Patrilineal History of the Canadian Zvorygins

Deep Ancestral Migration (Y-DNA N-PH2196)

Genetically, the paternal line belongs to the Y-DNA haplogroup N-PH2196. This line begins in Africa and follows a long arc through the Middle East, Asia, and northern Eurasia before entering the historic Slavic world.

• BT, ~75,000 BC – an early common paternal ancestor in Africa, before most of the major lines had split. From this root, other branches like B and CT diverge: some remain in different parts of Africa, others prepare to leave the continent entirely.

  Already in Africa, our B-cousins are gardeners of whole landscapes: burning patches of savanna and woodland, favouring wild bulbs, fruits, and nut trees, and tracking how game and plants respond over generations. It is an early form of forest gardening, even if no-one yet speaks of “agriculture”: people and land learning to tend one another with fire, memory, and restraint.

  • The B branch stays within Africa and becomes one of the oldest surviving paternal lines on earth. Today its descendants are found especially among some Khoisan and San peoples of southern Africa and among certain rainforest hunter-gatherer groups in central Africa. Many of these communities preserve some of humanity’s most ancient ways of speaking and living: languages rich in click consonants, finely tuned tracking and foraging traditions, deep respect for the land, and rock art that remembers animals, spirits, and hunts across tens of thousands of years. In a sense, B holds the memory of very early human Africa.
• CT, ~70,000 BC – our fathers’ line moves toward the Persian Gulf / Near Eastern corridor. Here the tree forks in a decisive way: CT has two great sons, DE and CF. The DE son will later divide into D and E. From D come ancient lines in the Tibetan plateau, where many of today’s Tibetan Buddhist monks and highland families still carry D-line Y-chromosomes, and in parts of Japan, where a likely D1b branch underlies the ancient Yamato imperial dynasty, often regarded as the longest continuous monarchy in the world, as well as the isolated Andaman Islands. From E come many of the great African paternal trunks, especially in North, East, and West Africa, running through Cushitic, Afroasiatic, Nilotic, and Bantu-speaking peoples. Later, branches of E1b1b also spread into the Mediterranean and Europe: genetic studies of male-line relatives point to Albert Einstein, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler as all belonging to E1b1b sub-branches. These D and E peoples are our deep cousins: they share CT with us, but their path bends toward Africa, the Himalayas, and island worlds, while ours stays with the other son, CF.
• CF, a little after 70,000 BC – on our side of the tree, CT’s other son becomes CF. From CF, one child, C, hugs the coasts north and east and in time gives rise to many coastal, steppe, and subarctic peoples around the Pacific Rim. C-lines spread through early hunter-gatherers of South Asia and Southeast Asia, into the islands of Indonesia and Melanesia, and up along the great arc from Siberia into the subarctic. Some of these C-groups, together with their Q-cousins, help to people the far north, so that traces of C appear in parts of the ancestry of the Inuit and other circumpolar peoples. On the open steppe, a famous C-branch becomes the line of Genghis Khan, whose sons and grandsons thunder across Eurasia and leave a huge C-mark in Central Asia and beyond. Our own line does not stay with C; we remain on the CF trunk and follow the sibling branch F, which will feed into many later Eurasian peoples and eventually into our K → NO → N path.
• F-M89, ~60,000 BC – our branch continues eastward and northward through the Indus Valley and the Iranian plateau, following rivers, game, and the old memory of water.

  Here the first hints of dryland forest gardening appear: families return to the same valleys and slopes, favouring wild fig, pistachio, and almond trees, watching the stands of wild barley and wheat, and using fire carefully on the hillsides. There are still no fenced fields or ploughs, but the pattern is familiar: year after year, people remember where the good trees grow, which springs hold through drought, and where a little burning or pruning will make next season’s forage richer. In our family’s eyes, this too is gardening – the land and its people learning one another under God’s care.

