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The Malkovich – Kulich Ancestry Summary

                                      Written by Phil Malkovich 2015/2016

                                       A little background first.

When I first started this project, I did not realize how it began to connect me to our ancestors. It has been a very amazing and gratifying experience. Just looking at pictures of them made me feel closer to them and wanting to learn more but also at the same time regretting that I did not ask my father and mother about their lives and ancestry. I also now wish I would have traveled to their villages but I will have to leave that up to the younger generation now. It really would be a great experience.

I want to thank those that helped me by giving me information, documents, pictures memories, and discussions particularly Patti Dillaman, Antoinette Hum, Shirley Erwin. and Jonathan Wright (my son-in-law) for his technical support.

I am writing this summary in the first person which is easiest for me such as my Grandfather etc. I have highlighted links to the documents, letters, maps, city/village info etc from where I got my information from which have been scanned into the appendix of this summary. You will now have access to all the documents that we have gathered in one place but there is still more to come. I view this study as a living document as there are items still to uncover.

In this genealogy study, I will break it down to the Malkovich Clan and the Kulich (Andrijkulich) Clan.

In the Malkovich Appendix I have a linage graph showing dates and place of birth, death, marriage info, and children of those parents. There is also a tree graph but some names, dates, etc are left out as I did not have info on them. If you would like me to complete the tree, please send me the info to phil@phil-m.net and I will update it.

Having been in engineering most of my life, I tried to be as factual as I could in reaching my conclusions as best I could. The most confusing part of trying to be accurate though is that I find that there are not only different spelling of people’s names, places, towns, villages etc. in the material and maps that I have but also different countries on some of the documents. I will try to explain my interpretation of these inconsistencies as I go along. I also realize that others may interpret these inconsistencies differently and would welcome any input you might have.

I first advise you to go to the appendix and download the background page and see the maps to get a feel for the rest of this summary. It will show you how the nations came to be today and where the villages are that our ancestors came from.

WW1 Started July 28, 1914 and ended in 1918 which caused the breakup of the Austria-Hungry Empire. See the info on WW1 in the addendum to see how it was divided.

I have tried to find the arrival dates and which port our ancestors came in on to no avail. It could have been Ellis Island or possibly Philadelphia. Maybe someone else has info that could clear this up. I would appreciate any assistance. I searched Ancestry.com and Archives.com with no luck.

Now that we have the internet and have access to data bases and maps all over Europe it is a way we can now see the towns and villages by street and satellite maps. Seeing the mountains by satellite and zooming into the towns, it gives me an appreciation of where they came from. I can now see why the settled in Pennsylvania because it looks pretty much the same with the hills and mountains and the coal mines.

Here is the web site where you can zoom in on the satellite map and see what the villages look like today. Go to Google and just copy and paste (but you already know this) into the address bar www.latlong.net Then type in the village name i.e.: Tukhlia Ukraine and it will take you right to a satellite map of the village. In the upper LH corner you can change it to a regular map to see the borders as they exist today. This is where I got my maps in the appendix from.

I spent many many challenging days to try and find the birth places of our ancestors. What made it so difficult were the changes in dialect and alphabet of the various nations that held those territories. It seems each nation may have spelled the same town differently and so it depends on which map you were looking at. I searched dozens of archives in Europe and sites here in the U.S. and even got more confused.

Take for example my grandfather Michael Malkovich and family were born and raised in a village at that time possessed by the Austria Hungry Empire and was called Tuchla. I found this name on a Baptism record of my father John Malkovich. This one drove me crazy and I spent day after day trying to find that village. By inserting that name into google it kept putting me into Poland. What I eventually realized is that this document was in the time of the Austria-Hungry Empire time period and was written using their dialect and alphabet.

Also on that document was the city of Skoleand on other documents from a Doctor from the city of Skole (The doctor turned out to be a Notary and not an MD) that had the name Malkovich on it I found that the city was in the Ukraine, Through further research and using the latitude and longitude of Skole I finally found the present day spelling of the village was Tukhlya not Tuchla which I could now find on a google 2016 map.

The Kulich family was easier but still had different spellings. The village of the Andrijkulich family according to documents that we have puts them in Stavenow, Ukraine and not Czechoslovakia as some documents indicate. This is only just one of the inconsistencies I have found. On the 1920 and 1930 census it shows the country of birth of Michael Kulich as Czechoslovakia. I found that in WWI the village was in the Ukraine but Hitler gave the area to Czechoslovakia and then after the war it reverted back to the Ukraine because most of the people were Ukrainian.

I now find the present day spelling of the village is now Stavene. Not much of a change but still confusing. A document written by Anna Kulich Malkovich puts her birth in this village and she had also placed a mark on a World Atlas map as that to be the approximate location of her birth and a mark of the John Malkovich birth place. This was where I started my study from. I could not find the villages on this map but finally found them on the 2016 google map.

                                                   So!!!

Now all you have to do is to go to the upper right hand side and pick which family you want to see.

Enjoy

Phil Malkovich