Family History Continued

Please read "Some Family History" as a refresher prior to reading this blog .


When we were in Abakan we visited Tanya's (Father's Cousin) Aunt Tonya (see picture bottom of previous history post). She is a very healthy and active lady in her very early 70's. She is going to Moscow to visit one of her daughters in August and offered look after Papa on the train on the way home so we have to get him to Moscow on August 17th. Tanya said when she was young she looked so much like Tonya's three daughters that everyone thought she was Tonya's kid.

I learned more about the Franskevich family while I was in Abakan. Great Grandfather Franskevich did come from Poland to Siberia in the mid-1920's. There was a picture of him, now lost, in Polish uniform. He had money when he came and set out to become a sucessful farmer, renting land, buying horses, a grist mill, a mower and a grain harvester (likely similar to the old original McCormick harvesters which were mfrd in the USSR until the late 40's). When Stalin collectivized all agriculture in the early 1930's, he lost everything to the new state farm created in the area.


Sometime during the Great Terror of 1938-1939, the KGB came one night to Kalegina, the village where they lived and arrested all males with Polish family names. They were never seen again. The KGB had gone to Tonya's father, who was the postmaster and demanded the names and addresses of all Polish people in the village. Because my Tanya's paternal grandfather was his brother-in-law, he left their name, Franskevich, off the list.