In November of 2005 my girlfriend and I travelled to Minersville, Pennsylvania and photographed about 60% of the tombstones in the cemetery of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church. What follows is the transcription of gravestones in those photos. The impatient can just jump right in:
| Left Side | Right Side |
There are about 450 stones and over 800 names in this transcription, so I broke it up into two parts. The cemetery itself suggests this division since there's a small road running down the middle of it. The cemetery is on a hill, as is most everything in Minersville. Most of the tombstones face uphill, so I define right and left from the perspective of someone looking at the face of the tombstones (i.e. downhill). This map of the cemetery will help you to understand what I mean.
We photographed every single one of the grave markers on the right side of the cemetery. We started on the left side and got about twelve rows completed before snow and cold drove us to quit. The column names in the transcription tables are mostly self-explanatory, but I'll add a few details here. The number column identifies an individual stone. The numbers run in order, so the table is organized just like the hill -- stones near the top of the table are also near the top of the hill. There's a row in the table for each person indicated on a stone. Most stones had multiple names which is why numbers usually repeat. The dates are in the format YYYY-MM-DD. That might be odd to an American audience (sorry!), but it is the international standard. The relationship column reflects what was written on the stone. Alternate name spellings should be taken with a grain of salt. They're guesses as to what the deceased's surname was in Europe. Subscribers to the Bukowsko Triangle mailing list will be familiar with many of them, and will also be aware that spelling names is a fuzzy business. That applies doubly for names that were originally Cyrillic, which is true for just about everyone in this transcription. In my research I've discovered about a dozen ways to spell Семенчук. I feel almost unimaginative for having used plain old "Semanchuk" all of my life.
If a stone is marked with footnote #2, it means that the photo I have is flawed. Usually this means that a clump of grass or a shadow obscures some information on the stone. The obscured information is highlighted or replaced with a question mark. I tried to distinguish flawed photos from cases where the stone was just in really bad shape and will probably require a rubbing or finger tracing to extract much more information.
We didn't bother transcribing anything that wasn't particular to the deceased. For instance, lots of stones say "Here lies" or "Tu spoczywae" or "Тут спочивае" (all of which mean the same thing). That's not included in the transcription. In short, if you visit a stone in person and see writing on it that's not in the transcription, you're not missing anything if you can't translate it yourself.
A lot of military veterans have two markers -- a family marker and a military marker. In order to avoid confusion, I didn't create separate entries for each marker. Instead I included the military information for the deceased in the footnotes column.
Thanks to Mette Jensen for photography, transcription, and being cold in the car. I got help with deciphering the Cyrillic on those dirty, worn-down, lichen-covered, poorly photographed tombstones from Anna Olkin, Chrystya Hnatiw, Helen Ginn and especially I. K. And special thanks to Dave Pukas for loaning us a camera, covering for my mistakes, helping us find what we could at St. George's, and for being there.
