courtesy of my father's older sister Maria (Teta Marunia). Actually, she was the first Bihun to plant roots in the United States. That was in the early 1900s when she came to marry a Ukrainian coal miner.
But that's another story.
CONCLUSION
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 23, 2000, No. 4, Vol. LXVIII
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