I am very late with my post today, as we’ve been decorating the Christmas tree.

I also thought, at first, that this week’s SNGF topic with Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings was a hard one because I’ve been so absorbed in my one-place study of St. Dimitry’s Church in Udol and Hajtovka, Slovakia.

1. Which ancestor(s) are at the top of your research list, and why?

I also think it’s kind of funny, since I don’t remember giving the suggestion to Randy, but my absorption in my locality study means that I have my research list ready to go.

I’ve finished entering all the village data into Excel and Word, but have only begun to clean up my Word doc.

Besides that, there is one last step I’d like to do. Thousands of Rusyns from eastern Slovakia emigrated to the United States, including an unknown number who settled in Passaic, New Jersey.

Those immigrants pretty much all lived in the First Ward of Passaic in the neighborhood of St. Michael’s Church on First Street. It will be fairly easy to page through the census enumerations for 1900 and 1910, seeking out families from St. Dimitry’s.

Ancestry has early city directories for Passaic, which I can look at, too.

I have a bit of a head start, as I am now extremely familiar with surnames found in the parish.

In addition to that, MyHeritage’s immigration category can be searched by the emigrant’s last residence, which will help me find some stragglers and possibly some making more than one trip across the ocean.

FamilySearch family tree has a few of these families after they settled in America.

Lastly, I remember many of the names from Nana’s Christmas card list. After the families were here for a while, a number of them moved to Garfield and a few to Clifton.

I have three telephone books for the Passaic area covering the 1950s. I’ll be able to find a lot of people in them, too.

Some of the names I’ll be on the lookout for include:

Pristas, Hrinya, Csanda, Murcko, Szova, Pruzinsky, Dornics, Arendacs, Mikulik, Biss, Patoray, Fabian, Fedus, Knap, Osifchin and Kovalycsik

I am not looking to identify descendants of the immigrants, just to determine who left the village and didn’t return. It’s the last piece of the puzzle for my one-place study.

This will keep me busy for a while!