Alberta Family Histories Society has been asked to share the following information about upcoming meetings of Ukraine Genealogy Group- Edmonton & Area Society:
On Wed., April 16, 2025, starting at 7 pm MST, our guest speaker is Jars Balan. His presentation on “Ukrainian Settlement in Western Canada” looks at the evolution of Ukrainian communities in the Canadian Prairies beginning in the late 19th century. Seen as ideal immigrants to take on the challenges of transforming the Parkland region of the Canadian Prairies into productive farmland, thousands of Ukrainians came to Canada under the Canadian Government’s Prairie Settlement initiative. Mr. Balan will discuss the process of attracting Ukrainians to Canada, their long journey by trains and ocean vessels to homesteading lands on the prairies, and the difficulties they had to overcome in making their home in Canada. Many Albertans claim Ukrainian heritage, and have a contributed a rich, cultural element to the development of western Canada. Jars Balan is the Director of the Peter and Doris Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta.
JARS BALAN is the Director of the Peter and Doris Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta. He has authored numerous scholarly and popular articles on Ukrainian-Canadian history, literature, and theatre, and an illustrated history of Ukrainians in Canada. A lifelong activist in the Ukrainian community, he is the initiator and curator of the Kalyna Country Ecomuseum, a heritage district encompassing Canada’s oldest and largest Ukrainian bloc settlement in rural east Central Alberta. Jars has been involved with CIUS, in one capacity or another, for almost all of its nearly fifty-year history.
Zoom link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/bMhq0NLOS3C4nowLhCLouQ
2. How to use the Geneteka, Szukaj w Archiwach and Skanoteka Websites with Lucjan Cichocki, tentative date of Saturday, May 17, to start at 10 am MST or so. Lucjan’s adventure with tracing family histories started in 2013 with a visit to the Diocesan Archives in Przemyśl. A friend of his showed him what old nineteenth-century vital records looked like and what information they contained. Gradually he became more and more accustomed to various kinds of longhand and was able to maximize the results of his work while minimizing the time needed to complete it. Now, genealogy research is his full-time occupation, and he is honored to have discovered the roots of many. Lucjan’s work involves searching for records at Diocesan and State Archives, searching for records at parishes, finding living relatives, driving people to the villages that their ancestors lived in, and translating vital records. His areas of expertise include southeastern and southern Poland (excluding southwestern Poland), central, eastern, and northeastern Poland, Slovakia, and westernmost Ukraine. His business is the Polish Ancestry Research. https://www.facebook.com/polishancestryresearch
Zoom link to register: will be in the next monthly UGG newsletter or in a mid-month UGG email update.
