When the Homily is about Immunology

Reminiscing over the future

Episode Two: Attack of the Church Records

The “strange connections” I felt to a past I have never known really began to escalate while pouring over old Church and Census records from the village of Juskova Vol’a, where members of my family have lived since at least 1715. It was a region dominated by many powers, but most famously: the Austro-Hungarian Empire – if for no other reason than because some of the best older genealogical research resources come from this era.

While my family are more aptly called Rusyns or Carpatho-Rusyns (more closely related to “eastern Slavs”) they are also Slovaks. (Rusyns may be found in numerous countries of the region: e.g. Ukraine, Poland). It is never easy to nail down an ethnicity, however their customs, locale, names (to some extent), and religious practices point to Rusyn. While most people in Slovakia are Roman Catholic, it is estimated that about 4-5% (the majority of the religious population in the east) are Greek Catholic, with about the same percentage being Orthodox. When my Great Grandfather came to America in 1903, he was a Greek Catholic, but would later lead his family into the Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Archdiocese.

It really wasn't until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia that Slovaks had a nation of their own. For a long time their native tongue was "persecuted" first by Hungarians and then Czechs (at least in regards to the "modern" era). Furthermore in their Churches, Latin became the dominant organizational tongue as testified by the records I was scouring through. Curious that they would worship in Slavonic, keep records in Latin, and speak to one another in Slovak or Rusyn.

Predominant names stood out: Georgius, Joannes, Anna, and Maria appeared over and over and over again. In fact, one must look very hard and long to find any of my male relatives not being a George or John and married to an Anna or Maria...it makes it very difficult to discern people from one another. Furthermore, there are on some of the baptismal, marriage, and death records a notation referencing what is essentially an address and in examining this you see a living arrangement similar to "zadruga" as described by Rade.

Sometimes it feels like you are stepping back into time and yet standing above it - almost in a deified state. You can thumb through the pages and see joyous times like weddings and baptisms, and then sad times like funerals and "illeg" births by relatives of mine who worked as servants (sad to imagine how that might have happened). You can see blank years around the time of a revolution and speculate as to why the Parish priest stopped keeping records, and you can see particularly harsh winters when many infants and children didn't make it - leading to further repetition of the same names, almost as if lost children were being replaced. And you can also see profound community: birth and baptismal records also show a notation of the infants' Godparents and thereby you can see a web of connectedness: read through the records of the children growing and getting married and having children of their own, while Godparenting their neighbors' and friends' children and vice versa.

Since John Sisak left Juskova Vol'a at age 18 and immigrated to the United States, the story of these records continues in western Pennsylvania. Now it also continues in western Washington. For in a way I feel that by my entering back into their faith, that I have begun to new chapters to this intriguing story.