I live in Ternopil. Most of these villages are two hours from my door.

It did not begin with a family legend. There is no emigrant great-grandfather whose letters I found in an attic, and I am not going to invent one for a page like this. It began with fieldwork. For sixteen years my research has taken me into villages of two hundred people to ask why the shop closed, why the school closed, why the young go — and in almost every one of them there is a woman in her eighties who, once the tea is poured, starts naming the families that went to Canada.

I heard those names for years before it occurred to me that on the other side of the ocean someone is looking for exactly them and cannot get here to ask. That is the whole of it. I happen to be on the side of the ocean where the answers still exist, and they are held by people in their late eighties. This is not one business idea out of several I considered. It is the one thing I am standing close enough to do.

Ternopil, and the villages around it. My family stayed; yours left. Those are the two halves of the same rupture, and they are the reason this page can exist at all — somebody had to remain within driving distance of the parish register. In 2022 a great many people left this country. I am still here, and so is the work.

So Galicia is not a heritage brand to me and not a line in a brochure. It is where I buy fuel, where I know which village council answers its telephone and which road to which cemetery turns to clay in March. When your document says Zloczow, Tarnopol or Brzezany, I am not finding it on a map for the first time — the chances are I have been there already, for something with nothing to do with genealogy.

Ten years before any of this was a business, I founded a non-profit in Ternopil: Пам’ять майбутнього — Memory of the Future. It was registered on 17 August 2016, I still head it, and its work is narrow. We record heritage that is about to be lost — photogrammetry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century church sculpture, monuments, interiors. Part of that work was done together with the National Reserve “Castles of Ternopil Region” — saints, apostles, angels, a Mother of God.

Two things follow from that, and both concern you. The first is a date. I have been photographing and measuring churches and graves since 2016, unpaid, and the state register can prove when I started. This is not a business I thought up on noticing that the diaspora has money.

The second is a capability no one else in this trade has. The camera work that records a baroque altar records your great-grandparents’ headstone. A photogrammetric scan reads a half-eroded inscription better than an eye does at the graveside — and what you are left holding is not only a photograph but a model your grandchildren can open on a telephone long after the stone has finished crumbling. If you want it as an object, it can be printed.