Family History

At the time of writing this post (February 2024), I had recently received the archival record of my great-grandparents’ marriage. The little envelope from the Ivano-Frankivsk State Archive still sits on my desk, even a month later; it will eventually get tucked away into my records folder when the novelty has worn off.

Every scrap of true information in this narrative was a fight. The gaps are filled with speculation and anachronistic, hushed grief over late-night (or, for my mom, morning) phone calls.

And there are so many gaps. How I arrived at this project – Ukrainian identity and textile craft – can only be found in moments. Nor can I present this story entirely chronologically or even fit it within my lifetime. It’s my yearslong efforts, my mom’s revised identity, and my grandmother and her family’s lived experiences, direct trauma, and plainly hidden truths. It’s the entire backdrop of this project and why I am crafting my own folk dress.

I will not guarantee complete details. There is knowledge that stays within my family alone. But I’ll try to start at the beginning.

The Last Ukrainian

My great-grandfather was born in Sniatyn (now Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, Western Ukraine) in 1892, when it was still part of Austro-Hungary. Most of our old records refer to him as Józef, the Polish version of the Ukrainian name Yosyp (Йосип). All of our records read Józef until ~2021, when I was able to retrieve copies of my great-grandparents’ birth certificates from the Ivano-Frankivsk State Archives, and he was effectively restored to Yosyp in our family tree. During his lifetime, Poles formed the upper class of local society, and he was the son of a long line of Ukrainian farmers.

Yosyp’s basic census information is fairly standard for a Western Ukrainian. He was baptized as a Greek Catholic (the primary religion of Western Ukrainians). He spoke Ukrainian at home. His children were brought up as Ukrainian-speaking Greek Catholics. Straightforward.

He was the perfect age to serve in some capacity during the First World War – ~23 when it began. There’s an aged family story that my great-grandmother met Yosyp in Vienna in 1917, and they got married then and there. Perhaps she visited him, but this story has been misremembered. The little envelope from Ivano-Frankivsk is quite clear: they married in Sniatyn in the summer of 1918. This restoration of truth is a simple, surface-level fix.

My great-grandmother was born in 1894 in Sniatyn. She was also baptized as Greek Catholic and was a descendant of a long line of Ukrainian farmers. She was born and married as Paraskeva, or Paraska. In later records, she appears as Olena or, more frequently, the Polish form, Helena. Her post-WW2 records only list Polish as her language, but it’s most likely that her mother tongue was also Ukrainian.

Their first children – my grandmother’s older brother, older sister, and my grandmother – followed quickly after their marriage. And at some point, in the early years of their marriage, they moved to Ivano-Frankivsk (at the time, Stanisławów, the Polish form), one of the closest cities to Sniatyn. Yosyp worked for the railroad industry, and Olena was a stay-at-home wife and mother. According to census data from August 1939, my great-grandparents lived very close to the railway station and still identified as Greek Catholic.

I couldn’t say who they were as people. Were they happy with their lives? What were their hobbies? What did Olena do in her spare moments of rest? There’s the lingering impression from my older relatives that Olena was a strong maternal figure, but specifics are impossible due to language barriers. My great-grandparents are census records and a single photo.

This is where the paper trail ends. My grandmother never knew for sure what happened to her father – or if she did, it was certainly too painful for her to tell. She evaded the question for the rest of her life, as she did with so many other questions. But between 1939-1941, the Soviets deported thousands of Western Ukrainian residents to Siberia (a long-standing Russian pastime) and outright killed many others just outside the city. I never found a death certificate for Yosyp, and I don’t expect that I will; I think we can figure out why.

Regardless, Yosyp’s loss marked the end of our family being “Ukrainian.” Yosyp was the last family member who my grandmother ever admitted was Ukrainian. The following several decades would be characterized by secrecy and repressed trauma.

The Breaking Point: WW2

My grandmother was born in 1923, when Western Ukraine was a part of newly independent Poland. Her birth name was Olha (Polish form: Olga), but her beloved older brother (Yevhen / Eugeniusz) called her Oli, which would become Ali after the war. She was raised Greek Catholic and spoke Ukrainian at home, especially with her father. Like many other Western Ukrainians to this day, she also grew up speaking Polish. At some point, she must have been educated in English, because both Ali and her sister Myroslava already spoke English very well following the war.

