The Batyski and Grace families, ten generations back

Joe was born in Yatesboro, a coal town in western Pennsylvania, the first child of Roman and Anna (Sabol) Batycki. The 1930 census finds him there at age 8, in school, in a rented house the census taker numbered 42. The family name was written down as “Batticky.” Over his lifetime it appears as Batycki, Batychi, Batticky and finally Batyski, the spelling Joe and his children used.

By 1940 the family had moved to a farm in Green Township, Mahoning County, on Rural Route 4 out of Salem. Joe was 18 and had finished four years of high school. The census lists him as a farm laborer on the family farm, working 60 hours the week before the census taker came.

His obituary fills in the rest. He graduated from Greenford High School in 1939 and attended the General Motors Institute. He drove an 18-wheeler for 31 years, first for Standard Oil and then for United Tool and Die, and drove a school bus for the South Range district for 20 years. He ushered at St. Paul Catholic Church for 70 years and belonged to the Knights of Columbus for 50. He played baseball as a young man, bowled for 65 years, and was inducted into the Salem association's Bowlers Hall of Fame.

He married Beulah Grace on 16 December 1943. They were married 69 years. He died at 91 and is buried at Grandview Cemetery in Salem.

Beulah was born in Salem to William and Fannie (Smith) Grace. At 5 she was living on Hillsdale in Perry Township. In 1940 the family rented 286 Ohio Avenue in Salem for $15 a month. Beulah was 15, in her first year of high school, and had already earned $12 for four weeks of work the year before.

She graduated from Salem High School in 1942 and attended Salem Business College. She was head cashier at G.C. Murphy in Salem for 30 years. She crocheted and knitted well enough to win Best of Show at the Canfield Fair, and took first prize in ceramics at the Ohio State Fair. Her obituary says her grandchildren were her biggest prize.

She had two sisters, Betty, who died as an infant in 1919, and Bernice (Mrs. Snyder), and a brother, Arnold. Beulah died at 90 and is buried beside Joe at Grandview Cemetery, Section 18. Together they had two daughters, seven grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren.

Roman was born in Piątkowa, a village in the hills of what is now Podkarpackie province in southeastern Poland. In 1886 that region was Galicia, a province of the Austrian Empire, which is why his ship record gives his country as Austria and his nationality as Polish. His mother, Klementyna, died in 1892 when he was six.

He sailed from Antwerp on the steamship Finland and landed at New York on 11 March 1914, a few months before the First World War began. He was 28 and single, with $30. The clerk recorded him as 5 feet 7 inches, fair, with blond hair and blue eyes. He was headed to a cousin, Michal Storis, in Fullerton, Pennsylvania.

He married Anna Sabol when he was 33, around 1919 or 1920, and by 1921 they were in Yatesboro, where Joseph, Alex and Albina were born. In 1930 Roman was a naturalized citizen renting a house there for $7.50 a month. He spoke Polish at home, could read and write, and spoke English.

Roman worked underground. On 21 April 1928, at 42, he was a machine miner at Yatesboro No. 9, a mine of the Cowanshannock Coal Company. He was laying track at the face of an entry when rock fell on him. The state accident register lists the accident as nonfatal and says nothing more about his injuries. The family remembers that he was in the hospital for months, and that Anna kept the house going by sewing and other work.

The family's account is that they left for Ohio once he was out of the hospital. The 1930 census still has them in Yatesboro, and the 1940 census says they were living in rural Armstrong County in 1935, so the move came sometime between 1935 and 1940. He bought a farm on Rural Route 4, Salem, valued at $1,000. The 1940 census has him farming on his own account, 65 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. He registered for the 1942 draft at 56 and named Anna as next of kin. He died in Salem at 74 and was buried at Grandview Cemetery on 10 November 1960.

Roman was not the only Batycki to reach Ohio. His brother Michael, 21 years older, died in New Waterford, Columbiana County, in 1947.

Anna grew up in the anthracite country around Hazleton in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. At 8 she was in Hazle Township with her parents. At 17 she was a weaver in a silk mill, living in Hazleton's 14th Ward. She had a seventh-grade education. After marrying Roman she raised three children in Yatesboro and then on the farm outside Salem, and outlived him by 21 years.

Anna's parents were born around 1870 in the Kingdom of Hungary, then part of Austria-Hungary. The census takers wrote their language as “Slavonian” in 1910 and “Ruthenian” in 1920. Ruthenian was the word of the time for the Rusyn people of the Carpathian Mountains, so the family was likely Carpatho-Rusyn. A Hamburg passenger list attached to Janos in the tree gives his home village as Koszkoncz.

They married about 1894 and came to America in 1895 to 1897. Janos petitioned for citizenship in Pennsylvania on 16 January 1904. He worked as a coal miner in both the 1910 and 1920 censuses. In 1910 neither he nor Mary could read or write. By 1920 Janos could do both, and they owned their house outright.

Mary told the 1910 census taker she had borne nine children and that five were living. Only Anna is in the tree so far, so Susan and Carole had at least four more Sabol great-aunts and great-uncles still to be found.

Bill was the oldest of eight children and spent his whole life within a few miles of Salem. The cemetery record gives his birthplace as Teegarden, in Columbiana County. At 19 he was a farm laborer living with his parents on Hillsdale Extension in Perry Township. He married Fannie Smith when he was 23.

In 1930 he was a laborer in a pump factory. In 1940 he was an assembler earning $1,000 a year, renting 286 Ohio Avenue in Salem. He had an eighth-grade education. He died at 87, less than eight months after Fannie, and both are buried at Grandview Cemetery.

Fannie grew up at Washingtonville, on the Mahoning and Columbiana county line, the daughter of a coal miner. She married Bill Grace at 18. Their children were Betty, Bernice, Beulah and a son, Arnold, who is named in the cemetery records and in Beulah's obituary. She died at 82, six days after her birthday.

Her father, William Harrison Smith, was born in Pennsylvania in June 1859 to Pennsylvania-born parents and was mining coal at Washingtonville in 1900. Nothing earlier is known about him. Her mother, Rachel Alice Flitcraft, went by Alice. She was 9 in the 1870 census of Green Township and at 19 was working as a servant in Washingtonville. She and William married in 1883.

Alice's family is the one that can be followed furthest. The surname is unusual and was spelled Flitcraft, Witcraft, Whitcraft and Wheatcraft by different clerks, sometimes for the same person.

There is a pleasing circle in this line. Salem, Ohio, was settled by Quakers in 1806 and takes its name from Salem, New Jersey. Mary Meredith Flitcraft died in Salem, New Jersey, in 1834, by which time her grandson Joseph was already raising a family in eastern Ohio. Seven generations later her descendants were still in Salem, Ohio.