Off to the land of buried ancestors.

About three months ago Jamie took a chance and penned a letter to a woman who had a last name as long as the alphabet itself. She lives in the city of Michalovce, which straddles the border between the Slovak Republic and the Ukraine. I've heard they speak a sort of 'funny' Slovak out that way, but I didn't really think much of it. I never really believed I'd go there anyways. Jamie and I were told that this Marta was our relative. Many years ago, a man by the name of Yuraj, Jiri, Jurej, Gyory, George (however you want to spell it), picked up shop and travelled for six months until he finally reached the shores of New York City in January of 1921. His wife and newly-born daughter made the same trip the next year, eventually settling in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, to start the cycle of immigrant labor that came to define and settle this region of North America. Apparently, not everyone in the immediate family thought that the pastures were greener on the other side of the fence (ocean if you will), and decided to stay in the fatherland. Yurej was the only one who took the bait.

As time went by, and the old country split twice and fell under the rule of their Germanic tormentor from the west and their Slavic father from the north, Yurej and his descendents became Americanized. By the time I was birthed onto this earth Yurej had been dead for nearly twenty years and his eldest-born daughter, my grandmother, had been relegated to a hospital bed in a Beaver Falls nursing home for nearly twenty-five years due to a disease that is the property of Lou Gherig. The language went with Yurej and so did the living memory of his life back in Europe. And with that, my family began to trace their history as far back as my grandmother. We had a vague notion of the land that was left behind, but that was about it. We knew not who lived there, what their trade was, or, really, even what country they lived in (for many years my Grandmother believed she had been born in what is today the Czech Republic half of Czechoslovakia. It was found out later that she was born in the eastern-most part of the former CZSK--the Slovak side).

At Christmas, I was on the train to Prague when a man sat down beside me. He was very dirty and had the sweet-dingy smell of a drunk. His glasses magnified his eyes to the point that I couldn't make out their color, and his Czech was heavily accented due to the fact that he only retained about five teeth total in his mouth. I tried to make my presence small, as I did not want to give him any reason to spark up a conversation with me, but it was in vain. He looked over at me and offered me a beer. I had never seen the golden can before in the Czech Republic, so I asked him where the beer was from. "Slovakia," he said. "I was there this past weekend. I work as a forester there." I thought this was pretty intriguing so I engaged further. "Where in Slovakia were you, exactly?" I asked. "In Michalovce. It's as far east as you can go. I have a girlfriend who lives in a little village near there." "Oh yeah," I replied. "What's the name of the village?" "Kolibabovce," he said.

Before my grandmother died in 2003, she showed me the travel documents of both her parents and of herself when they immigrated to America. I remember reading and looking over the documents to find their place of birth and residence before Aliquippa. I found the name fairly hard to read, but my Grandma was certain of its pronunciation. "Collee-ba-buff-za," she said. "It's the place where I was born." "Yeah right," I thought. "Old people are always so sure of their heritage."

After the train ride, my mind was jarred back towards that memory. The man had said a village in the eastern part of Slovakia that sounded much like the one my grandma had pronounced out seven years ago. Jamie and I brought copies of the documents to the Czech Republic with us, so we pulled them out and scanned them over. Sure enough, it was a match. The village was real after all! And to this day, people live there.

It was at this time that we decided to pursue the trail of history more in-depth.

Jamie spear-headed the research and began scouring message boards and ancestry websites for names that would somehow be related to me; narrowing her search to the village of Kolibabovce and its surrounding areas. Immediately, she garnered the help of a Slovak man who was following Jamie's requests vicariously through the internet. He himself is from Kolibabovce and is quite confident that he could give us the 'scoop' on where our relatives, if any of them still live there, are. Initial research was frustrating at best, as this region is a mix of language--mainly Hungarian and Slovakian--thus making it very difficult to pinpoint an exact place name or even family name. It also didn't help that when choosing names, the Slovaks that lived in the region at that time weren't too keen on creativity; it seems that every single man was named Yurej and every woman was named Alzbeta or Maria.

As time went by, Jamie located a woman by the name of Marta (not Maria, but close!). Her maiden name was Kovac, and her father was the brother of my Grandmother's mother. You follow!? Anyways, this makes Maria the direct cousin to my Grandma. They never saw each other. Like I said, Yurej and his wife seem to be the only ones who left.

Jamie took a chance and decided to write this women using very halting Czech. About three weeks later we received an email. It was from Marta, and since that time, we have spoken with her on numerous occasions. She invited us to see her in Michalovce.

Tomorrow we will ride to the far side of Slovakia, and hopefully come into contact with something that might resemble a 'connection'.

Perhaps we will be kindred spirits? After all, history and family documents claim it to be so