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The young man got off the train at the tiny village east of the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine. He was oblivious to the commotion around him of people trying to get on and off the train. Rather than being possessed with the natural curiosity of a visitor in a far-off land for the first time, his face wore a grim determination, a single-minded obsession with but one purpose. His right hand frequently kept patting his left breast pocket, as if to constantly assure himself that something was still safe inside.
With what little he had picked up of his ancestral tongue, he asked about for directions to a certain individual's house. He did not have much trouble finding someone who knew whom he was looking for. A few excited waves of the hand pointing directions, and some animated conversation sent him off on a fast walk.
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"My grandmother Valentina was the only child of my great-grandfather Pavlo Kuzyk and his wife Elena." He paused again, examining intently the deeply wrinkled face of the old woman for any glimmer of recognition of those names. If there was any, he could not see it. Though further disheartened, he continued.
"As a small boy, I used to enjoy listening to stories that bubba Valentina used to tell me, of life on the Canadian prairie farm in the early 1900s. But, most of all, I was fascinated listening to her tell me stories told to her by her parents, of how they first came to Canada from the Ukraine as a newly-married couple in their early twenties, towards the end of the 1800s.
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