The East European Genealogical Society (EEGS) in Winnipeg, Manitoba yesterday announced the reprinting of the first and third volumes of Vladimir J. Kaye’s Dictionary of Ukrainian Canadian Biography.
Volume 1, covering 941 settlers who arrived in Manitoba by 1900, was originally published in 1975 and has long been out of print. It has been made available again on its 50th anniversary with the gracious consent of Mr. Kaye’s literary estate. This reprint consists of a facsimile reproduction of the entire, unaltered work, followed by a new index to the European place names by Brian J. Lenius and Dave M. Olinyk.
Volume 3, covering 295 settlers who arrived in Saskatchewan Assiniboia by 1904, was left unpublished at Kaye’s death, and with the consent of his literary estate was first published by the EEGS in 2018. The “Saskatchewan” and “Assiniboia” of the title refer to two of the four Northwest Territories that became the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The region covered by this volume corresponds to the modern day province of Saskatchewan below the 55th parallel, roughly the area south of the Churchill River. The text of this edition closely follows Mr. Kaye’s typescript, but to assist in the identification of the place names, the society has added the Polish versions, as well as the German and Romanian versions for places in Bukovina.
The dictionary is the earliest biographical and genealogical study of the first wave of immigrants to Canada from the former Austro Hungarian provinces of Galicia and Bukovina now in Western Ukraine in the years 1891-1900 (volume 1) or 1892-1904 (volume 3). It does not cover all settlers who arrived within the stated timeframes, treating only those recorded in the Homestead Grant Registers at Library and Archives Canada, now known as “Land Grants of Western Canada.”
Both volumes are available for purchase as PDF and softcover through the EEGS website. The Manitoba volume is also available in hardcover.
Vladimir Julian Kaye (1896 1976), C.M., Ph.D., whose original surname was Kisilevsky, was born in Kolomyia, Galicia (now in Western Ukraine). He received his doctoral degree from the Institute of East European Studies at the University of Vienna in 1924, and came to Canada at the end of the same year. In 1926, he attended the College of Education at the University of Toronto. He was inducted into the Order of Canada in 1974.
