john k ancestry


Mar 7, 2020

    #2,510

So I was wondering about something nobody seems to know - where does John K.'s family, his ancestors, come from? So I did a little research and here's what I found out...

People generally think that John's of Ukrainian descent. But if you look up his last name, Kricfalusi, other people who have it seem to be generally Czech or Slovakian. So there's your answer, right? Not quite.

In his "Kaspar the Unfriendly Bear" pitch, he sets the action in Ruthenia, the part of western Ukraine on the Hungarian-Romanian border. Before World War I, it was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. John puts a lot of himself into his cartoons, so there, needless to say, was a good clue as to where his ancestry is from.

As an aside, his grandfather emigrated to Canada in the 1920s. He was a priest, and what little I can find about why he came here seems to imply he came to "escape the Communists" - perhaps caught in the Polish-Soviet border wars of the 20s.

So I did a little more research, and most of the people with the name "Kricfalusi" seemed to come from a place in Ukraine called Zakarpatska. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you would learn that in the twenties and thirties, it was a part of Czechoslovakia.

All this being said, I think I've found where John's family comes from.

The other mystery, however, the one I can't solve, is how old John's dad is. The only actual date I can find says he was born in 1921, so he'd be 99 this year. Robyn Byrd, however, disputes this, and thinks he's a decade younger at least. She got to meet him, and he didn't seem to be 80-something when she met him. (The only other date I could find implies he was born in 1916... so I don't believe it for a minute.)

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rcvrd jan 2021