Some children of Luka Talpash:

Benedyk Talpash

 - Luka's second son

Summary: 

·    born on 23 March 1862 in Labowa

·    conscripted into the Austrian army; served in Bosnia

·    in November 1887 had scrap with the gendarme; brother Simeon killed

·    1888 joined his brother Theodosiy in Pennsylvania; worked in the coal mines, then started a butcher shop in Shamokin

·    married Pearl Kuzemchak, a newly-arrived Ukrainian Lemko, a friend of Anastasia, Theodosiy's wife

·    in 1898 moved to Canada to homestead around Moose Bay, Manitoba

·    10 children - Sarah, Pauline, Katherine, Michael, Walter, Joseph, Marie, Helen, Rose, Peter

·    a 'hard, tough man'

·    died in 1945, age 83, in Rorketon, Manitoba

John Talpash

 - Luka's fifth son

Summary:

·    born on 11 November 1866 in Labowa

·    about 1886 left home to join brother Theodosiy in Pennsylvania

·    1889 received Anthracite Miner's Certificate, then owned a grocery store/butcher shop with his brothers

·    about 1890 married Barbara Molodchak, recently immigrated from Bogusa, Galicia (Western Ukraine)

·    1896 moved to Canmore, Northwest Territories, Canada- as a coal miner

·    homesteaded near Bawlf, then Strathcona, then Colinton, all in Alberta

·    1925 bought Colinton Hotel; operated it until retirement in 1945

·    big, good-looking, 'tough' man

·    13 children - Alice, Michael, Sadie, Mary, Samuel, Julia, Anna, Sally, Kate, Twins A&B, Ben, Millie

·    died of pneumonia 27 June 1948

Julia Talpash

 - Luka's eighth child, third daughter

Summary:

·    born 24 March 1871 in Labowa, Galicia

·    emigrated to Pennsylvania about 1887 with siblings Benedyk, Anna, Stephania and Anton

·    married Jacob Masciuch in Shamokin, Pennsylvania

·    1898 moved to Manitoba

·    had 9 children: John, Konstantina, Waldemar, William, Olga, Rosalia, Victoria, Yaroslaw, Constantine

·    widowed in 1921, raised children alone, encouraged their education

·    died 1970, age 99

Anton Talpash

 - the youngest of Luka's 11 children

Summary:

·    born on 25 January 1877 in Labowa, Galicia

·    mother died when he was 9; he was 10 when father Luka died

·    about 1888, emigrated to join siblings in Pennsylvania

·    July 1897 emigrated to Manitoba, Canada

·    1902 took a homestead 10 miles south-west of Ethelbert

·    1903 married Anna Sytnick, a newly-arrived Ukrainian from Galicia

·    had 9 children - Stephen, Kateryna, Mary, Peter, Michael, Joseph, Walter, Paul, Antonia

·    founded local school (Wolodymyr); served years on Board of Trustees

·    was short, stocky, strict, and principled

·    died of pneumonia in 1969, in Gilbert Plains, Manitoba

Biographic details of Luka's children:

( - biographies are presented here as examples of the lives and circumstances of the First Generation North Americans)

Benedyk Talpash

 - Luka's second son

Biography:

(The name Benedyk, with the accent on the second syllable, is a Ukrainian name. It was not Benedict or "Benedykt," as appears on his grave marker. The name Benedyk is not unknown in English, either; it is that of the main character in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing."