Ali also craved upward mobility, and being Ukrainian wasn’t enough to do that for her. Poles still made up the upper class in Western Ukraine during her young adulthood. In general, the local Poles had long dismissed the existence of Ukrainians as a separate people and demanded Polonization in exchange for upward mobility. Although she still spoke “quaint” Ukrainian at home, Ali otherwise spoke Polish as her primary language and converted to Roman Catholicism as a young adult. In this, she followed her older brother’s footsteps, who also spoke Polish regularly and traveled through the Baltic region as a young man. But she didn’t wait for what little upward mobility she could manage. Ali married a Polish soldier, Kazimierz at the age of 16, and shortly after, had her first child, Ryszard, in 1939.

Her husband Kazimierz was killed by the Soviet invaders in the service of the Polish Army in the early days of the war, leaving her a single mother.

Her brother, Yevhen, followed shortly after. Ali was able to recall his death in definitive terms for her descendants. He was lined up and shot by the Soviet invaders. He would have been ~21 at this time. When Ali was forced to leave Ukraine, one of the very few possessions that she kept with her was a photo of him. When she cursed the Russians in later years, it was often in his name.

Her father, Yosyp, was most likely either deported or similarly shot by the Soviets. By the end of the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, Ali knew that all of her immediate male relatives had met harsh fates, except her infant son.

The Nazi German takeover of Western Ukraine in 1941 may not have been as violent to Ali, but it was not much kinder. At this time, Ali, her son Ryszard, her mother Olena, and her older sister Myroslava were deported to serve in forced labor camps in Germany. How Ali fared through this with an infant is beyond me, but she was a sharp woman and always landed on her feet.

When US liberation came in 1945, Ali and Myroslava got into the good graces of the local soldiers. Ali served as a typist for the army and was even commissioned as a Polish-English translator during the Nuremberg trials. Myroslava married a US soldier and was able to immigrate to the US shortly after. Records from these immediate postwar years show both Ali and Olena having requested to return home to Ivano-Frankivsk, but to return to what was now Soviet territory was no longer safe. Realizing this, Olena and Ryszard immigrated to the US via their connections with Myroslava. Ali would follow several months later, when she could secure a (sham) marriage to an American soldier and legally move to the US.

There’s no real success story after this.

When she immigrated to the US, Ali became the sole provider for Ryszard and Olena. Olena stayed home and raised Ryszard, while Ali worked a variety of odd jobs (factory worker, housemaid, etc.). In 1957, in her mid-30s, she was faced with another pregnancy by an unknown man, resulting in my mother. A few years later, she attempted a marriage that quickly crashed and left her with another child to raise. For a third time, she was a single mother, the family matriarch. She spent her midlife decades working hard to provide for her family, only to be poor.

She pressed onward.

Myroslava and Ali had a fallout, leaving the sisters to be estranged for the remainder of their lives. In her last years of life, Olena lived with Myroslava. She had been a smoker for years, and in 1979, it caught up to her. It was just Ali and her descendants left.

She pressed onward.

Nevermind the Past

By the time some of my older relatives actually started asking questions, Ali was the only option. And she was… an unreliable narrator. She had made a new life in the US, and she didn’t want to truly revisit the past. She offered little, and the information she did offer was dubious. To piece together her life is to slog through countless little reports of misinformation and assumptions. I’m still tearing apart false narratives and fighting for what truths I can find.

Some of it could be unintentional mistakes, like saying that her parents had gotten married in Vienna in 1917. This had been written in our family records for decades, only to be disproven immediately by the little envelope that I received in early 2024.

Some of it is understandable from a personal perspective.

As we know from above, she was evasive about her father’s death. She would smudge the dates and tell us different reasons, but none of it aligned with the real paper trail. Yosyp died sometime shortly after the outbreak of the war, most likely due to Soviet violence. Should the truth have been pried from her? As much as it hurts, my grandma had some right to keep that trauma a secret.

When she was naturalized as a US citizen, Ali provided specific dates and locations for their marriage and divorce. However, unlike with Myroslava’s marriage, I have never been able to find a marriage record for Ali and her “husband.” If they had gotten married, the US Army would have the record, but they don’t. Okay, but if the US Army doesn’t have the record, then Germany must have it. No, no, throughout 2021-2022, I received several letters from German archives telling me that they had no records of this. She had most likely used her job with the US Army to forge her marriage and, thereby, gain access to the US. But she had done this to live a better life with her young son, so who am I to judge? I can’t blame her for having kept up the false pretense.

