Matrona Jane McGlashan (Krukoff-Sovoroff)

In 1910 Makushin’s forty-seven residents were divided among ten families. The eldest resident in all three villages lived here. This was Matrona Krukoff, a sixty-year-old widow, living with her twenty-one-year-old son Elia [Il%E2%80%99ia] and his younger brother, Matfey, fifteen. The boys were listed as Krukoffs, but ten years earlier when she had lived at Kashega and been married to John Borenin (the first)3 Matrona’s two sons along with their older brother, Stepan, had been Borenins. They could trace their ancestry (through their father’s mother) to Abraham Yatchmenev, the starosta of the chapel at Kashega in the 1850s, and in this way they were distant relatives of Alexei Yatchmeneff who had become chief of Unalaska in 1902. The 1910 census was taken by Vasilii Shaiashnikov, Yatchmeneff’s predecessor as chief, and it is probable that he recorded the names the boys were actually using. Before long, however, both Elia and Matfey returned to using their father’s surname. Paradoxically, in 1942, it was the family of Elia Borenin, a man from Kashega, that became the last Unanga{ family living at Makushin.

As the 20th century began, the families with the deepest ties to Makushin were the Kastromitins, Telanoffs, Krukoffs, Petelins, and Petukoffs. The Kastromitins, represented by a single family in the 1900 census, disappeared from Makushin during the next decade; however, this family name resurfaces at Kashega. There were four Telanoff families in 1900, but only one in 1910. In 1900 there were two Krukoff families, including that of Ivan Grigorovich Kriukov, the man who was the primary official at the church. By 1910, however, this family was represented only by the widow Matrona, the mother of Elia and Matfey Borenin. Family names that disappeared from census records continued to have a presence through the female line. Thus, Nick Galaktionoff’s grandmother, Marva Petukoff, had a Kastromitin grandmother. The disappearance of these names, however, was symbolic of losses suffered by villages.

Two families had been primarily responsible for establishing the chapel at Makushin, that of Joseph Petelin and that of Gregory Petukhov [Petukoff]. By 1900, the Petelins were no longer present. Thomas Petelin, the last agent for the AC Company, had moved into Iliuliuk when the company closed its Makushin station in the 1890s. There were three Petukoff families in 1900, if the widow Marva Petukoff and her son Peter are counted as they should be since by 1910 he had married and started his own family. There were two other Petukoff families; that of Innokentii and Elena Petukoff and their daughter, and that of Vasilii and Elizaveta with their children Anna, Yakim and Matfey.