Benedyk was born on 23 March 1862, in Labowa, Galicia, and was schooled there. When conscripted into the Austrian army, he served in Bosnia where insurrections and inter-ethnic tensions were causing policing problems in the Balkans.  He witnessed great brutality there, and said he feared the 'cutthroat Serbs' who would torture, kill and mutilate any captured soldier in the Austrian Army.  One day, when he was on border patrol, he saw a woman trying to flee to his side of the border.  A man on horseback caught her, beat her to death, put her body in a sack and rode off. The soldiers could not cross the border to help her. When he was discharged, he returned to Labowa  -- (now please see notes on brother Simeon--)

After the scrap with the gendarme in November 1887, his sister Mary dressed his neck wound and looked after him until he was nursed to health. He was charged with a variety of offences and sentenced to one year in prison. However, the law was flexible enough that it would permit a farm worker to choose a time to serve his sentence, that would least disrupt productivity. This provision gave Benedyk some time to settle affairs and make arrangements to join his brother Theodosiy in Pennsylvania. He had just boarded the train for Hamburg in spring 1888 when gendarmes searched it. They took him off for questioning, because he was of military age, and they were on the look-out for young men leaving the country, dodging the universal conscription. (Fortunately, they did not realize he was a fugitive for more serious offences.) They took him to a military depot to hold him for investigation of his military eligibility. By great coincidence, he had done his basic training at this very depot and knew the escape routes used by the boys to sneak in and out of barracks unobserved. That night he sneaked out and caught another train. By morning he was in Prussia; his facility with the German language from his military service made passage to America an easy prospect.

Benedyk joined his brother Theodosiy in Pennsylvania in 1888 and worked in the coal mines in Shamokin. East and Central Europeans were welcomed by the mine owners. The mine conditions were appalling, and the Irish miners often went on strike. When Poles, Hungarians and Rusyns took their jobs, there was terrible inter-ethnic hostility. Miners were paid in gold coins and cash. Paydays were absolutely chaotic. Muggings and robberies were frequent. If a man were killed, the killer just took a train to New York or New Jersey where Pennsylvania police had no jurisdiction. Ben related a fear of Hungarian gangs. He slept with a revolver under his pillow. Even then, one night someone entered his room, and just as Ben reached for his gun the intruder shot at him. Ben then lay very still until the robber crept away, leaving only a bullet hole in the wall. However, the next payday Benedyk was prepared to defend himself more aggressively. When he heard someone turning his latch in the middle of the night, he fired a shot right through his door. He heard someone cry out "Jesus Christ," and run off. Next winter, when he saw his woodpile shrinking faster than he himself was using the wood, he drilled out a core out of a couple of sticks of the firewood and filled them with dynamite. Although his wood stopped disappearing, he always hated the lawlessness of the new land.

Benedyk left the mine and started a butcher shop in Shamokin. This may well have prospered because the proprietor had the advantage of being able to communicate with patrons in any of 5 languages - Ukrainian, Polish, Slovakian, German and English. He married and had three children in Pennsylvania. In 1898, he and sister Julia, her husband Jacob Masciuch, sister Stefania, and younger brother Anton all moved to Canada to take homesteads in Manitoba.

Benedyk chose to settle near Dauphin. He sold out and moved to new land around Moose Bay, Manitoba. As it turned out, this was exceedingly poor swamp land. The swamp hay was so lacking nutrients that the cattle starved and the family could not prosper. They survived on the plentiful moose meat, which they came to hate. Seven more children were born there, but they quickly drifted off to Winnipeg and beyond, to fashion their destinies. Ben finally bought a quarter section of land 1.5 miles east of Rorketon, Manitoba. He continued a meagre existence, sold eggs and cream, and was sustained by garden vegetables. After he died in 1945, his widow continued to live in their poor farm house.

His children and grandchildren Benedyk remember him as being a 'hard, tough man.' He was a natural horseman, rode hard even in his 80's, and was a deadly shot with his rifle. He was full-bearded, big, square-cut and very muscular.  Across his neck was an old thick sabre scar, tattooed black by the axle grease which had stemmed the bleeding.

He died in 1945, age 83, and is buried in Rorketon, Manitoba.

John Talpash

 - Luka's fifth son

Biography:

John Talpash was born on 11 November 1866, in Labowa. (Recorded as Tolposh, b. 1865 in the Index to the 1901 Census, District of Alberta, No. 202 published by the Alberta Genealogical Society, Edmonton Branch, 1999, p.375). John was in his early 20's when he left home to join brother Theodosiy in Pennsylvania, in about 1885.

