2024 Week 2: Origins #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My husband's father, Jan Stepek, was born in 1922 in Maczkowce, in what is now western Ukraine but in those days was part of Poland. His father, Wladyslaw Stepek was born in the village of Haczow in Podkarpacie in south-east Poland. Our research has validated the story that these Stepeks had been in Haczow for hundreds of years, as Martin's Stepek line has been traced there back to Wojciech Stepek, Martin's 4 x great grandfather, born around 1768.

Photo from Wikipedia

As a family, we visited Haczow in 2010 and were able to go inside the UNESCO World Heritage wooden church where Martin's ancestors were baptised and married in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Martin has also revisited Haczow with his cousin Chris and met up with local people who share their interest in genealogy and the history of the now small town and who have been very helpful in translating documents and visiting archive centres on our behalf. One of these even proved to be a distant relative - although it seems like everyone in Haczow may be related as, as might be expected, marriages between the village families was the norm and has led to many of the same names cropping up in the family tree down through the years.

While we were there, we were lucky enough to be able to visit the house where Wladyslaw, Martin's grandfather, was born. It is a wooden house which is still a small farm. The inhabitants were Martin's third cousins and their family, sharing a common ancestor in Jan Stepek, Wladyslaw's father.

Own photo.

We also visited the graveyard, where we found lots of headstones with the Stepek name on them - we had never seen any gravestone with that name on it before. We found Wladyslaw's grave amongst them. The graves themselves were all beautifully tended to, with flowers and candles.

Own photos.

Thirteen people from Haczow died in Auschwitz, none of them Jewish. Among them was a Czeslaw Stepek, a contemporary of Wladyslaw in the Polish Resistance, possibly a cousin. His name is among many on a monument in the town dedicated to those who fought and died for Poland in the two world wars. Wladyslaw's name is on there too.

War memorial in Hazcow. Own photo.

Martin's DNA results (from Ancestry) also show him to be connected to the Krosno County community, Krosno being the main town in the immediate area of Haczow.

Stepek is such an unusual name that, after south east Poland, the highest concentration of Stepeks are to be found in Scotland - and that is Martin's immediate family! We haven't yet ascertained where the Stepeks were prior to arriving in Poland. Martin's Y-DNA haplogroup suggests a deep origin in Anatolia, roughly present day Turkey from whence the westward journey may have begun, thousands of years ago.

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