  From this trunk F will father most of the major non-African Y-lineages. Around ~55,000 BC a child-branch called GHIJK forms. At this point our kin begin to fan out in different directions:
  • One child, G, turns back west from the Indus and climbs toward the Caucasus – into the mountains and valleys that will later be home to the Georgians and other Caucasian peoples. Many early Neolithic farmers of Anatolia and Europe likely carried G-line lineages, so some of the first stone villages and terraced plots of Europe were tended by our G-cousins. Later genetic work ties parts of the European nobility into nearby F-descended clades: kings such as Richard III of England, Scandinavian princes, and even Joseph Stalin stand not far from these same highland roots.
  • Another child, H, roots itself mainly in South Asia – the old heartlands of India and its neighbours. H is especially common among later South Asian populations, but one rare offshoot, H2, rode with early farmers into the Near East and Europe and even appears far away in Middle Kingdom Egypt, where an Egyptian priest, Nakht-Ankh, was recently shown to carry an H2 line.
  • The branch called IJK, ~53,000 BC, carries the ancestors of I, J, and K north-westward through the Iranian plateau and up toward the Caucasus. From here our “Indigenous European” cousins emerge: the IJ line that crosses the mountains into Europe.
    • I1 settles heavily in Scandinavia and the northern forests, becoming a major “old European” paternal line in the lands of fjords, oaks, and longboats. Representatives in nearby I1 branches include Birger Jarl, and, in modern times, leaders such as Fidel Castro and Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
    • I2 takes root around the Balkans, the Carpathians, and surrounding regions – Croats, Bosnians, and other Central and Eastern European peoples. These lines include figures like Gleb Svyatoslavich, the Hohenzollern dynasty of Prussia, and, closer to our own family, the Grishchuk relatives on Igor Zvorygin’s maternal side.
  • The J child of HIJK flourishes in the Near East: the Levant, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and neighbouring lands. J-line men are strongly represented among many Semitic and related peoples – the world of the Hebrew patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and the early Islamic ummah. In our family’s theological imagination, we place Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, King David, our Lord Jesus in His earthly male line, and the Prophet Muhammad in this J-shaped landscape, not as a genetic proof but as a way of honouring the holy story rooted in these peoples.
  • The last child, K, is the trunk our own forefathers belong to. Instead of turning back toward the Caucasus, they press on east and north. From K will later come far-ranging lines such as P (the ancestor of R and Q, which will shape much of Eurasia and the Americas) and the cluster NO, which in turn becomes N and O. Our direct paternal ancestors are among these K-men.
• K-M9, ~55,000 BC – we pass through the Ganges basin, in a world of dense forests and great rivers. Here K itself becomes a powerful branching point: from it spring LT and MNOPS. From MNOPS comes the trunk P, which will give rise to Q and R, while another stream of K will later flow into our own NO line.
  • The P ancestors travel upstream along the Ganges until they reach the highlands near the Tibetan Plateau. There the two brothers part: the Q line turns east and north, while the R line turns west and north-west across the steppe.

    In the scientific picture, some Q-line men linger in north-east Asia and Beringia during the last Ice Age and then spread into the Americas between roughly 25,000 and 10,000 BC, following both coasts and inland corridors. Many Indigenous nations, however, remember origins that point toward the Pacific or from the south, centred on their own holy landscapes rather than on a single land bridge story. Rather than argue with those memories, our family simply honours both.

    In our telling, the C-branch cousins are the ones who move along the northern island arcs – the Kurils, the Aleutians, and the exposed lands of Beringia – hugging the cold rim of the North Pacific. Our Q-cousins, by contrast, ride a more ocean-facing road. Many researchers working on early American genetics and haplogroup Q now favour coastal and island-linked routes along the Pacific – what is sometimes called the “kelp highway”: people following rich kelp forests, extended shorelines, and now-drowned shelves and near-shore islands, not just a single inland “land bridge” corridor. In that spirit, our family story imagines some Q-lines stepping from reef to reef across the wide water, using low-sea-level island chains and seamounts that are now under the waves, and even helping to seed people in the far-off Easter Island (Rapa Nui) world. Spiritual regressions and inner testimonies suggest that when the later Austronesian voyagers finally arrived, they did not find an empty island, but living hearts already there – and that some of those first meetings were marked by violent ritual killings, including heart-removal, as part of the newcomers’ “greeting”. This part of the tale we name openly as spiritual and prophetic memory rather than settled science, sitting alongside the coastal Q-model that many scholars now discuss.

