About us
The village of Wyszatyce is located in the southeastern part of present day Poland on the western banks of the San River. It is a rural farming village located few kilometers northeast of the city of Przemsyl, Poland and only about 5km west of the present day border between Poland and Ukraine. The village dates back hundreds of years and was first mentioned in 1293. Prior to 1772, Wyszatyce was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Wyszatyce become part of the Austrian Empire and was located in what came to be known as the Kingdom and later Province of Galicia. Between the end of WWI and WWII, Wyszatyce was located in the Republic of Poland.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, approximately 70% of the population of Galicia were serfs, who worked the land for wealthy landlords, but were largely prohibited from owning land themselves and had limited rights and little access to education. In 1781, peasants were granted hereditary ownership of land, they could not be removed from the land without a court order, serfdom was limited to three days a week, serf children could seek education outside agriculture, and government control and administration was extended to the serfs. However, peasants still could not buy lands on their own. The landlord in Wyszatyce during these years was Matthew and later Maurice Krainski. Following a series of peasant uprisings in Galicia in the 1840s, serfdom was abolished in the Kingdom of Austria and in Wyszatyce in 1848. Like most of Galicia, the village of Wyszatyce was struck by cholera in the mid-1850s and a large number of villagers died during the outbreak.
A significant number of villagers left Wyszatyce in the early 1900s due to lack of opportunities and limited land for farming. There is evidence that as many as 300 individuals emigrated from Wyszatyce to the US and Canada between 1900 and 1914, and a much smaller number emigrated later. These early emigrants settled primarily in Chicago IL, Yorkville OH, Perth Amboy NJ and in the areas around Derwent AB, Brightstone MB and in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Wyszatyce is located just outside of the perimeter of the historical Fortress of Przemysl, which was built by the Austrian army in the early to mid 1800s and was an early target of the Russian army in the Siege of Przemysl in September 1914 at the outset of WWI. The Austrians knew the Russians would attack here first and proactively evacuated all of the villagers and sent them to a refugee camp in Chocen in what is now the Czech Republic. Once the villagers were gone, the army blew up all of the structures in the village so the Russians couldn't use them while they were attacking Przemysl. Both the Roman Catholic church and the Greek Catholic church were destroyed and rebuilt after the war. The only remaining item from the original Roman Catholic church is the stone altar that the villagers took with them Chocen and back. Many of the villagers returned to Wyszatyce in 1916 and 1917 and rebuilt the village, while others scattered throughout Europe.
Prior to WWI, Wyszatyce was considered to be a relatively large village with a population of approximately 1,700 in the 1880s and nearly 2,200 by 1914. At this time, nearly two-thirds of population was Greek Catholic, approximately one-third were Roman Catholic, and small number were Jewish. The Greek Catholic villagers were ethnically "Ruthenian" or Ukrainian. The Roman Catholic villagers were ethnically Polish. However, most of the villagers spoke both Polish and Ukrainian as a result of significant intermarriage between Greek Catholics and Roman Catholics. The village, like all of Poland, is predominately Roman Catholic today as a result of the displacement of Greek Catholics to Ukraine following WWII in the late 1940s. The Greek Catholic church sits on a hill overlooking the village just northwest of the Roman Catholic church. The Greek Catholic church, which was rebuild after WWI, fell into disrepair after the displacement of the Greek Catholics and hasn't been used for more than 60 years. However, in the summer of 2015, the church was in the process of being restored and turned into a museum. The Roman Catholic church, which contains the stone alter of the original Roman Catholic church, has been in continuous use since the church was rebuilt after WWI and remains the social center of the village.
The main road in Wyszatyce runs from Przemsyl through Bolestraszyce, which is located just south of Wyszatyce, to Walawa, just north of Wyszatyce. The road was first paved in 1967. Before that, the village was inaccessible during the winter or rainy months as the road turned to mud and ice. The San River that runs along the eastern edge of the village and there is a "ferry" that connects Wyszatyce to the village of Torki, just east of the river, which is very close to the Ukrainian border. A ferry has been in operation on this part of the river for nearly 200 years, and the ferry crossing is marked on a cadastral map of the village from 1850. Most of the houses in the village today were built after WWII, but some of the brick homes date back to the period between WWI and WWII. 80-90% of the world's storks reside in Poland during the spring and summer. Today, there are at least a half dozen very large stork nests on utility poles along the main road in Wyszatyce.
Most of the buildings in use in the village today are residential, which the exception of the Roman Catholic church and its associated buildings, a primary school, a type of community center and a funeral chapel next to the cemetery. The cemetery sits across the main road about a kilometer from the Roman Catholic and old Greek Catholic churches and dates back to 1827, however, because the population was primarily comprised of poor serfs and peasants, nearly all of the graves from the nineteenth century were marked with wooden crosses and are no longer visible. The earliest headstones in the cemetery today date back to the early 1900s. There is a monument at the entrance to the cemetery commemorating the villagers who were displaced and sent to Chocen in 1914, and those who lost their lives there during the war.
The Greek Catholic parish records for Wyszatyce for the period 1884-1940 are held in the Zurawica Civil Registry office in nearby Zurawica. The Greek Catholic parish records for 1784-1847
are held in the Polish State Archives in Przemysl. The Przemsyl Archives scanned and digitized the records for the villages surrounding Przemysl in 2014 and early 2015, and have made these digital records available online for some villages, but have not yet published the records for Wyszatyce (as of April 2016). The Roman Catholic parish records for Wyszatyce are held by the local parish priest in the village. Tadeusz Kochanowicz, who served as Treasurer of the church for many years and is the village historian and genealogist, has transcribed most of the Roman Catholic birth and marriage records. Allison Wysocki photographed many of these transcribed records and a few pages of the original books during her visit to Wyszatyce in July 2015.