Stefan Ramik and the identification of Bela Cerkow, Russia

Stefan (Steve) George Ramik was my great-grandfather (my mother's mother's father). My family history on that branch of the tree is currently at a dead end, with no information beyond my great-grandparent's names. I hope that is going to change sometime soon.

On his registration card he wrote that he was born Oct 1, 1888 in "Bela Cerkow", Russia.

I have long struggled to identify this location. Tonight I may have had a breakthrough. While doing another Google search for "Bela Cerkow" (not really expecting to find anything new) the second result in my search was something that has never appeared before in previous searches. It was the city of "Bila Tserkva", in modern day Ukraine.



But, of course, this isn't Russia. My mother has told me that even though he was technically born in Russia he never considered himself a true Russian, but instead considered himself ethnically Polish. There is in fact an interesting historical reason for this.

The "Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth" was an independent nation that existed from 1569-1795. The extent of this nation covered parts of many modern nations, including modern Ukraine. While it was a union of two different nations (Poland & Lithuania, obviously) apparently Poland was the dominant influence. In the image below the colored sections (pink/pinkish colors) all represent the extent of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth

At the end of this nation's existence it was split into three partitions. One of those partitions fell to the Russian Empire, including the area that includes the town of "Bila Tserkva" mentioned earlier. The name of this town translates literally to "White Church". The Polish spelling is something much closer to "Bela Cerkow", which is how my great-grandfather spelled it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bila_Tserkva

This annexation of Bila Tserkva into Russia was accomplished in 1793, almost 100 years before his birth in 1888. I hope to continue researching the history of this area, beyond what is available on Wikipedia, to hopefully find information that suggests that people born in the late 1800's in Bela Tserkva would have identified themselves more as Polish than Russian.

Descendant of the Mayflower

Back in November of last year (2012) I did some genealogical research and found that I was a direct descendent of several of the passengers from the famed Mayflower ship which landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Here is the chart I made at the time to try and organize the data:

Now, I shared this information on Facebook and Aunt Ellen (my dad's aunt) responded telling me that we were related to several more, but I have not yet done the research on them or added them to my illustration. Their names were:

William Brewster
Peter Brown
James Chilton
Francis Cooke
Edward Fuller

If I include all of these names that is a grand total of 12 Mayflower passengers of whom I am a direct descendant!

FamilySearch "Fan Chart" as an Alternative to "Pedigree"

The Church's FamilySearch website has a new feature that allows you to display four generations of one's ancestry in a "fan chart" format. This format is easy to use, and helpful for "at-a-glance" surveying. This is what mines looks like:

My main complain about this format is that you can't see more than four generations. I don't know why this limitation exists, because it seems it would be easy to show several more, especially if zooming capabilities were included. This is a pretty new format, so hopefully in the near future they can fix this.

As you can see, I really need to work on my mother's side of the family. I suspect most of those missing names are in the system already, but are not connected to my name yet.