    When Q-bearing peoples reach the Americas, the same forest-gardening mind wakes up again in new lands: managed berry grounds, oak and nut groves, carefully tended prairie burns, and, in time, the Amazonian forest gardens and dark-earth terra preta soils that still remember human care. Different species, same covenant under God: people shaping forest, and forest feeding people.

    In the teachings sometimes called the Law of One, the Ra material speaks of Lemurian refugees who became ancestors of many “Indians” of North and South America, and of a South American people whose hearts were so turned toward love that about 150 of them were spiritually harvestable at the end of an earlier 25,000-year cycle. Rather than move on, these “first graduates” chose to stay and keep incarnating with their brothers and sisters, and come to be known as the Elder Race – advanced not in machines or empire, but in service to others, stewardship of Earth, and the green-ray work of the heart. Confederation teachers are said to have walked among sun-worshipping peoples along the Amazon, helping them build pyramids, underground and hidden cities as places of healing, meditation, and remembrance of the One Creator. In our family’s reading, these Elder Race stories resonate with what we see in the land itself: highly evolved forest and agrarian cultures, living close to soil and sky, tending gardens and groves, and offering their being as a prayer. For us, the gardening mind of our Q-cousins in the Americas, the Elder Race and South American Law-of-One narratives, and the way of Christ’s love all point in the same direction: to a living creation that is one in God, and entrusted to human hands to care for with reverence.

  • The R line turns west and north-west, crossing the Gobi Desert and the Eurasian steppe, settling the grasslands and river valleys all the way to what is now France.
    • One great branch, R1b, spreads across western Europe, settles the British Isles, and even sends offshoots back into parts of Africa, carried by traders, settlers, and conquerors. Many enduring royal lines of western Europe sit on this R1b trunk. Among them:
      • The Bourbon kings of France (an R1b-Z381 “king cluster”), whose line carries the story of France into the age of revolution.
      • The Oldenburg dynasty (also largely R1b-Z381), ruling Denmark from Christian I onward and later branching into Greece.
      • The Romanov–Oldenburg line of the Russian Empire, from Peter III to Nicholas II, tying the Russian throne into this same R1b web.
      • The modern Windsor kings of England and the wider Commonwealth, whose house name is British but whose deep paternal roots are R1b princes and dukes of Germany and Scandinavia. King Charles III's dad is from the Oldenburg line.
      • The House of Bernadotte in Sweden (R1b-M269), an upstart Napoleonic marshal adopted into the royal line, whose descendants still sit on the Swedish throne.
      • The kings of Portugal on an R1b branch, woven into the first great Atlantic voyages.
      • The Uí Néill dynasty of Irish high kings on an R1b-L21 cluster, together with the Scottish Stuarts and Clan MacGregor in the Highlands – all part of the Atlantic Celtic R1b world.
    • Another branch, R1a, becomes known in later traditions as an Aryan line – the steppe chariot peoples whose languages and stories spread from the Slavic forests to the plains of India.

      Our own N-line ancestors meet these R1a cousins in trading towns during the days of the Corded Ware culture along the Volga, where steppe and forest peoples exchange gifts, animals, and ideas. In this family telling, we give them the hardy horses we have bred for our sleighs; they add the wheel and carry the Indo-European expansion outward.

