Sanok Genes is a website for sharing cultural and historical stories about the historic Sanok County of Red Ruthenia and Galicia (the modern Polish counties of Sanok, Lesko, and Bieszczady. Our work is particularly geared toward English-speaking genealogists who want to take their research to a higher level.

Piotr Zelny is a historian and archivist, mountain guide, staff member of the Historical Museum in the castle of Sanok in south-eastern Poland, genealogy researcher and guide for the genealogical company PolishOrigins.

Piotr received his master degree in history, archival science and historical sources at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. He is a historian and a researcher of so-called micro-histories, histories of particular villages, families, people and events accompanying their everyday lives.

In genealogy, he specializes in researching non-metrical sources such as land, tax, school and judiciary records as well as other essential genealogical sources.
The aim of his research is not only to provide the names of our ancestors and dates referring to their lives but above all to discover their everyday lives, living conditions, financial situations, social status, land possession, locations of family houses, and feudal privileges and obligations.

Leo Filipczak lives in Wisconsin, USA. His ancestors left the Sanok region in the mass migration of the beginning of the 20th century. In 2026, he self-published his first book, Beyond the San: National Identity in the Carpathian Borderlands, which explores the consequences of national development (Polish and Ukrainian) among the branches of the Filipczak family of the mixed Mazur-Rusyn village of Liszna. The same year, he submitted his first academic paper (with Delfina Ertanowska) A forgotten local patriot: the influence of Lishna and the Eastern Lemkivshchyna on Ivan Fylypchak’s work, to the journal of the society Boikivshchyna in Sambir.

Leo graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor’s in History and Social Studies Education, with a minor in Geography. His primary area of research is the interaction of cultures in the Lake Superior region of North America before 1860. Since 2013, he has co-administered the Chequamegon History blog, which publishes his research in that area.