But some of this…

Colonialism’s Toll

A long time ago, in high school, I used to read books and do research. History research, even! (I didn’t have a social life.)

I wanted to learn more about the history of Poland and my Polish heritage, courtesy of my grandma Ali. As far as my mom had ever been concerned, her mother was Polish – after all, Ali spoke Polish fluently, was Roman Catholic, and had a maiden name with a Polish spelling. My older relatives never looked further than Poland for our family roots. And my mom was fine being just American for most of her life anyway. So, as a child, I was simply told that we were Polish. In this, mom and I fit well into Hansen’s “rule” – mom had no qualms being American for most of her life, while I (the third generation) started vying for a return to our roots at a young age (likely helped by the fact that I always took after my grandparents more than my own parents).

It wasn’t until I was reading up on Western Ukraine’s history that I realized that something wasn’t clicking. Our records weren’t adding up to the conclusion. Sniatyn was and still is a Ukrainian-dominant region. There were gaps in Ali’s narrative that made our being Polish historically dubious. And more than that, when I did find digital traces of our remaining relatives in Sniatyn, they were unequivocally Ukrainian. I couldn’t find any evidence about a Polish family with our surname in that region, but there was a mounting pool of evidence towards our being Ukrainian.

I would get confirmation in the years following that realization. My great-grandparents’ birth certificates and census records reading “Greek Catholic,” records specifying our agricultural background (Ukrainians made up Sniatyn’s historic farming community), finding more Ukrainian names connected to Yosyp and Olena, an older relative of mine admitting that Ali’s father spoke Ukrainian (something that she then brushed off quickly) …

Ali and her parents were Ukrainian.

My mom had never cared much about her Polish roots, but when I came to her with what I had found, there was a dissonance. She had never doubted Ali’s narrative on her own, but my mom is also willing to look at evidence and accept when something she thought was wrong. And this was weirdly wrong, so she started paying attention. She helped me start collecting original family records; I studied Ukrainian so that I could write to the Ivano-Frankivsk archive, and mom helped pay the fees to obtain records.

There is only so much that can be confirmed since Ali’s death, but mom and I mended as much of the narrative as we could – the narrative written out above. And when we had gathered enough of it together, the historical context made a bit more sense. Ali was a proud woman, and she had always longed for a better life. But she was not going to achieve that easily as a Ukrainian-speaking, Greek Catholic woman at a time when Ukrainians were obstructed from upward movement and Ukrainian language and culture were suppressed. For Western Ukraine, Poles had long been the dominant, colonizing force, and that is the community Ali went to for some fortune in life. She was willing to switch identities to fit into the dominant group. We figured this Ukrainian oppression and Polonization in Western Ukraine was what originally drove Ali to reject her Ukrainian identity.

But why keep up the pretense after immigrating to the US? Why hide her Ukrainian roots?

Maybe Ali just liked Polish culture more, but I can’t imagine there not being more than that. Considering her family’s humble background and the cultural superiority that Poles in the region had long exerted over Ukrainians, I would guess that shame and disappointment in her Ukrainian roots played a role. Why admit to being in the marginalized group when she could easily pass as a member of the dominant community? This is rather odd to think about in the context of US’s copious “dumb Pole” jokes, but it was still the attitude that Ali grew up around. To be Ukrainian was lowly, and that was undesirable.

Sometimes, I wonder if there was more to that. For the first years of her life, Ali lived in a Ukrainian household – a household that remained Ukrainian even after her Polonization, and that was violently destroyed by the Soviet occupiers. She told her descendants so little about her pre-war life, but there is undoubtedly an echo of trauma tied to this time. The last family member who Ali admitted was Ukrainian was her father, and his memory is now weighed down with the hushed knowledge of his fate. In the postwar years, she could have switched back to her original culture or told us about it, at least, but she dismissed it out of hand. We know that language has been tied to trauma before, that second languages may be easier to discuss distressing experiences in, and that some languages may be irrevocably tied to trauma. Perhaps her Ukrainian roots became too associated with the painful memories of the first Soviet occupation, and it was easier just to remain Polish. Maybe when she cursed the Russians for the rest of her life, it was in mourning for both her family and any comfortable return to her childhood roots and memories.

