It has been a little while since I’ve had the chance to sit down and write or rather dictate a blog post on my phone. There are numerous topics I want to talk about and I haven’t had the time because I’ve been in the middle of a very extensive Autoimmune pain flare and a very long series of new medical issues that have come up as well as trying to navigate a crisis in my continuity of care and pain management.
In the 20 day interim without writing, I have solved a really big piece of my ancestral mystery. It turns out that we are Carpatho-Rusyn more than anything else -- we’re still more Ukrainian aligned. Just add a clarify Rusyn is NOT Russian. Carpathian Rusyn's are indigenous Slav's of the Carpathian mountains -- which spans the borders of Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Within the Carpatho-Rusyn's you will find specific ethnic groups such as the Rusyn (Rusnak), Lemko, Hutsul, Boyko, and Pannonian. There are other ethnic clusters in the region such as the Romani/Roma. Basically these groups are ethnic minorities within the regions and this is why I’ve had such a hard time tracking down ancestral information.
This was done by a specific genetic testing for this particular population through Marleka Identity Labs.
We are the people from nowhere. We are a stateless ethnic minority very similar to the Kurd's in that we are stateless ethnicities attached to other countries. I found it interesting that the Hutsul's are referred to as thieves and outlaws.
All my life, I have had this underlying feeling that I don’t belong here and have struggled with never knowing where I belong and never feeling like I’m in the right place. My ancestral exploration has showed me is that we are 'people from nowhere' and having read a book with the same title, and the pop artist, Andry Warhol also referred to himself as 'being from nowhere' I concur that is this an apt descriptor.
I’ve always had this attachment to the Carpathian mountains and maybe it came originally from my minor, but life-long obsession with Dracula -- now I find it amusing that we have genetic ties to the Draculesti and the Bathory families though I am not sure yet where this connects to our modern ancestry.
I’ve been reading and researching more trying to put the pieces together the Carpatho-Rusyn's. We mostly settled in the Eastern United States with Pennsylvania, where I live, being the largest population. They came here to work in the steel mills and coal mines. Both of my great grandfather‘s and my grandfather worked at Bethlehem Steel.
I’m like oh this is why we go to a Greek Catholic Church or visiting Catholic because I’ve been trying to figure that out as well, as opposed to being straight up eastern orthodox were more Ukrainian Catholic and visiting Catholic on that side, so but as it appear from what I can understand, historically they came here due to just the economic poverty of the region, many of them sold their homes to come here to make money to send back home and also with eventually understanding that they two would return home. This was in the sort of early pre-and during World War I and what I did didn’t realize here with the ones that stayed a lot of the Karen’s were around we rounded up from the mountains into in tournament camps during World War I, which I didn’t even know existed, but that’s a whole thing so you’ve got a lot of layers here that feed into the ancestral epigenetic structure of who I am as a person we don’t belong here. We’re not from here. We want to go home. That’s the Gen feeling I’ve had and doing my ancestor work as we were planning on staying, but you know throwing two world wars, the whole lot of more the holocaust and so communism if you ever catch me being, I have a epic amount of shade to throw at so communism or any communism really because what happened to all those ancestral villages is that everyone survived the war World War II didn’t really affect the Carpathian region as much as it did other areas there, but the Soviets liquidated a lot of villages, including ones that my great grandparents came from in their families and burned them to the ground and relocated whomever lived there further inside Soviet Ukraine at the time so I have some feelings about that because that type of thing just sticks in your soul like to the point and I shit you not because I eventually put this together. I used to date an anarchocommunist, and there was one time when he was over and out of nowhere nowhere a large portrait of my great great grandparents from that region that was liquidated by the Soviets flung itself off the wall and onto the ground, as if to say not in my house Missy, and when I kind of pieced that together years later, yeah, so that ancestral blood flows that trauma flows deep and all of that and that’s what makes me who I am
I am really excited to have this missing piece and am in research mode of filling in the blanks I wasn’t sure why my great grandparents came here. How many of them came and what the circumstances were you can you know, piece together, things from historic records, but I didn’t know their story so this helps me tell their story. I now know that I know that I have a point of where I can really start to research this further because I don’t necessarily need to know the entire histories of all of those five or six countries I need to know the history of the Carpathian-Rusyn people. I would love to know why everyone with my last name is a blood relative or married to one I can’t find anything outside of a handful Hungarian church in synagogue records from the 1700s, but beyond that it’s a bit of a mystery so we’re going keep digging. I can’t stress us enough knowing your ancestry as it really helps you to understand who you are as a person.
And for as long I shall live, my dream one day is to return to my homeland to that cottage in the Carpathian Mountains overlooking the Black Sea.