October is flying by and it’s the weekend, once again, so it’s time for a new challenge from Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.
I didn’t ask Randy, but wonder if this week’s topic was inspired by the UK Society of Genealogists’ All About That Place 2026, which is currently up and running for ten days from 7 October 2026. About ten new videos are posted each day, but each is only about ten minutes long. The talks cover all kinds of topics related the the study of a single “place” (or event).
It’s well worth checking out the videos as they are all well done.
Back to Randy’s choice for today’s SNGF:
1) What geographic and community places matter to you?
2) Pick one place (building, village, town, city, county, state/province) and describe your connection to it and why it matters.
I think I’d have to choose the parish of St. Demetrius Greek Catholic Church, which includes the villages of Udol, where it is located, and Hajtovka, both in eastern Slovakia.
I haven’t been fortunate enough to visit, except virtually via Google maps, but it is the ancestral home of 1/4 of my family tree – that of my paternal grandmother, Julia (Scerbak) Sabo (1893-1985).
Hajtovka, on the left, today has only about 68 residents, down from 300+ when Nana grew up in the late 1890s. Udol is on the right and the cross marks the location of the parish church. They are a mile apart, so in the old days, those in Hajtovka walked to church every week. Today, they have a small chapel of their own.
The image above is the road going through Udol and you can see the church in the distance. There are about 300 residents in Udol today, down from 800+ when my grandmother lived there.
I would love to visit this area, as I have second cousins living nearby, and keep in touch with one of them a couple of times a year with the help of Google Translate since Helena doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Slovak or Rusyn.
I have more or less created a one-place study of the parish as its church registers are digitally available on FamilySearch and, a few years ago, I went through and created Excel databases of all the baptisms, marriages and burials from 1828 (when they begin) to 1920. The parish records actually continue to 1935, but in 1920, local authorities switched to the Cyrillic alphabet, which was too much for me to figure out!
The parish is in the foothills of the Tatras Mountains and is beautiful, but the land has never been good for farming and there is no industry near there. Young people have left for cities where they can earn a living.
