Dr. Robert Hanich connects with his history in America and present in Uzhhorod.
Dr. Robert Hanich
Published: July 9, 2024
Growing up, my parents told me that we were Slovak, and my deceased grandparents, as only children, had limited connections with the Homeland. We’d heard of a village (Hanigovce) and preserved some documents, including a 1956 letter from Malyy Bereznyy in Transcarpathia. My parents had little curiosity about their heritage or religion, which they described as Ruthenian. My parents spoke a language they thought was Slovak. We were Catholic but our Masses weren’t in English, our holy days and order of Sacraments didn’t correspond with Roman Catholic tradition, and we crossed ourselves differently. My siblings and I kept the traditions of our arcane culture in the home and enjoyed the food, but wished that we were less unique.
As an adult, after questions from my own sons about our past, I spent months studying microfilm at the local Mormon church. I discovered that my maternal great-grandfather, who arrived via Ellis Island in 1894, was the first of my ancestors to emigrate. He traveled back to the homeland several times, returning to the United States in 1889 and 1904. After 1904, he decided to remain and pay passage for his family in 1906. Four years later he was murdered by the Coal and Iron Police in the Westmoreland Coal Strike of 1910.
My paternal grandmother was orphaned at an early age after a cholera epidemic in her village. She and my maternal grandfather (an only child) were actually fourth cousins and playmates in Hanigovce, a Carpatho-Rusyn village in the Cergov mountains. On hearing this, my parents recalled they first met when their respective parents reconnected in 1948 after a Greek Catholic festival.
In 1907, my paternal grandfather emigrated from Transcarpathia, via Baltimore, to work in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. He later arranged for his nephew, Michael, to live with his family in Aliquippa in the years before my father’s birth. Michael returned in 1922 to Czechoslovakia to care for his parents, whereafter our families lost touch. In 1940 my paternal grandfather died of pneumonia. As the only member of his family who could read his native language, he wasn’t around to decipher a letter which arrived sixteen years later from Ukraine.
In 2004, through the Internet, I located a Professor Hanych in Uzhhorod through the Internet. I sent him a copy of the 1956 letter, asking if we shared a relation. Six months later, I received his reply, along with a 1922 photo of his father posing with my older uncles as young children and a translation of the 1956 Carpatho-Rusyn letter. I felt I had reached across time.
Professor Hanych, a physician like myself, was the son of my grandfather’s nephew. He was touched to see his father’s handwriting relating village news from half a century ago. I later traveled with my family to Uzhhorod for a remarkable experience of reconnection, meeting a host of Hanychs in western Ukraine. During a celebratory dinner of Carpatho-Rusyn cuisine (just like home) in Vil’shynky, my father easily conversed with the villagers. Before departing, we met one last time for Mass at the Cathedral of the Exhaltation of the Holy Cross in Uzhhorod.
Uncovering my family’s accurate history and subsequently conversing with my generation of Carpatho-Rusyns, I sensed our shared values of family, faith, and hard work. To understand and finally identity with this remarkable heritage was like arriving home after a circuitous journey of self-discovery.
Dr. Robert Hanich is a member of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, and the Recording Secretary of the C-RS Board of Directors.
