Last November, after a five-hour train ride to western Ukraine, where I met up with a translator who drove us another two hours in his car, we pulled into Olena’s village for the first time — after several stops to allow women herding cows to cross the main road. There is no commercial area, just a community center that occasionally opens for dances. Like others in the village, Olena’s family tends to plots of land where they raise potatoes and other vegetables.

After hugs and three kisses on our cheeks Olena showed us her chickens and a shed where she kept a cow and four pigs, including one destined to be slaughtered for Christmas dinner. The main house, separate from a building where food is prepared for the family and the animals, is among a dozen in the village of 400 people that have indoor plumbing and Wi-Fi.

One of our first stops was the village cemetery where I learned I was named after my mother’s brother and Olena’s grandfather, a person I had never heard of before. As we stood at the rickety green wooden cross that marked his grave I wondered why my mother had never told me about Gregory Ziatyk or two other brothers, one who died in the 1940s and another who had sailed to the United States but immediately returned to Ukraine and died three days later.

I also learned why the Ziatyks were living in the Ternopil oblast when the village listed on my mother’s baptism record was some 225 miles to the west, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in what had been the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Olena began to cry as she explained how the Soviets at the end of World War II forced people from their village of Soyinka into cattle cars and shipped them to Ukraine while their homeland was annexed to Poland. The Ziatyks were among 100,000 Lemkos, an ethnic minority, scattered about Ukraine as part of the forced-relocation program known as Operation Vistula . In 1947 another 50,000 Lemkos were settled throughout Poland.

“If you didn’t want to leave they threatened to burn you in your house,’’ said Olena, who was six years old when her family was moved. The homes of 250 people who lived in Solinka were set ablaze. One family member claimed he was Polish in the hope he would be allowed to stay. He was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged through the village, Olena said. Paralyzed by his injuries, he died five years ago.

The Ziatyks had left behind 10 hectares of land (roughly 25 acres) and a sizable house, according to a document Olena showed me. They also lost most of their possessions and animals, except for one horse, she said.