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EDMONTON – For most of my life, all I knew about my family history was what my father and Uncle John had told me: “We’re Ukrainian from Brody in the province of Galicia.â€�

After years of wondering what that truly meant, I finally have an answer.

My search began with a long-shot email inquiry in October 2009 to Karen Lemiski, curator of the Basilian Fathers Museum in Mundare, about 70 kilometres east of Edmonton:

“Hello, I am trying to track history of the Stablyk family,� I wrote. “Matt McDonald (Demetrius Stablyk) was born in the Mundare district in 1905. Do you have, or know of any church records that might verify?�

She responded: “The parents of the children were Andrii Steblyk and Eva (maiden name Dolaba). Both were from the town of Konjuszkiw (Koniushkiv), district of Brody (in the northeast corner of Galicia).�

The birth records of my father and his four siblings uncovered a lifelong mystery. Our grandparents had left a small, rural Ukrainian village in the early 1900s. Their destination: Mundare.

From the moment I read the curator’s email, I knew I had to visit Koniushkiv. I spent the next couple of years doing extensive research.

I was proud to learn that all four of my grandparents were Ukrainian. My father’s biological family, the Steblyks, endured such severe hardships that in 1912, at the age of seven, my father Matt was taken in as a foster child by Mr. and Mrs. Dan McDonald. His brother Michael was taken in by the Van Vliet family, who lived just north of the McDonald farmstead. In 1916, the remaining siblings— John, Roman and Anna — were placed in care of the church and adopted by various families.

My grandmother, Eva, died before I was born; and visits with my grandfather had not been very meaningful, as he spoke only Ukrainian and I spoke English. Still, I always felt an inner pride knowing I was a “McDonald� Ukrainian, and wanted to learn more about my roots.

Birth records provided by the curator in Mundare verified that my grandfather was Andreas (Andreii) Steblyk and my grandmother was Eva (Eudocia) Dolaba. Other records confirmed that Andreas had immigrated to Canada in 1901 and settled in the Mundare region. Ship records state that Eva was born in 1873, and that she left Hamburg, Germany, on the Armenia on May 19, 1903, arriving at Halifax 13 days later.

Using census records, provincial archives and the website ancestry.ca, a researcher in Edmonton located a document sent to the Old Age Pensions Department on Feb. 8, 1940, that states my grandfather swore on his 1906 “application for patent� (homestead) that he was 36 — meaning his year of birth was 1870.

In further researching our genealogy, my siblings and I scoured history books, archives, microfilm, census records, land and homestead records, visited cemeteries and talked to historians. The Internet proved to be a wonderful tool.

Eventually I was ready to visit Koniushkiv. My sisters Ilene Fingland and Shirley Reed had made a brief trip to Brody, 11 kilometres from Koniushkiv, on a tour of Ukraine in May 2010, when they spent a day with researcher/interpreter Irene Golovachova of Lviv. Her knowledge of the region proved invaluable to me.

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