Walking in My Ancestors' Footprints

My 2003 and 2004 Trips to Poland

I made my first trip to Poland in July-August 2003 on the Lemko Heritage Tour of southeastern Poland that was sponsored by the Carpatho-Rusyn Society (C-RS) based in Pittsburgh, PA. As it turned out, the trip was far more memorable than I could have imagined when I first signed up for it in the spring of that year. In fact, it became a major event in my family history because I got to meet cousins in Poland that my family in the US were unaware of and whose family had not been in contact with my immediate family in America in almost 100 years. The elders among them were born and raised in our earliest ancestral village in the mountains and I got to hear about our family history from them first hand and thereby confirmed my Lemko family roots. My new-found cousins took me on guided tours of the lands of our ancestors in the mountains and the valley, on the mountain footpaths and trails once used by our earliest ancestors, so I literally got to walk in my ancestor's footprints. That first meeting was so remarkable and special to me that I followed it with a second trip to Poland in August of 2004, on my own, to spend more time with my new family there and learn more of my family history. To my great satisfaction, we did much the same things as we had done the previous summer, only more. A number of the photographs I made on those trips are provided below and others included elsewhere in this website.

Before describing those trips, though, bear with me while I tell you something of my background so you will better appreciate what the trips accomplished for my family and me.

My background

I am 67 years of age and have always known that I was of Polish descent because my father and his parents, as well as my mother's parents, were born in Poland. But I knew little else about my ancestors or my Polish heritage. With a name like Smith, I was somewhat confused about my heritage, to say the least.

I had been researching my family history for about six years at the time I joined the C-RS tour in 2003. I knew almost nothing about my Polish roots at the beginning of my family search because my parents had passed away many years earlier and while I was growing up they never talked about our family history. But around the time the tour was announced I had already come to realize that I was also part Lemko through my mother's Kiehart family line (Kichard in Poland). That was a shock to me. I was raised a strict Roman Catholic in a very small northeastern PA community, suspicious of and avoiding anything of the Orthodox Church, only to learn after all those years what Walt Kelly's cartoon character Pogo once said, "....they is us....". But I was excited about this new heritage of mine and the Lemko Tour was happening at an opportune time for me to investigate it further and first hand. So I joined the tour to learn more about that heritage and to see the area where my Lemko ancestors once lived. Today, with a new understanding of my ancestry, I'm happy to acknowledge that I too am Lemko.

My family searchers in Poland

It was with the help of Iwona Dakiniewicz, a genealogist in Poland, that I was able to construct the family tree of my mother's Kiehart (Kichard) family that made me aware of my Lemko roots. Inspired by and armed with that knowledge I joined the 2003 Lemko Heritage Tour hoping to learn more about those family roots.

However, it was Halina and Andrzej Malecki of Poland that located my Kichard cousins in Poland for me. The Maleckis were to be tour guides for the tour as it passed the region of my Kichard family ancestral villages, Huta Samokleska and Pielgryzmka so I contacted them by e-mail prior to the tour, to help me to visit those villages when I was there. I had already located the villages on both older and newer maps of Poland and knew that Huta, for short, was once a mountain village but was now out of existence and consequently would not be easy to locate. However, I knew that Pielgrzymka was still there, located in the valley just beyond the mountains from where Huta once stood.

On their own and without my knowledge since we still had no agreement about the work, the Maleckis had begun researching the locations of my villages, making trips from their home 20 miles away to the area and inquiring about Huta and my Kichard family. After a few such efforts they e-mailed me one day saying, ".....Andy, we have a surprise for you......". And what a surprise it was. They had not only located both of my ancestral villages, they also found and met an 82-year old man by the name of Andrzej Kichard living in one of them, Pielgrzymka. Andrzej, I was about to learn, was a cousin whose father was my grandfather's brother. The facts they provided about Andrzej and his family fit what I then knew of my family history, but the proof of our family relationship were two photos hanging on the wall in Andrzej's home that the Maleckis copied and e-mailed to me. The photos were of my grandfather and Andrzej's father and were made in America when his father was here in the early 1900's. Andrzej knew his father was one of the two men in the photos, but he didn't know the other. The other, as I said, was my grandfather. I recognized him at once in the photos from photographs that I have of my grandparents and their children in this country that were made in 1910. But there was a further surprise in one of the photos, both men were holding violins. I had heard previously from cousins in Mayfield, PA that my then coal-miner grandfather, who died in 1915, once played the violin at weddings and other functions, which helped pay for the home he built there, but Andrzej's photo was the first proof I had seen of that. There was no doubt in my mind, Andrzej and his family living in Pielgrzymka were my cousins.

Highlights of my Poland trips

The C-RS 2003 Lemko Heritage Tour of Poland was described in detail in articles by Nancy Revak in the C-RS Newsletter, The New Rusyn Times , January/February, March/April, and May/June 2004 issues so I will not describe that part of my trip here, except for a few comments about some of the things that left me with lasting impressions of our Lemko homeland. Except for those comments, the rest of what I have to say below about that trip and my followup trip in the summer of 2004 is about my visits with my new-found Kichard family in Pielgrzymka and our hikes to Huta in the mountains.

Among the most noteworthy things the tour did that are described in Nancy Revak's articles, was to attend the annual Vatra (annual Lemko festival) in Michalów, visit numerous old wooden churches in Lemkovyna, enjoy a traditional Lemko meal like our ancestors once had, and to visit the Museum of Lemko Culture in Zyndranowa and the Ethnographic Park (outdoor museum of old homes and churches) in Sanok.

