Finding PEI Ukrainian Ancestors: Interview with Professional Genealogy Researcher Sandra Kowalchuk

Sandra Kowalchuk: PEI is counterintuitive in the best way. Because the Ukrainian community here was small — we're talking dozens of families rather than thousands — the documentation that does exist is remarkably personal. In Manitoba, an archivist might have a box with 5,000 homestead applications. Here, a church secretary might have kept a ledger with every family's name, their village of origin in Galicia, and the names of their children baptized in the parish. That level of detail is extraordinary.

The challenge is that these records are dispersed. They might be in the PEI Public Archives, or in a diocesan office in Edmonton, or in a box in someone’s attic. My job is often just connecting researchers with records they didn’t know existed. The foundation, though, is always the same: start by gathering what the living family knows, then move systematically into Canadian records before ever touching Ukrainian archives.

Sandra Kowalchuk: Day one is family. Not archives, not DNA — family. You interview every living relative and you write down everything they say, even the parts that seem irrelevant or contradictory. "Grandpa came from somewhere near Lviv" is worth recording. "I think his name used to be something different in the old country" is worth recording. "He never talked about it" is worth recording — because that silence is itself a data point.

After the family interviews, the first archival stop is Library and Archives Canada at bac-lac.gc.ca. They have the 1901 census, the 1906 census, the 1911 census — all free, all searchable online. Ukrainian immigrants in these censuses are usually recorded as Galician, Ruthenian, Austrian, or Polish — almost never as Ukrainian, because that term wasn’t yet in common use in Canadian record-keeping. Religion is your best search filter. Look for Greek Catholic or Greek Orthodox families in Atlantic Canada and you’ve dramatically narrowed the field.

A guide like how to start Ukrainian genealogy research walks through this initial phase systematically. The key insight is that the search term “Ukrainian” will fail you repeatedly in pre-1920 Canadian records. You have to search by what the records actually say, not by what you know the family was.

Sandra Kowalchuk: Central isn't a strong enough word. For Ukrainian families in the period from 1900 to 1960, the church was the entire institutional life of the community. Births, marriages, deaths, confirmations, first communions — all of these were recorded by the priest in registers that are, in many cases, the most complete vital record source available for a given family.

In PEI, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox communities each maintained their own parishes with separate record-keeping systems. Ukrainian church records from PEI are mostly held in two locations: some with the local parishes themselves, and others transferred to diocesan archives in Edmonton (for Greek Catholic records) and Winnipeg (for Orthodox records). A researcher who contacts the right diocesan archive often finds baptismal registers going back to the first years of the congregation’s existence.

The key is knowing which church your family attended. That’s another reason the family interview matters so much on day one. “We were Greek Catholic” versus “we were Ukrainian Orthodox” sends you to completely different archives.

Sandra Kowalchuk: That happens — and it's not necessarily a dead end. Before Ukrainian-specific parishes were established in PEI, some Ukrainian families attended the nearest Roman Catholic or even Anglican church and appear in those registers instead. The enumerator in the 1901 census might record the family as Roman Catholic when they were actually Greek Catholic, because the enumerator didn't know the difference.

So you cast a wider net. You look at Roman Catholic registers for the nearest town. You check civil registration records with the PEI Vital Statistics office for the period after 1906, when provincial civil registration became more systematic. And you look for the family in the records of their neighbours — who were often from the same Galician village and who went to the same informal community gatherings even before a formal church was established.

Sandra Kowalchuk: Quite a lot, if you know how to read them. The [1906 Canadian census](/genealogy/1906-canadian-census-ukrainian-genealogy-guide/) is technically a census of the Northwest Provinces — Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta — so it doesn't cover PEI directly. But it captures relatives who may have gone west, which is common. A family might have sent one son to Manitoba to homestead while the rest remained in PEI working in the fishing industry or as farm labourers. Finding that son's 1906 record can give you the village of origin in Galicia, which then unlocks the Ukrainian church archives on the other side of the Atlantic.

For PEI itself, the 1901 census of Canada is the most useful early snapshot. It records name, age, sex, birthplace, origin, religion, and occupation for every individual. Ukrainian families appear scattered throughout the island, often recorded as “Galician” or “Russian” in the origin column. Religion is again the key: Greek Catholic or Greek Orthodox entries in an Atlantic province census are almost always Ukrainian or Belarusian families.