On 19 August 1889 John received an Anthracite Miner's Certificate of Competence.  He quit work in the mine and, with brothers Theodosiy, Benedyk, and brother-in-law Jacob Masciuch, ran a grocery store.

About 1890 John married Barbara Molodchak, who had recently immigrated from Bogusa, Galicia (now in western Ukraine). A daughter Elia (later known as Alice) was born in 1893. On 6 February 1893 John appeared in a Pennsylvania court to apply for US Citizenship. This was granted on 15 March 1894. The brothers apparently had disagreements about the mutually-owned business (decades later he still did not visit his sister Julia, even when she lived only a few miles away in N Central Alberta).  John left to work in a gold mine in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. There son Michael was born 8 October 1895. By 1896 Canada was aggressively seeking colonists in Europe and USA to homestead on the prairies.  (Kaye,V.J. Early Ukrainian Settlements in Canada: 1895-1900.: Univ of Toronto Press, 1964. p 86).  When he heard that Canada was offering free homesteads, John, in 1896, moved to Canmore, in what was then the Northwest Territories in Canada.  (In 1905 the Territory became the Province of Alberta, and Edmonton became the capital.) At Canmore, and likely in similar coal-mining towns in British Columbia, he worked for a number of months as a coal miner.

In late 1897 John moved his family to homestead near Sandy Lake by present-day Beaumont, just south-east of Edmonton, and south of the Edna-Star area, the very first area to have been settled by Ukrainians, starting with Eleniak and Pilipow in 1891. By 1895 there were 12 families, in 1896 some 30 Ukrainian families in the whole settlement (Kaye, p342). John took a homestead in late 1897, and is noted in a list of settlers recorded in a February 1898 report by Corporal Butler of the North West Mounted Police stationed in Edna: "John Talbash - S.W.1/4-14-50-23. Wife and 2 children. Arrived January 1898 (sic), from British Columbia. Has gone out with Mack and is also building a house. Granted relief of $8.00." (Kaye, p341) Daughter Sadie arrived in 1898, daughter Mary in 1899, son Sam in April 1900. (all listed under TOLPOSH in the Index to the 1901 Census, District of Alberta No. 202 reprinted by the Alberta Genealogical Society , Edmonton Branch. 1999. p.375.  The detailed Census form is handwritten, and on page 17 of Alberta, East Edmonton on Alberta Provincial Archives microfilm T-6550. Incidentally, it is interesting to read the questions and answers as were recorded in 1901. TOLPOSH,Jno, (sic) was listed as white; American; came to Canada 1897; occupation: coal miner; worked 12 months in last year; earned $450; can read, write, speak English, also speaks Russian; no infirmities.) 

Farming there did not make him rich quickly enough. There exists a Department of the Interior document dated 18 June 1900 stating that  "John Tolposh surrenders claim to SW 1/4 Sec 14, T 50, R 23, with the improvements of stable, shed and house worth $140.00, and six acres of breaking $18.00, the value of which will be collected for the benefit of the Crown." So in 1901 John moved back south to the coal-mining town of Frank, NWT (Alberta). He worked as a miner, and wife Barbara ran a boarding house for about 16 laborers, on the outskirts of town. They hired a Chinese cook and prospered. In 1902 daughter Julia was born.  About 25 April the family moved again, to British Columbia. Three days later, at 0410 a.m. 29 April 1903 the town of Frank was buried when the mountain to the southwest collapsed, killing everyone in the path of the slide. (The site is a tourist attraction today.) In November 1903 the Talpash family moved to Frenchman's Camp, BC, then on to Edberg for the winter. The next move was to Haney, B.C., where they started clearing land on a small farm. One fateful day a tree fell and crushed his leg. Wife Barbara walked to the hospital 16 miles away once a week, carried provisions home, ran the farm with her children, until John was up and about. In 1904 they moved to a farm 2 kilometers south of Bawlf, Alberta. Daughters Anna 12 July 1904, Sally 10 November 1905 and Kate 17 June 1907, were born there. Daughter Alice, by then 16, married Alex Piro, a newly-arrived Ukrainian pioneer, who was homesteading 5 Kilometers south and 1 km west of Bawlf.

