About Us

Prokop Melish lived in the Austrian Hungarian Empire State of Galicia, now Ukraine.  Prokop lived in Koniuchy with his family.  His son and family still in the Ukraine said the family was wealthy and "well to do".  They lived on a farm and owned lots of land and many animals.  Prokop died one winter while chasing a horse onto a frozen pond.  

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Peter Procyk's father gave the Melish family the money to send young Ivan (John) to the US to escape the start of WW1 and the advancing Russian army.  Ivan, with help from two of his sisters, walked from southeast Ukraine to Italy to take a ship to the US.  According to records at Ellis Island, Ivan Melish arrived in 1914 at the age of 16 from Koniuchy Austria.  He moved to Scranton and worked in the coal mines. John moved to Burralo in or around 1918, working as a laborer in the dry docks.  John attended night school and eventually worked selling life insurance for Metropolitan Life.  His wife Mary said that John would show up at Mary's parent's farm house in Angola wearing a nice suit and driving a Studebaker.  

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Born in Sambor in the Austrian Hungarian Empire in the state of Galicia, Andrew Kotowicz met his wife Anna in Livi, Ukraine.  She came to America and Andrew kept writing her to help him come to America.  Andrew eventually did come to America in 1899 and they married in 1902.  Both came from farming families, however Anna was sent to school and became learned and once in America put Andrew in the grocery / saloon business, and owned a butcher shop and tavern on Electric Avenue in Lackawanna.  Family legend is that he passed himself off as Polish in the mostly Polish neighborhood, but when locals realized he was actually Ukranian, his business suffered.  

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Anna Marciszewski was born in Pnieczna Galicia.  She immigrated to the US in 1899.