Chyszewice (Hee-shev-ee-chee)
How does one find these things? By the greatest of luck, I was provided a copy of Pauline's baptismal certificate. Written in three languages, it contained only a few brief citations concerning her baptism, birth, parents. But oh, what a wealth of clues.
Please recall that me...the Wozny clan...the Dombroskys...the
Trojanowskys...the Rogozas...can all trace our roots to the church nearest
the Oszczypko family homestead in the Ukraine. Yes, you need look no further
for your roots than here!
The first step was to do a net search on
the town name, under various spellings. This yielded the information that
the town was indeed in Galicia, a province of Austria-Hungary, and indeed
in the Rudki district. Rudky is too small a town to be listed on most general
atlases (as I found out in retrospect). Through a series of lucky net searches,
I discovered that the State University of New York at Buffalo has a Polish
Genealogy library with the following tome...
This
is a 17-volume
gazeteer listing all towns and villages in Poland known at the time of printing,
1880. Perfect timing for this generation of descendants! Now I know that
any person seeking Polish roots (with any experience) checks here first.
The reference work is in many big city public libraries (such as Cleveland
Public Library) and allegedly on microfiche at the LDS family research centers.
The citation for Chyszewice
reads:
Notably, in
translation, the town is in a marshy region in the Rudki powiat (county).
But the distance (104 kil northwest of Rudki) is all wrong. And they can't
blame that on computers! The town population consisted of 854 Greek Catholics
and 8 Jews totalling, yes, 862. Impeccable arithmetic at the expense of
redundancy (perhaps this is why the reference is 17 volumes in
size).
Through a series of harrowing trips to the Cleveland Public
Library Map Collection, we were finally able to find the town on a 1:75,000
map of Galicia produced in the 1910s, and available on microfiche. The scale
is so small, the locations of churches and houses are marked! The scale is
so small, it's also like finding a needle in a haystack. One fiche covers
about 5 square miles, and if you have no idea where a place is,
well...
But this
is far too close-up to gain a sense of its location. Below is a scan of
a 1905 atlas I have in my small collection of old books showing the region
with respect to the modern town of Lvov (or Lviv), which was once known as
Lemberg. For additional reference purposes, I have placed the birth place
of my grandfather Stanley Andrew Wozny, the town of Hoczew. Though my
grandmother and grandfather probably did not meet prior to arriving in the
US, they did not grow up very far from each
other!
At this
point, I suppose I should include links to famous people born in Chyszewice...but
I'm afraid that is a very small list (same for
Hoczew).
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