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The Talpash family in Lemko areas
The Lemko Talpash families lived in the area of the Carpathian Mountains between present-day Poland and Slovakia, along a well-travelled north-south trade route through the forested hills, south to Slovakia and Hungary. Lemkos have been called the Carpatho-Rusyns. They are considered to belong to the most westerly-located branch of the Ukrainian ethnocultural people. Because they lived in areas under Polish administration, they spoke a Polonized dialect of Ukrainian. Unlike the Roman Catholic Poles and Slovaks, between whom they were sandwiched, they were all of the Eastern Rite Greek Catholic (Uniate) faith.
The name Talpasz appears in Ivan Krasovsky's book Surnames of Galician Lemkos in the 18th Century, which is based on the Austrian Emperor Joseph's Land Cadaster of 1787-8. The surname Talpasz is listed in these tax assessment rolls as land owners in the villages of Berest in the Grybow District, in Solotviny in the Novy Sacz District, and in Svjatkova (spelled Swiatkowa Wielka in Polish) in the Jaslo District of Galicia. Records document Talpasz families in the Polish villages of Labowa and neighbouring Kotow, in Dubne some 20 kilometers to the south, and in Swiatkowa, some 50 kilometers to the east. US immigration and Census records document particulars of Talpasz members from these villages, but there is no known means by which common ancestors of these disparate families might be determined.
The family from Labowa is of primary interest to this website. We have access to the primary sources - the Baptismal, Marriage and Funeral Records kept by the parish priest for most of the Talpasz family back to 1780s. The 1877 Baptismal Certificate of Anton Talpash of Labowa lists his parents, grandparents and godparents. His godfather was recorded as being Paulus Talpasz of near-by Kotow. The Certificate was filled out in Latin by a priest who wrote that the religion of "Antonius Talpasz" was "graeco-catholica".
The first Talpash immigrants to the United States did not join the already-established Polish, Russian or Hungarian groups. Together with other Lemko immigrants, they formed their own church parishes and social organizations. Furthermore, all first generation Talpashs married ethnic Ukrainians.
There is no question that the ethnicity of this "Northern" branch of the Talpasz/Talpash family is Lemkian-Ukrainian, and that their religion was Greek Catholic (Ukrainian Uniate).
((Further research in Labowa, presently in Poland, is difficult because Lemkos were systematically expelled from their homelands. Just after the Second World War, in 1945, Poland and Soviet Ukraine established their new mutual border, and forcefully pursued a policy of "ethnic exchange." Over a million ethnic Poles (plus some Polonophile Ukrainians) were expelled from Ukraine. In return, some 700,000 Lemkos, who were ethnic Ukrainians, were expelled from southern Poland into areas of western Ukraine, and also into the north-west corner of Poland, from whence its German residents had been expelled. The hills and fields of the old Lemko homelands now lie largely barren, and the villages are very sparsely settled. The church in Labowa, built in 1784, is now closed and was in ruin but there has been some effort to repair it. However, the pre-war Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy offices in Lviv, Stanislav and Peremyshl had duplicate parish records from most parishes. These are now available in the National Archives in Lviv, Ukraine, from which I obtained the Funeral Records from Labowa. From the Archiwum Panstwowe W Przemysl (Premysl) in Poland, the Labowa parish Baptismal and Marriage Records were obtained. For further information, read about Lemkos in Vol. 3 of The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, University of Toronto Press, 1993, and in Iwanusiw, Oleh W. Church in Ruins, St. Sophia. St. Catherines. 1987.))
External Links: Lemko Carpatho-Rusyns Greek Catholic (Uniate) Swiatkowa Wielka Galicia parish records The Encyclopedia of Ukraine |