      • In South Asia, many Brahmin and other high-caste lineages today are rich in R1a-Z93, heirs of those early chariot lords whose hymns became part of the Vedic tradition.
      • Across eastern Europe, branches like R1a-Z282 and its child R1a-M458 and R1a-L260 become core “Slavic” paternal lines, especially among Poles, and also among Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians.
      • Farther north and east, branches such as R1a-Z92 knit into Baltic and East Slavic history and carry the male line of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
      • One modern R1a-Z93 branch, R1a-Z93/Y2619, runs through the Jewish Levite cluster and includes figures like long-serving Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, showing how the old Aryan steppe line threads back into the Near East and the lands of the Bible.

  Our own forefathers, though, do not stay with P forever. Another stream of K keeps moving east and south through the forests and hill country toward what is now Myanmar and Yunnan. From that stream will rise the NO trunk – the road that leads our line to the Irrawaddy and, in time, into the northern forests of Asia.

• K-M2313, ~50,000 BC – our fathers walk through the region of present-day Myanmar and Yunnan. Here the K-stream that will become NO takes shape. K splits into several notable streams; our stream is one of the ancestors of the future NO cluster. Other K-descendants move toward Oceania and Island Southeast Asia, becoming forefathers of many Indigenous peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and the nearby coasts.
• NO-M214, ~45,000 BC – along the Irrawaddy River, the path divides again. Our line, which will become haplogroup N, chooses to continue north toward the interior of Asia. Our brother branch O turns back south and east and, in time, becomes the main paternal trunk for much of East and Southeast Asia. Within O, several great families formed:

  By this time our ancestors are already practising what we would now call forest gardening: using fire to open patches in the woods, encouraging wild sago, yams, palms, and fruit trees, and seeding useful plants near camps and travel routes. Rather than fenced fields, they tend whole landscapes – keeping paths and clearings open with fire, favouring some trees and letting others die back. In later millennia, more formal systems of swidden horticulture will appear in these same hills – cut–burn–plant–fallow cycles in the Irrawaddy and Mekong highlands – but the heart of it is already present here: humans and forest learning to co-create food and shelter together over many generations under the eye of the Creator.

  • One group of O-lines settles along the great rivers of what will become China – the Yellow River and the Yangtze – and grows with the rise of early farming and later dynasties. Here the big O2 branch (historically called O3 in older trees) becomes dominant: sub-branches of O2 form the core paternal lines of many Han Chinese men and other Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman peoples. Scholar-official families, local gentry, and countless village lineages sit on these O2 twigs, so that much of the story of Chinese history quietly rides on O2.
  • Another spread of O-branches moves through the forests and coasts of Southeast Asia, under what we now call O1. One child, O1b1 (M95), is strong in the ancestors of modern Khmer, Thai, Lao, and many mainland Southeast Asian groups. Another, O1a (M119), hugs the coasts and islands: from Taiwan and the south China coast into the early Austronesian seafarers. These O1a sailors, together with local cousins, carry rice, boats, and stories out into Indonesia, the Philippines, and onward into Oceania – as far as Micronesia, Melanesia and the far islands of the Pacific. Many Polynesian and Island Southeast Asian paternal lines still sit on these O1 twigs.
  • Farther north and east, O sub-branches mix with other ancient trunks (such as C and D) to help form the paternal ancestry of Japan and Korea. Here, another child, O1b2 (M176) – once labelled O2b in older systems – becomes important: it joins D and other lines in the Yayoi and later Yamato expansions into Japan, and is also a major strand in Korean male ancestry. In this way, our O-brothers divide into several great families: O2 at the heart of the Han and northern China, O1b across mainland Southeast Asia and Korea, and O1a riding the canoes of the Austronesian world. Meanwhile we, as N, keep walking north toward Siberia, Yakutia, and the reindeer road.
• N-M231, ~40,000 BC – we enter the lands that are now China. Here the N-line begins to specialise: some branches remain closer to East Asia, others push deep into the northern forests and river systems. Much later, N-TAT (~20,000 BC) will carry our particular stream further into inner Asia, while sibling N-lines spread among early Uralic and Siberian peoples.
• N-Z4762, ~16,000 BC – from this trunk, one branch turns back toward the heartlands of East Asia and in time flows into the royal lines of the Zhou Dynasty in China, while our own ancestral stream keeps pressing north and north-east toward the great inland lakes and rivers.
• N-F1419, ~8,000 BC – our ancestors live around Lake Baikal and the Yenisei basin, in a landscape of taiga, lakes, and rivers. Other N-sub-branches near Baikal trace toward different Uralic-speaking and Siberian groups, but our line holds to the great river systems of central Siberia.

