Saturday has again rolled around and it’s time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver.

This week’s challenge is very straightforward:

1)  Do you have an ancestor with no defined birth and death dates or places? 

2)  This week, please tell us about that ancestor and what clues you used to estimate a birth and death date and place.

For this challenge, I methodically checked my pedigree chart for the first ancestor for whom I have no exact dates of birth or death.

Of course, it wasn’t a surprise to find that person is in the Rusyn side of the family tree, where church records only go back to the 1820s.

George Kucharik is my 3X great grandfather. I do know, from church records, that he married four times and can estimate his birth year and year of marriage based on baptismal records of his children.

George was born c1790, most likely in Okruzna in the Presov region of Slovakia. He married four women, all named Anna: (1) Anna Pelahat (2) Anna Batsa (3) Anna Miklus and (4) Anna Lucats.

It’s not really unusual since Catholics could only give the names of saints to their children and families tended to use the same given names over and over. In my family, the first choices for males are John and Michael and for women, Anna and Maria (Mary).

George and Anna (Pelahat) Kucharik had one known child: Anna, baptized on 20 January 1815.

George and Anna (Batsa) Kucharik had one known child: John, baptized 8 November 1816.

George and Anna (Miklus) Kucharik had two known children: John, baptized on 28 November 1820 and Maria, born c1822.

George and Anna (Lucats) Kucharik had one known child: George, baptized 1 April 1830.

There was only one Kucharik family in Okruzna in this time period and it was small.

Anna Pelahat and Anna Batsa might have died soon after giving birth, while Anna Miklus might have lived a few years after giving birth since George didn’t marry Anna Lucats until about 1828 or 1820.

Anna Pelahat’s daughter, Anna, lived to marry.

John, son of Anna Batsa, doesn’t appear in any other church record and likely died very young.

Anna Miklus’s two children both lived to marry. Her son, John, is my 2X great grandfather.

Anna Lucats’ son, George, also lived to marry.

Okruzna’s early church records seem not be be very well kept as many vital dates aren’t found even in a time period when they should be there.

I have no idea when George Kucharik died, although it is very likely that he died in the village. Of his four wives, only Anna Lucats died in a time period when the records exist. She was buried on 1 March 1862 in Okruzna and, per custom, would have been buried two days after her death.

That’s it for my mystery person!

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge.