Off to Ruthenia

Mrs Vache Folle and I are leaving Saturday for an eleven day trip to Ruthenia, now in southern Poland. A quarter of Mrs VF's ancestors came to America over a century ago from the village of Gladyszow, and we are supposed to be meeting some of her kinfolk who remained there. (It is good to keep in contact with family since you never know when you are going to need a kidney.)

We will visit Krakow for a few days then head out to the country to see the ancestral haunts.

Mrs VF always thought her grandfather was Ukrainian, but we have learned, through my genealogical research, that he was actually Ruthenian or Galician, related to Ukrainians but whose ancestral homeland now lies within Poland. Grandpa was born in New Jersey, but his folks were subjects of the Austrian Empire when they left Europe in the late 1890s. Some time before 1910, the family returned to Gladyszow, and Grandpa came back over on his own in the early 1920s and settled in Plains, Luzerne County, PA where he mined coal until his death in 1960 from lung disease.

Last year, Mrs VF learned that she had a cousin who had settled in the Chicago area, but he died just before she contacted him. I dug up her family's Ellis Islands records, free from EllisIsland.org , and learned dates of arrival and village of origin. I put her in contact with some tour guides specializing in "Lemko" visitors, the name for Ruthenians, and the upcoming trip was planned. Ellis Island

Our last major vacation was also had a family history theme, and we visited Shrewsbury and environs from which some of Mrs VF's other ancestors had come. We saw a lot of out of the way things that typical tourists would not have seen, and I hope that this trip is as rewarding.

I won't be blogging until we get back, but I am sure that my imaginary readership will bear up under the strain tolerably well.