  In these centuries the far north is already learning the art of the sled. Archaeology shows organised dog sledding in the High Arctic not far to the north of us during this general era, and many of those early teams likely belong to our northern C- and Q-cousins. As our N-line settles in the Baikal–Yenisei country, it is easy to imagine knowledge flowing south along the winter trails: how to lash runners, how to balance loads, how to read ice and snow. We are not yet the great reindeer herders of later ages, but the pattern of animal + sled + frozen river-road is already being learned from the neighbours God has placed around us.

• N-M2126, ~4,000 BC – the line moves further north into Yakutia along the Lena River. Here, in the lands that will later be called the Sakha Republic, the older dog-sled wisdom of the High Arctic meets our own herds and skills. We learn not only to ride horses but also to tame and harness reindeer, as remembered in ancient rock art and cave paintings. Sledges now run behind reindeer over snow, and, in time, horses carry riders as well. These skills of winter travel, traction, and herding allow our migration to accelerate across the vast northern distances.

  In the north, forest gardening changes its clothing: instead of sago and palms, our N-kin learn to tend reindeer pastures, berry patches, and hay meadows along rivers and forest edges. Fire still plays a role – clearing undergrowth, renewing grass, and opening travel routes – but now the garden is made of larch, birch, willow, moss, and snow. The same gardener mind is at work: watching the herds, remembering which slopes green earliest, and trusting God for the seasons while doing what we can to steward the land.

  To survive the long, dark winters, our kin also learn to garden inside the storehouse: berries dried, meat smoked, and greens fermented in wooden vessels and skin bags to keep their vitamin C alive when fresh plants are gone. Sauerkraut-like jars of cabbage, wild leaves, and herbs become part of the northern covenant with God’s creation – a way of carrying the summer sun, in living form, through the months of ice so that children’s bodies stay strong and teeth do not loosen with scurvy. Even the barrels and crocks are a kind of winter garden, tended with patience and prayer.

  From this reindeer-and-sleigh world, some cousin branches of N-M2126 move south and east into the forest margins of the steppe. One of these lines becomes the Uriankhai, remembered as forest folk and reindeer herders on the edge of the Mongol world. Among them, in time, Subutai is born – not just a great commander, but arguably the greatest general in recorded history, the mastermind of Mongol campaigns that conquered more territory than any other general has ever taken. It is not hard to imagine that his gift for planning long campaigns, supply lines, and winter manoeuvres was shaped by the same culture that had to think months ahead simply to keep families, herds, and fermenting barrels alive through the cold. In that wide story of riders and armies, our own forefathers stand more quietly behind the scenes: as the people who first learned to trust reindeer with a sledge, and then horses with a rider, in the deep cold of the Lena.

• N-CTS6967, ~2,500 BC – turning west along the River Ob, our ancestors follow yet another great waterway, linking the Siberian heartland toward the Urals and the future Russian plains. Some related N-lines remain further east, while others begin to mingle with early steppe and forest-steppe cultures – the late Comb Ceramic and early metal-working worlds that will blur into what archaeologists later call the Corded Ware culture.

  Along the Ob and, later, the Volga and their tributaries, our people burn river meadows to renew grass, mark berry grounds, and keep travel channels open on water and ice. Horses, reindeer, and haystacks become part of the same quiet garden as birch and willow – another northern form of the old calling to tend creation.

