Welcome to Mosty Wielkie

Half of my ancestry runs through a single Ukrainian community. Both of my father’s parents were born in the municipality now known as Velyki Mosty (Великі Мо́сти). Presently part of the Ukraine, before the Second World War it was within Poland and known as Mosty Wielkie, and earlier, along with the rest of Galicia it was a component of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

My grandfather, Dmytro Karpowich, was born in Mosty Wielkie, November 7, 1890, the youngest son of Ivan Karpowich (1847-?) and his wife Anna (Rybicka) Karpowich (1850-1897). In 1906 he sailed to New York and joined siblings in Pennsylvania. In 1916 he married Maria Sawicka, who had also been born in Mosty Wielkie, October 16, 1893, daughter of Hryhorii (Gregory) Sawicki (1864-?) and Paraskeva (Nabozniak) Sawicki (1873-?). She had immigrated to New York at an unknown time (I’ve yet to find a record of her landing at Ellis Island), and was living in Brooklyn at the time of her marriage.

My grandparents were distantly related (third cousins, once removed), although I’m not sure they knew the precise relationship. They lived the rest of their lives in and near Allentown, PA; my grandmother died July 7, 1950, when I was only two years old; my grandfather July 15, 1961. They had four children, five grandchildren, and ultimately, nine great-grandchildren.

Not long after my late wife and I married in 1974 we started researching our genealogies. We made a long of progress on her side (French-Canadian, mostly) but little on my side (my mother’s people were from Lithuania). Using city directories and naturalization records, and later the Ellis Island records, we were able to find something of my relatives in America, but nothing of my European antecedents.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, research in Ukrainian genealogy was impossible, and the Russian authorities who ruled the Ukraine treated vital records as state secrets. No one could say what records even survived the two world wars that had been fought there, much less offer access to them. Afterwards, the Mormon church eventually got the now independent Ukrainian government to let them view the records. Much to my amazement, the records had not only survived, but were still housed in the very building erected to hold them two centuries earlier!

It took years to microfilm to records, but by 2007 they were available to users of the Family History Centers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), and I was able to trace my ancestry in Mosty Wielkie back to the early eighteenth century. This blog will describe what I found and how I found it. I hope it will be a help to others undertaking Ukrainian genealogy, and perhaps locate some of my other relatives in the United States and Canada.