My paternal grandfather was born in Sniatyn, Galicia which is now in the Ukraine. The name on his passport is: Bazyli Wynohradnyk. He changed his name to William Wainer, officially, when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen – more on that in a future post. Here are images from his passport.
Here are the second and third pages
Comments
so,are we polish ?papa considered himself polish acording to his sons.i noodled around about ruethians,etc. and just got more confused.
We’re from, what used to be called when our grandparents left, the Austrian_Hungary Empire from a city called: Sniatyn in the, now, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in what is now Ukraine.
The problem with this is that it’s in Eastern Europe and each patch of ground in Eastern Europe has been “owned” by so many different kings and countries and religions and nomads, that the best way I found to identify who our grandparents were, culturally, was to use the term Ruthenian. The better term might be now: Rusyns or Carpatho-Rusyns.
The short answer is: no we are not Polish. Next time you’re out we can have a long, long talk about this