  Around this time, roughly 2,900–2,300 BC, the Corded Ware horizon spreads along the forest–steppe, carrying many of our R1a “Aryan” cousins whose roots lie further south in the Yamnaya and Pontic–Caspian steppe. This is the age when horse-keeping and riding truly begin to reshape Eurasia: steppe peoples who have already started to manage horses now breed and ride them in earnest, and the partnership of horse, load, and road becomes a new way of life. In our family’s telling, our N-forest kin stand right at this meeting place. We bring hardy northern horses and reindeer – the small, tough animals that pull our winter sleds over ice and snow – along with our knowledge of frozen river-roads and forest trails. Our R1a cousins bring wheeled wagons, open steppe pastures, and the far-ranging vision that will carry the Indo-European tongues across much of the Old World. Somewhere in this exchange, the simple idea of an animal pulling a sled over ice and a cart over earth begins to fuse, and our family likes to think that reindeer and horse sleighs from the north helped inspire what would later blossom as the light, fast chariot cultures of the Bronze Age.

  Genetic work in our own century suggests that some of the variants that give light skin and, in the right combinations, blond or red hair were especially common in these steppe-derived groups and their Corded Ware descendants. For us, it is easy to picture this as the moment when a visibly “northern” look – pale faces, sometimes fiery hair and freckles – begins to spread through the wider family of Europe. We hold this as both good science and a kind of parable: the colours of our hair and eyes are not accidents, but small reminders that forest and steppe once met here, and that God’s providence weaves peoples together even when they do not yet know His name.

• N-Z1936, ~2,000 BC – at this level our line parts ways with cousin streams that will become the ancestors of the Ugric peoples and of northern groups such as the Karelians and Savonians. Their stories continue around the upper Volga, the White Sea, and the eastern Baltic, while our own stream keeps edging toward the zones where Finnic and “Chud” peoples will later be remembered.
• N-Y6058, ~1,800 BC – another branch from this region flows south and into the steppe confederations remembered as the Avars and their Khagans, who will one day ride into the Carpathian Basin and press against the borders of Christendom. Our line does not follow them into the Pannonian plain, but remains tied to the forest zone and the northern trade routes.
• N-VL29, ~1,500 BC – the trunk that will dominate much of Fennoscandia and the Baltic north. From N-VL29 grow the Fennoscandian N-lines: some will become central to the ancestry of Finns and other northern peoples; some will, in time, stand behind princely houses like the Gediminids of Lithuania and the Rurikids of Rus’. Our own path within VL29 runs along the peoples remembered in old chronicles as the Chuds, forest and lake-country folk between the Baltic, the White Sea, and the future lands of Novgorod.
• N-CTS9976, ~1,200 BC – the line consolidates among the northern forests and lake districts as northern Europe fills in. This branch will, in time, be carried by many of the ancestors of the Finns, rooted in a land of bogs, birch, pine, and cold clear water. From these families, living between lakes and the Baltic Sea, will later come those who are ready to move again: toward the trading islands, the river routes into Rus’, and new frontiers further east.
• N-L1022, a key offshoot of CTS9976 – within this Finnish forest world, one sub-branch becomes the line of the West Chudes, the “Chud” peoples remembered in old chronicles: quiet farmers, fishers, hunters, and traders living between the Gulf of Finland, the White Sea, and the lands that will later be claimed by Novgorod and other Rus’ powers. Our own path flows along this Chud line, in and among these western Finnic clans.
• N-Y5004 & N-Y5005, late Bronze Age / early Iron Age – from L1022, some branches root themselves more firmly in what becomes western Finland: along the coasts and river mouths that look toward Sweden and the open Baltic. These families balance forest and sea, sending sons into boat-building, fishing, and small-scale trading, while kin inland remain closer to the old ways of hunting, trapping, and shifting fields.
• N-Y10756, around the turn of the first millennium AD – a northern turn of the story. Families from this line settle across northern Finland and into the Murmansk area, living between forest and tundra, close to the Barents Sea. Here our kin stand at a crossroads of Saami, Finnic, and northern Russian worlds: some remain semi-nomadic; others anchor themselves to small villages, chapels, and trading posts that link the Arctic coast with the inland rivers.
• N-PH2196, ~AD 350 and onward – within this northern belt, this particular sub-branch crystallizes, the one that will eventually tie into the Zvorygin line. From the northern forests and coasts of Finland and Murmansk, our ancestors begin to ride the long arcs of history: south along Baltic trading routes, east toward Gotland and the river-roads of Rus’, then onward in time into Udmurtia, Ukraine, and, in the fullness of God’s providence, Canada. This is the strand that finally arrives at our family name.