All of the above and the rest of the tour were special, but the most noteable and also the saddest part of the tour for me was the bus ride east from Gorlice toward Zyndranowa, through areas where there was once Lemko village after Lemko village located at the base of the mountains, but that are no longer there today. The communist government totally obliterated all of those villages during the Lemko deportations and all that remains of them today is empty grassland stretching to the mountains. But along the roadsides, standing alone in front of the empty fields, there are still occasional small religious shrines that were raised long ago by the individual Lemko families who once lived there, to honor significant events in their family life. Otherwise, every trace of those villages is gone and not even the stone foundations of their homes remain. The sight provoked feelings of both anger and sadness for all. Anger at those who perpetrated it and sadness for those who once lived there.

It was easy for us to imagine the pain those people must have felt when they had to give up their homes and the land that had been in their families for centuries, and in some cases even to see those homes being burned to the ground as they were forced to leave. It was a brutal chapter in our ancestors history.

Visits with my Kichard family in Poland

After the tour in 2003 and again in the summer of 2004 I visited with my elderly cousins and their off-spring in Pielgrzymka that the Maleckis had located for me. Those elderly cousins were born and raised in Huta and were forced by the communists to move from Huta to houses in Pielgrzymka that had been vacated by the deported Lemkos. My cousins living in Pielgrzymka today were only part Lemko and were not deported because in one case a parent and the other a spouse was Polish. But others of my Kichard family in both Huta and Pielgrzymka who were Lemko or even only part Lemko were deported to Ukraine, and their whereabouts to this day are still unknown. The separations caused much grief in their families and my cousins still feel the pain of those times today.

My first meeting with my Kichard cousins in Pielgrzymka in 2003 was very emotional but a happy time for us. That meeting with cousin Andrzej and one of his nieces, as I stepped out of the Maleckis van, is shown in this photo. It was a memorable occasion. Until then, our immediate families had not been in contact for almost 100 years. Nor had any of our families seen each other since Andrzej's father, Mikolaj had visited with his brother, my grandfather, Andrew Kiehart, in Mayfield, PA between 1905 and 1915. Andrzej's father lived and worked in the US for a few years before returning to Poland where he later remained.

Cousin Andrzej was born in Huta and at the time of our first meeting hiked part of the way there with my guides in Poland, the Maleckis, and I to show us where his father's home had once stood and the location of the bed in that house where he was born in 1921. The road in Magurski National Park was temporarily open for that day so we were able to drive with my elderly cousin to within about one-half mile of Huta, and walked the rest of the way to the village along the forest trail used by my ancestor's who lived there over 100 years ago.

Huta was located in the mountains, over two miles from Pielgrzymka and Samokleski in the valley at the base of the mountains. My Kichard ancestors from Huta were only part Lemko and some of them attended St. Michael's Orthodox (once Greek Catholic) Church in Pielgryzmka and others the Roman Catholic church in Samokleski. They walked that distance year round and regularly, and in all types of weather to attend services and even carried coffins and babies there for funerals and baptisms. The records show that burials and baptisms in Huta usually occurred within 1-3 days of the event, so there was likely no waiting during inclement weather to make the long trip from Huta to the church.

My younger cousins and I, with the Maleckis, made a total of three trips to Huta from Pielgrzymka in the summers of 2003 and 2004. On two of them we hiked most of the way from St. Michael's so that I could literally walk in the footprints of my grandparents and their ancestors who made that trip innumerable times over the last two centuries.

Following are photos from those hikes and of the ruins of Huta as one can see them today. The first photo is of the "change house" at the southernmost end of Pielgrzymka where my ancestors changed from the walking clothes they wore on their long hike to the valley into the better clothes they wore to church services. They reversed the procedure on their return to Huta.

Next is a photo of my group starting one of our hikes to Huta from the southernmost end of Pielgrzymka in the valley. Huta is about 2 miles away and out of view at the base of the mountain ridge behind the first mountain ridge shown in the photos. Does anyone walk this far to go to church services today?

What follows next are photos of some of the ruins and remants of the village that once was Huta. As mentioned elsewhere, Huta has been swallowed up by the more than 50-year old mountain forest since it ceased to exist. The first photo is of Barwinek (myrtle ground cover, which does not originate in the wild) growing around what was once the the water well of my G-G-G-Grandfather, Jakub Kichard. The surface of the well is now down to ground level but its below-ground stone lining is still clearly visible but not shown in the photo. The next photo is of a small grind-stone and one of several pieces of broken clay pots near where my cousins thought the craftsman who made the pots once lived. Nearby we also saw a mill-stone from what must have been the home and grist mill of the miller in Huta. Along our way we also found several different types of fruit trees, the most notable of which was an ancient sour cherry tree, older than any I have ever seen, and one that our Lemko ancestors probably planted there many years ago. We also saw some stone cold-cellars that the families of Huta built to preserve their food, as well as remants of stone foundations of homes that once stood there.

The only thing from Huta that was not destroyed by the Communists and is still standing there today is a religious shrine that was made in 1893 by my Lemko grandmother's Kityk family, that had also lived in Huta and were among the first families in the village. The shrine was restored by volunteers in 2001 who still maintain it.

Aside from our trips to Huta my cousins and I had numerous family gatherings with the help of the Maleckis. The final photo of my visits to Poland is of one of those occasions, a "bonfire kielbasa cookout" in cousin Andrzej's back yard, with Lemko music provided by the Malecki family.

All in all, both of my trips to Poland were very special for me, and I think for my family there, and gave us some lasting memories.