Nine European places · six American ones

Where they came from

Two families, and between them almost no distance at all. The Carpathian side comes from a cluster of neighbouring villages across Spiš and Šariš that fed one Connecticut parish. The German side comes from one upland region of the Eifel — three of its five villages within twelve kilometres of each other. Only one line, the Dutch Cremers of Sittard, comes from outside its family's cluster.

Two clusters, drawn to scale

The Carpathian cluster

Torysky sits in Spiš. Šarišské Jastrabie and Kijov sit about thirty kilometres away in Šariš, on the far side of a county line that meant very little to the people crossing it. All three fed the same Carpatho-Russian parish in Bridgeport, and their people married each other once they got there: a Torysky woman married a Jastrabie man; a Kijov man married a Kijov woman; and, on the evidence, a Jastrabie woman married a man whose family came from Torysky.

The Eifel cluster

This is not "Germany". It is one upland Catholic region of a few dozen villages, and four of the five German lines come out of it. American enumerators wrote "Prussia" against all of them, including the Dutch ones, because Prussia was the word they had for the whole Rhine borderland.

The route, both times