In Edmonton a typhoid fever epidemic was spreading. Daughter Anna remembers the baby twins dead, lying wrapped up on the sewing machine, until a man came to take them away (in a suitcase) for burial. In 1909 John bought a half-section of uncleared bushland (S13 T65 R22 W4) 1 1/2 miles east of Colinton, Alberta. Barbara and the younger children travelled there by stage-coach, John drove the wagon full of their worldly goods, and the older boys rode horseback, herding the cattle. Daughter Ann, then 5, remembers the exciting 115 kilometer trek north from Edmonton, stopping at night at the way stations to feed the animals and bed everyone down. They moved into a house owned by a Mr. Bellerose while they cleared an area for a farmstead and built their own home, just 3 kilometers east of the Colinton townsite.  Pioneer life was difficult, but they had a lot of cattle, and many children to help with the milking. Barbara used to make 40 pounds of butter a week! Eggs (5 cents a dozen) and butter (10 cents a pound) were then taken to Athabasca for sale. Over the years, the land was cleared and during World War I and the early booming 1920s they prospered in mixed farming. John would often ship a whole rail car of pigs or cattle to market. He was fortunate to have had a large, hard-working family. On 23 December 1913 he received a Certificate of Naturalization in Edmonton.

In 1925 John sold the farm and packed the belongings on a truck to move to Edmonton in the morning. He went to the Colinton Hotel beer parlour to bid his farewells to his neighbours and friends. In the morning he found that he had bought the hotel from the owner, Mr. King. He and his family operated it until about 1945, when he retired.

He was a good-looking, stocky man who was just a little on the wild side of conventional conservative behavior. He was said to be domineering and tough. He is remembered as walking with a cane, read the Lemko News, was not close to his children, but was said to enjoy beer with his friends. 

His children stated he never kept any Ukrainian traditions, and even Christmas and Easter were ordinary work days. Wife Barbara is remembered by all as a tiny, pretty, very hard-working woman who bore 13 children, many without even a midwife's assistance, sewed all their clothes, and ran the family affairs with a tight hand. She had no problem following her restless husband around the pioneer landscape. For twenty-five years she cooked fabulous meals for guests of their hotel, while John managed the saloon. The rooms had to be cleaned, sheets washed and ironed, water brought in. It was exhausting work, especially in winter when sheets had to freeze dry on outdoor lines. Because Colinton was located on the main highway north from Edmonton at the junction of the main road east to Lac La Biche, many travellers preferred to stay in Colinton rather than continuing north the 20 km to Athabasca. They operated the hotel until retirement in the mid 1940's.

John died of pneumonia 27 June 1948. Barbara continued to live in their home in Colinton until she died of cancer March 1957. They are buried in the Colinton Cemetary, high on a hill just south of the village.

Julia Talpash 

- Luka's eighth child, third daughter

Biography:

Julia Talpash was born in Labowa, Galicia, 24 March 1871. She emigrated to Pennsylvania about 1888 with siblings Anna, Stephania and Anton. Soon after, she married Jacob Masciuch, whom she knew from school in Labowa.  From 1892 to 1912 they had 9 children, the first three in Pennsylvania. In 1898 they moved to Manitoba, and 6 more children were born there. When she was widowed in 1921, she raised the children alone, always encouraging them to get good educations. Her children were: John, Konstantina, Waldemar, William, Olga, Rosalia, Victoria, Yaroslaw, Constantine (Most became teachers, one an accountant and one became a lawyer.)

