As eastern European countries open more records to researchers, it is becoming possible to learn something about ancestors whose very names were unknown just a few years ago.  Such is the case with my great-great-grandfather Izak (Benyamin Yitzhak haKohen), whose family lived in Tarnoka, a small place in Zemplen megye, in the early years of the 19th century.   Tarnoka, which the area’s Rusyn residents called Tarnavka and is now Trnavka, Slovakia, was about 3 kilometers west of  Galszecs,  where the few Jewish residents worshipped.

Izak was born in 1813 or 1816, according to records from Zebegnyo, a village southeast of Galszecs, where he settled in about 1838 after his marriage to Anna (Chana) Lefkovits.  Anna was born in 1820.  The handwritten 1869 census record lists her birthplace as Kolbaj, probably Kolbaszo, in the Carpathian foothills in the northeastern part of the county.  Kolbaszo, now Kolbasov (bottom left), was less than 10 kilometers from the border with Galicia, from which both families had probably emigrated a few decades earlier.  According to a history of the area, Jews first settled in the area in the latter half of the 18th century,  (Vasil Fedič, 2002).  Kolbaszo was also not far from Kismihaly (Mihajlo) where other Lefkovits families lived.

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