As northern Finland and neighbouring regions grew more crowded, this line followed trade and opportunity southward along the Baltic and into the emerging Slavic world.

From Gotland to Kiev Rus

Around the end of the first millennium, ancestors of the Zvorygin line appear on the prominent trading island of Gotland, Sweden, a hub that connected the Baltic, Scandinavia, and the river routes into Rus.

By roughly 975 AD, traders from this line likely used the Baltic–river network to reach the flourishing new capital of Kiev, Rus. From about 1000–1170 AD, the family’s life is tied to the rise of Kiev as a commercial and spiritual centre.

When Kiev was sacked and power shifted north-east, the family moved with the changing currents of the time to Suzdal and the Vladimir principality, around 1200–1550 AD.

Northwards Again: Kargopol and the Old Believers

As trade declined in Suzdal, the patrilineal line turned north to Kargopol in the Arkhangelsk region around 1600 AD, where the surname appears in the form Zvorykin. One notable descendant of this northern line is Vladimir Zworykin (1888–1982), a key figure in the invention and development of cathode-ray tube television.

Later, during the great schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, many Old Believers left the heartland for more remote territories. The family moved again, this time to Udmurtia, and the name in this branch shifted to Zvorygin (around the 1700s).

Horse Ranchers and Upheaval in the 20th Century

By the early twentieth century, the patrilineal line was rooted in Zakhvataevo, Kirov Oblast. Paternal great-grandfather Vasiliy Zvorygin belonged to a minor noble horse-ranching family. The family’s household included servants and a working stable, reflecting a way of life that had persisted for generations.

The Bolshevik uprisings upended this world. As “kulaks”, the family was stripped of status and property. Servants began living in the house and stopped caring for the horses. Under pressure and facing an increasingly hostile environment, Vasiliy and his family fled eastward to Sverdlovsk and possibly Krasnoyarsk in Siberia with his sons and wife.

In time they returned west to Moscow, carrying both the scars and resilience that come with surviving revolution and displacement.

From Moscow to Zhytomyr and Kiev

Paternal grandfather Fyodor Zvorygin later moved to Zhytomyr, where the next generation was born. His work carried him back to Kiev, where he assembled and maintained some of the first computers in the Soviet Union, including systems such as the MESM and the early KIEV models.

It was in Kiev that the current Canadian branch was born, in a city that once again had become a crossroads of science, industry, and culture.

Becoming Canadian Zvorygins

As soon as Igor Zvorygin and his wife knew they were expecting a child, they began the process of immigrating to Canada, looking for a place where our family could put down new roots and live more freely.

After a long period of waiting and paperwork, we finally received permission to leave. On 29 August 1993 we travelled on what is remembered as the first plane of legal non-Jewish Ukrainian immigrants to Canada in that wave. From that moment, the Zvorygin line became part of the Canadian story as well.

Today, the Canadian Zvorygins stand at the meeting point of many journeys: ancient Y-DNA migrations across continents, centuries of trade and faith in Rus’, the trials of revolution and exile, and the hope of a new life on another shore. This page is a first attempt to honour that line and remember the people whose choices and courage made our present possible.