In 1938 Julia moved to Athabasca, Alberta to live with son Waldemar and his wife Mary. She subsequently moved in with daughter Victoria and son-in-law Steve Pysyk, who needed help with her two young boys on their farm 16 km north of Boyle, Alberta.

In 1967 at age 96, Julia fell and broke her hip. In spite of this, she remained spunky and uncomplaining for the next three years of her long life. She was said to have been very kind, intelligent; read the weekly Ukrainian Voice cover-to-cover, wrote to her children and siblings, loved having son Waldemar drive her the ten miles south to Colinton to visit her brother John and his family.

Julia died 4 March 1970, at age 99, and is buried in Athabasca, Alberta.

Anton Talpash

 - Luka's youngest: eleventh child, sixth son

Biography:

Anton Talpash was born in Labowa, Galicia, on 25 Jan 1877. (A copy of his Baptismal Certificate is available.)

Anton's mother died when he was 9; he was 10 when father Luka died. Soon after, little "Yantik" and sisters Anna, Julia and Stephania emigrated to join their brothers in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, USA. Their passage was paid by brother Theodosiy. Anton started out working with other boys at a conveyer belt, picking out pieces of slate from the stream of excavated coal. A foreman would walk up and down the row of boys, as they stood knee-deep in coal dust, flicking them with a switch so that their attention did not wander. In a photograph dated 1894 of a brass band in Shamokin, Anton, age 17, is the drummer. At some point the spelling of the surname changed from the Polish rendering of 'Talpasz,' to the transliteration which more accurately conveys the pronounciation in English; all documents after 1900 use the spelling 'Talpash.'

In July 1897 Anton emigrated to Manitoba, Canada with sister Stefania, brother Benedyk and family, and sister Julia and her husband Jacob Masciuch, and three Masciuch children. In 1902 he took a homestead (NE Sec 6-T28-21 W1), 10 miles south-west of Ethelbert, Manitoba, near a ridge on which there was a well-used Indian trail. (The ridge was really the gravel-and-sand western shore-line of what used to be Lake Agassiz, which had been left by the retreating glacier of the last Ice Age.) Anton Talpash was one of the first settlers in the area. (Dictionary of Ukrainian Canadian Pioneer Settlers of Manitoba 1891-1900. Ed. V.J.Kaye. Ukrainian Canadian Research Foundation, Toronto 1975)

Next year, in 1903, Anton married Anna Sytnick, a newly-arrived Ukrainian girl from East Galicia, having walked with his bride-to be to Sifton, Manitoba, where a priest was available. The Marriage Certificate was registered in Dauphin, dated 24 June 1903. His Naturalization was granted 14 December 1903, in Dauphin County Court. In both documents the name is spelled 'Talpash.'

The work of a poor pioneer couple was typical. He set out to build a house, break the land, and raise a large family. To earn cash to buy horses and machinery, he left his bride and went to work for a better-established English neighbour. On 11 December 1904 he became agitated and walked the 20-odd miles to his home. There he arrived to find his wife had just had a baby. She had walked over the snowy fields to summon the neighbour's wife to be with her at the arrival of her first child.

Anton worked very hard, but had marginal, stony land, and remained poor. He still worked his land with 4 oxen up to about 1912. It took 2 days to deliver a wagon-load of grain from Gilbert Plains to Dauphin. His son Stephen remembered accompanying his father on one of those trips. They purchase horses in the early 1920s, much later than most neighbours. Horses made farming operations easier and speedier.

Anton read Polish well, having started school in Labowa. Because he had lived for some 12 years in USA, he was fluent in English. As a result, he and Jacob Masciuch were instrumental in founding the local school (Wolodymyr); both served on the Board of Trustees for years.

He had a short, stocky, square physiognomy. He was firm and strict, very principled and respected, but he was not a warm man. His wife died in 1950; he became deaf and forgetful. He succumbed to pneumonia in 1969, in Gilbert Plains, Manitoba hospital, and is buried in Dauphin, Manitoba.