Obit: Sereda, Wasyl (1898 - 1955)

Contact: Dolores Mohr Kenyon

Email: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org 
 

Surnames: Sereda, Kryklywec, Malikoff, Gehrt  
 

----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co., WI.) January 20, 1955 
 

Sereda, Wasyl (27 December 1898 - 16 January 1955) 
 

Little Walter played at the Christmas tree - But Grandpa Sereda went silently Away - end for displaced person: 
 

When his father and mother and sister went to the movies last Sunday afternoon, little Walter Kryklywec, 2, was happy to stay at home with the Christmas tree and his grandfather, Wasyl Sereda.  While his grandfather did whatever the big folks do, Walter went about his own baby business around the Christmas tree in the front room. 
 

Walter was still playing there when the Vasili Malikoffs came knocking at the door.  In answer the dog barked inside, but nobody opened the door and so Mr. Malikoff presently pushed the door open and walked in.  They saw the baby playing and laughing, but Grandpa Sereda was down on the floor.  An hour or so before an unbidden guest had entered the Kryklywec home and had taken the good part of Wasyl Sereda away.  
 

The word was taken to the Kryklywecs at the theater and they came quickly home, filling the house with the lamentations customary to the people of southern Europe and in contrast with the pent-up restraints of occidentals.  Wasyl Sereda, 57, was a displaced person, as are the Kryklywecs.  He was born December 27, 1898, in the Ukraine.  He became a bookkeeper, but the war came on and he worked in a labor camp in Germany.  In 1950 he and his family came to a farm in Illinois.  Later he worked in Chicago.  Not long ago he and his wife came to live with their daughter on the old Harry Gehrt farm in the Town of Grant which the Kryklywecs had bought last September. 
 

The body was cared for at the Bergemann Funeral Home, and was then taken to Chicago, where the rites and burial could be conducted in accordance with the Orthodox faith, to which Mr. Sereda adhered. 
 

This family is part of the small Ukrainian colony of displaced persons who have recently been finding homes in Clark County.