Click Map to Enlarge.Map of Austrian Hungary Empire
My name is Vernon Fedor and one of my great interests and past times is Genealogy and specifically, the genealogy of Eastern Europe where my ancestors were born and emigrated from. I have been doing my family's history tree for about 13 years now or may be more. How did I get this interest? I believe I can credit it to my parents. To my Dad, Simon, for he was immensely proud of his family lineage and his Ukrainian heritage and constantly reminded me about when I was young (and uninterested); and to my Mom, Elizabeth, for she fascinated me later in my life with her memory of people, birth dates and who married who and how they were related. I figured I better copy some of this information down before it was lost forever because neither I or my brothers or my sister would ever remember it. So with my computer skills I decided to use a Genealogy software program to write it down. Presently I use Family Tree Maker ver 11 program though I started out with Cumberland Tree.
I am a descendant of Ukrainian families that came to Alberta in 1897, 1898 and 1906. They came from the villages of Wysocko (Ukrainian: Vysits'ko), Wietlin (Ukrainian: Vetlyn), Laszki ( Ukrainian: Liashky Dovhi) and Lazy (Ukrainian: Lazy) in present day South East Poland near the City of Jaroslaw and the Town of Radymno. These villages were on or near the River San and this homeland area was at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. From what I can understand my ancestors were not mountain people, therefore, they were not Lemko, another nearby ethic linguistic Ukrainian group.
The San River is an important river for it generally marked the western edge of historical Ukrainian territory. If you were on the eastern side of the San River as were Weitlin, Wysocko, Laszki and Lazy you were in Ukrainian land. If you were on the west side of the San River, you were in Polish land. When they emigrated to Canada, their ancestral land was part of the Austrian Hungary Empire and was called the Province of Galicia, a special crown land set up by the Austrian Government in 1772. They considered themselves Ukrainian (Rusyn, Ruthenians) and considered themselves victims of politics, that is, conquered and cut off from their ancestral homeland, the Country of the Ukraine to the east.
Click Map to Enlarge.
Map
of Austrian Hungary Empire
Their story is one of "classical oppression". Their homeland was controlled by occupying forces (Poles then Austrians), they suffered religious persecution because the occupying forces were Roman Catholic and they were Greek Orthodox, and they had their farms taken over by devious and dubious means (free titles taken away and granted to the new Political Landlords) and therefore, they sought a new life in a new land. Like all other people who came to Canada or USA, they felt like they had found heaven.
What makes their story a little bit different was
that they (my
ancestors
and Ukrainians from Galicia) were solicited and invited by the Canadian
Government of the day (Conservative Minister of Interior Affairs Mr. T.
Mayne Daly and Superintendent of Immigration Mr. John Hall) to come to
Canada and settle the western
territories
of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. The Government was looking for,
and
found, hard core farmers to settle the harsh land and not "hobby"
farmers
from Britain or France. In the end it was mostly Germans and Ukrainians
that farmed and settled western Canada though the Dutch, Swedes,
Norwegians
and Canadians from the Province of Quebec contributed. And though they
were asked to come by the Canadian Government to Canada, they we
discriminated
against by some newspapers, politicians and upper class (?) Canadians
as
"undesirable people" to settle
Canada with. By 1900, the next
Government
of the day (Liberal) and the next Minister of Interior Affairs,
Mr.Clifford Sifton
said "I think a stalwart peasant in
a sheepskin coat, born on the soil,
whose
forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife
and
half a dozen children, is a very desirable settler". In the end
he was
right.
Here are some detailed or larger scale maps of where my ancestors came from. Click on Maps to Enlarge.
<img
src="http://www3.telus.net/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?dd=B|df=vgfedor.dat">
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