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In Search of "Dead Relatives" (Page 3)
Next came the
Internet. For the seeker of "dead relatives" this place
is both Disneyland and your worst nightmare. There are hundreds
of Web sites to search for names, phone numbers and email addresses.
You could easily grow old and gray wading through it all! Casting
around I found two sites that opened up a new world for me in
the mysterious Carpathians. On the Infoukes server, Walter Maksimovich
has crafted a wonderful site that details the background of the
Lemkos
of Galicia
from a Ukrainian perspective. At the Carpatho-Rusyn.org site, Greg Gressa tells
a slightly different story from the viewpoint of the Rusyn people.
Greg has painstakingly put together a Web-searchable index of
most of the Lemko villages in Galicia. Working closely with him,
more Buryks popped up in Lupkiw and Zawoz. And the only Czerepaniaks
he could find in his excerpt from a 1787census of Galicia were
in Siemuszowa. Unfortunately, the LDS never filmed the records
in Siemuszowa so it was not possible for me to trace any ancestors
here myself. I went back to the LDS to search through more microfilm
and found no Buryks in Lupkiw but a ton of them in Zawoz. Many
of the names in my own Buryk family were carried by the Buryks
of Zawoz. Could this finally be grandpa Mike's village? Not quite.
Then there was a long email correspondence with Christoph Buryk
of Germany. I found him through an email directory on the Web
and we quickly got into a detailed discussion about his grandfather,
Nikolaus Buryk. Nikolaus came to Germany via Poland during World
War II from the village of Dovha (Dotha) Wojnitowska in Galicia.
Could this be the place? Lots more digging and other heavy email
and face-to-face discussions with Jan Popiel, formerly of Dobra,
Poland, (Dobra is a short distance
from Siemuszowa) plus the help of the Ukrainian Genealogy Society
in Alberta, Canada. As it turned out, Nikolaus came from a village
located in eastern Galicia which was no where near Siemuszowa.
Next stop.
With the gracious help of Jan Popiel, I met with Walter Polanski,
a former resident of the village right next to Siemuszowa. Walter
didn't know any Buryks, but his mother was a Czerepaniak! We
couldn't quite put together a connection between our two families,
if there was it was several generations back, but some old photos
that Baba Julia had kept of her relatives in Poland which fell
into my hands last summer courtesy of my cousin Delores jogged
Walter's memory. Wasn't that Hanya and George? Walter gave me
an address for Hanya Hirniak whom he had met several years ago
on a trip back to Poland. More letters. More waiting.
In the meantime, I had started a fresh trail in search of Mike
Buryk by putting requests for his birth certificate through the
Polish Consulate in New York City. The first two tries with different
places and years of birth came back with "no such person
listed". The third try with Siemuszowa as the place of birth
brought back two different people -- one with the last name "Gbur"
and the other "Gburyk". This was going no where fast
at $35 a shot!