Sandra Kowalchuk: Yes, but with realistic expectations. The fundamental challenge is database size. AncestryDNA has tens of millions of users — but most of them are from the British Isles and Western Europe. Ukrainian-specific DNA matches in a PEI context are relatively rare because the community was small and many descendants haven't tested.

The strategy I recommend is to test with AncestryDNA for maximum database exposure, then upload the raw data to FamilySearch.org and MyHeritage for free. FamilySearch in particular has a growing European user base. When you do find a DNA match with a recognizable Ukrainian surname or who lists Ukraine as an ancestor, contact them immediately. A DNA match who has already done the documentary research in Galicia can jump you decades in a single conversation.

The most valuable DNA strategy for PEI is what I call “cousin triangulation” — finding multiple DNA matches who all share a common ancestor, comparing their trees, and working backward from the point where the trees diverge toward the ancestral village. It’s slow, but it works.

Sandra Kowalchuk: There are, and they're dramatically underused. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ukrainian community organizations across Canada went through a period of intensive memory-collection. Church groups organized their communities, solicited contributions from families, and published commemorative volumes. Some of these are polished books; others are photocopied booklets stapled together at the parish hall.

For PEI, the most valuable of these were produced by Ukrainian church anniversary committees in Charlottetown and a few rural areas. They typically include a history of the community, a list of founding families with village-of-origin information, photographs of early settlers, and sometimes genealogical sketches going back one or two generations. Finding a copy can save a researcher years of work.

The challenge is locating them. The PEI Public Archives holds some. Individual families hold others. There is a broader national directory of Ukrainian-Canadian published family histories that indexes these community books by province — a resource that is woefully unknown to most researchers.

Sandra Kowalchuk: A long one. The biggest is searching for the modern Ukrainian spelling of a surname. If your great-grandfather was Hrynchyshyn, searching for exactly "Hrynchyshyn" in a 1901 Canadian census will return nothing. The enumerator wrote what he heard, phonetically, in English. You need to search for every conceivable variation: Granchason, Krynchyshyn, Grynchyshyn, Hynchason. Wildcards are your best friend.

The second biggest mistake is giving up after the first failure. Canadian genealogy for Ukrainian settlers is inherently iterative. You search the 1901 census under one spelling, find nothing, try four more spellings, find a possibility, look at the neighbours, recognize a familiar village name, come back and re-search the original surname. It’s a process of gradually narrowing a field of candidates.

The third mistake is ignoring maiden names. Ukrainian women retained their own surname until very recently in the tradition, and a grandmother’s maiden name is often the key to a completely separate branch of the family. If your great-grandmother was born Parhomenko but is recorded in Canadian documents only as Mrs. Michael Semeniuk, you’ve lost an entire family line — unless someone specifically tracked the maiden name in a church register or a community history book.

Sandra Kowalchuk: Marriage records are gold. In Ukrainian church registers, the marriage record typically lists both the groom's full name and village of origin, and the bride's full name and village of origin. If you can find a great-grandparent's marriage record — whether in Canada or in Ukraine — you often get both maiden names and both villages in a single entry.

For village of origin, the ship passenger arrival lists at Library and Archives Canada are underrated. Many lists from the 1895-1914 period include a “last residence” or “place of origin” field, which enumerators sometimes filled in with the actual village name. The handwriting can be difficult, but the information, when present, is as close to a primary source as you’ll get without going to Ukrainian archives directly. The Lviv Archives are the end-point of that chain — once you have a village and a date range, the church records there can take you back another two or three generations.

Sandra Kowalchuk: Several things that give me real optimism. Library and Archives Canada continues to expand its online collections — the passenger arrival records are much better indexed than they were five years ago. The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago and several Canadian Ukrainian organizations have ongoing digitization projects for community archives that include PEI-related materials.

More importantly, FamilySearch has partnered with Ukrainian archives to digitize church records from Galicia. This project accelerated dramatically after 2022, driven both by a desire to preserve records endangered by the war and by a long-term commitment to making these records globally accessible. Researchers who find brick walls today because records aren’t yet online may find those same records accessible in two to three years.

My advice is to document your research now — even the failed searches — so that when new records become available, you can quickly identify what you still need to check. A research log is not glamorous, but it prevents you from duplicating work you’ve already done and from missing a record you didn’t notice had become available.