It’s conjecture. We’ll never know for sure. But there’s an indelible mark of shame and pain in having hid our Ukrainian roots, even in somewhat plain sight.

Whatever her truth was, I recognize that Ali had her reasons. She was a normal person trying to do her best to cope with the legacy of two settler colonialist regimes. She’s not the first to have this complicated relationship with being Ukrainian (“Nikolai Gogol,” after all, fought for access to the Russian metropole), and with the current war, she will not be the last. Ali was a member of just one generation of Ukrainians pushed down for their ethnicity. Were we expecting her to come away with a healthy relationship with her Ukrainian identity?

But this shame and trauma does not have to continue lingering.

Reclamation

After reconstructing our family’s narrative and discovering that we were actually Ukrainian, my mom and I worked to reclaim that heritage, though along different paths.

I was the pioneer in this, sharing any new information about our history and culture that I could over the years. This got easier when I entered university and was able to study the Ukrainian language and culture. My college education was immediately put towards working with the Ivano-Frankivsk archive to get our family records and learning about the parts of our Ukrainian heritage that we had been cut off from. I built connections with the Ukrainian communities in the US, Canada, and elsewhere and began embroidering Western Ukrainian patterns (2024 marks 7 years of embroidering Ukrainian patterns!). Within a few years, I had amassed enough knowledge about Ukrainian culture to write both my BA thesis and History MA thesis on Ukrainian-focused topics. So much of my life quickly became centered on reclaiming our Ukrainian heritage; it was normalized for me that we were Ukrainian.

My mom was a bit slower to take; after all, she had a separate life and interests already established. She had helped me reconstruct Ali’s narrative with what she knew and was willing to accept the change in our identity, but a full reclamation of her Ukrainian roots was not her top priority. At first.

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine was a surprising wake-up call for her. The similarities to what her own mother had experienced several decades before were certainly not lost to her. After hearing about the Bucha massacre, my mom visited me. She asked me to help her fill out a name change form to take Ali’s maiden name – this time, with the original Ukrainian spelling. A longtime knitter, she began to knit with Ukrainian national symbols in mind. She started speaking with the local Ukrainian diaspora more and asking about Ukrainian history and culture. The war was a realization for her that, if she wants to reclaim our heritage and beat the vestiges of settler colonialism that brought shame to our identity in the first place, then she would have to actively fight for it.

This process has spanned nearly a century, but mom and I are finally working to heal past Polonization and Soviet trauma in our family and reclaim our Ukrainian heritage. Luckily, we already had one tool that we could actively use to restore our heritage and identity: embroidery.

Embroidering is a skill that my grandma Ali, my mom, and I all share. Ali was an avid needleworker and passed the skill down to willing descendants. Before my mom developed arthritis following years of professional seamstress work, she used to embroider her handmade quilts. Mom then taught me various stitches throughout my childhood and (especially) teenage years. My predecessors didn’t embroider Ukrainian patterns, but modern patterns that they liked. The skill and act of embroidering was safe; it was something that Ali had always known, but could engage in within new settings and without overt ties to a painful past. It was one of the few things that Ali allowed to follow from her native Ukrainian culture to her American life; it was a lifelong mode of self-expression and meditation that could be decoupled from her hushed truth. But for my mom and I, embroidering quickly became a way to reclaim our heritage, because it’s a skill that we already understand.

Before I could easily find information online about Sniatyn, I could find photos of the Sniatyn folk dress and the famed, complex whitework (which my mom quite likes). These photos of embroidery were how I first introduced my mom to Ukrainian culture. And the more research I did and conversations I had with other Ukrainians, the more I realized how significant embroidering was to Ukrainian culture. We didn’t embroider just because that’s what my family does. We embroider because that’s what Ukrainian women have historically done to create beauty in the world. It was the natural form of self-expression for my grandma, who had grown up with Ukrainian traditions.

So, mom and I are both proficient in embroidery. We know the narrative of our Ukrainian heritage. And we have reason and motivation to reclaim our Ukrainian identity. Mom’s arthritis limits her embroidery abilities at this point, but I have her full support going forward.

Well, a strong next step is to finish restoring our embroidery skill to its Ukrainian cultural context, and thereby help mend our lingering family trauma and reclaim our Ukrainian identity. Crafting a Sniatyn-based folk dress might be one way to accomplish this…