Shadows of Remembered Ancestors

By  Walter Kish

This past Sunday [June 7], fifty days after Easter, marked Pentecost what is also known as Zeleni Sviata on the Ukrainian church [Julian] calendar, traditionally dedicated to remembering departed friends, family and ancestors by visiting cemeteries and grave sites.  Prayers and services are conducted and the graves are tended to and freshly decorated with flowers.

The holiday is actually a lot older than Christianity and in pagan times was a celebration marking the passage from spring to summer in the solar cycle and involved certain hedonistic practices that the early Church Fathers quickly sought to transform into a more spiritual form.

Be that as it may, within current Ukrainian tradition, it is a time to reflect and honour all those past generations that got us to where we are today.  For most of my life, this was a strictly symbolic endeavour, since my ancestors and their remains were half way around the world.  My parents were both immigrants and I never met or knew any of my grandparents or even most of my aunts and uncles. 

By the time I was finally able to visit Ukraine at the age of thirty nine, most of them were long gone.  In Canada, I had never seen a tombstone with the Kish and Gerun names that represented the paternal and maternal linkages to my family’s past.  When I first visited the cemeteries in my father’s and mother’s villages, I was therefore particularly moved by the number of gravestones that had my parent’s surnames on them.  It was only then that I first came to appreciate the extent of the family network that transcended centuries and countless individuals, of which I was a part.  As I walked down the endless rows of crosses and stone markers, I was overcome with the realization that I was of their flesh and blood, kinfolk with whom I shared more than just a genetic history.  They had lived through all those trials and tribulations that I had only read about in Ukrainian history.  They were in fact part of that history and I was a part of them.

Prior to that time, my family was basically my parents, my brother and sister and the one uncle that I had in Canada.  In Ukraine, I discovered over time that I had literally dozens of aunts and uncles and hundreds of cousins, many living and untold numbers that had passed on. I was part of both a personal and cultural heritage much bigger than I had ever imagined.

It spurred me to do some serious genealogical research into my roots and led me to some fascinating discoveries.  In the archives in Lviv, I found an old map dated 1844 drawn up by some functionary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that ruled Western Ukraine at the time.  It showed in great detail all the plots of land in the village of Sokoliwka where my father originally came from.  On that map I can find the various parcels of land owned by Vasyl and Stefan Kish, from whom I am undoubtedly descended, they being the only Kishes living in my family’s ancestral village at that time.  Unfortunately, the family tree that I have been able to draw up in some detail stops one generation short of these two gentlemen.  Hopefully further research will enable me to more precisely define my relationship to them.

I have a similar map dated 1854 for my mother’s village and have been able to trace my lineage on that side some one hundred and fifty years back as well.

I have spent many hours poring over old church records of births, deaths and marriages and now have a catalogue of some six hundred individuals covering six generations of my family.  Although I know their names and some of the events that marked their lives, I know almost nothing of who they were as individuals.  Most of them were barely literate, if at all, and there is virtually no artifact written in their own hand – no letters, no memoirs and of course, no portraits or photographs.

I can only look upon the living family members that I have gotten to know in Ukraine and see in them perhaps a reflection of what my ancestors might have been like six, seven or more generations back.  Who knows, perhaps Vasyl Kish was very much like me!

On Zeleni Sviata I raise a toast to all my ancestors, thanking them for making me possible and if they are listening, wherever they are, letting them know that I will remember them.