But back to the beginning. Heading north to PA from DC typically leads me to Somerset, Cambria, Indiana, and Huntingdon Counties. I began this trip with a stop in Wood (once upon a time known as Woodvale) in Huntingdon County. I wanted to take some new and hopefully better photos of the inside of the vintage St. Michael's Orthodox Church, and parishioner Susan Pawuk graciously met me there and opened the church.
She also provided me with the parish's 2017 centennial booklet, which had some valuable photos inside. Susan's brother Ronald has been a Facebook friend for a while, so I was glad to make a personal connection with the family, who are now among only a few local parishioners of St. Michael's.I then headed to Patton, Cambria County, near my mother's homestead in Barnesboro (now known as Northern Cambria), to meet with the current pastor of Patton's Ss. Peter & Paul Byzantine Catholic Church and our family parish, St. John's Byzantine Catholic Church in Northern Cambria. Father Vasyl Polyak is a Carpatho-Rusyn native of Užhorod and came to the U.S. to serve our churches several years ago.
Again taking "improved" photos of the inside of the Patton church, Fr. Vasyl also supplied me with a DVD to commemorate the parish's history, and later emailed me a digital copy of the historic old photo of the parish and its congregation, which was taken from a newspaper.The hamlet of Dixonville in northern Indiana County was my next stop; parishioner Maureen (Betsa) Cornman, while unavailable to meet me there in person, graciously arranged for the church to be open, for a copy of the parish's 1915 centennial booklet to be set out for me, and for a bounty of historical photographs available for me to scan. It was encouraging to see a parish that's in a fairly out-of-the-way place still active and clearly proud of who they are. (Although most of its history has been as a Ukrainian Orthodox church, it was originally a Greek Catholic church tied to the mainly-Subcarpathian Rusyn St. Michael's Church in neighboring Clymer, and was actually a parish of the Pittsburgh Greek Catholic Exarchate until the mid-1920s. Most of its families, though, came from transitional Lemko-Bojko villages of Lisko County in southeastern Poland—within Carpathian Rus' but whose American descendants and those who remained in the homeland mostly came to consider themselves Ukrainians.) As part of the "circle of life," it was Maureen's parents George and Ann Betsa whose home at the base of the hill where the church now stands and whose porch I sat on and with whom I first discussed the history of St. John's parish way back in the 1990s when just beginning this project. George and Ann have gone on to eternal life, but their legacy lives on in a wonderful way.