Since the Austro-Hungarian war records were mostly destroyed at the end of WWI, there seemed little hope of tracing my paternal grandfather, who died somewhere during the war, serving in the army, according to my father. He only mentioned this once (at least to me) and I interrupted him in the story, I was so surprised. So he never continued. Mea culpa.
The remaining war records are stored in Prague and can be searched here. I assumed that they only would contain information on Czech regiments so I had never bothered to search until a few days ago.
As usual I plugged in the two surnames my father was known by: Kosmyryk and Suknowicz, expecting nothing. To my surprise Kosmyryk appeared twice in the search. Now this name, the one I grew up with, has never been found by Google, (not counting me, my two sisters and this blog) or on any genealogical search. So we assumed it was a made up name or a badly transliterated Cyrillic name. The story of why my father changed from Suknowicz to Kosmyryk has two versions but attempts trace the documents adopted by my father backwards in time have always failed to produce anything.
But now from the Czech archives we have this information:
Stefan Kosmyryk was listed as wounded on 8 October 1915 and then died on 30 November 1915. He was born in 1889 in the town of Pniow, in the Nadworno district of Galicia. Stefan was serving in infantry regiment 15 in the 12th company.
So it seems Nadworno is not far from Stanislau (Stanislawov, Ivano-Frankovsk).
So who is Stefan? A brother of Mikhail, the supposed grandfather's name? Or have the Suknowicz and Kosmyryk families merged their histories in my father's mind.
Another puzzle: where was he injured? The Eastern Front in 1915 in the Carpathians seems to have ended in September. Too bad to be injured after the end of the campaign season. But it seems that the 15 th Infantry regiment was not stationed near its home and doesn't seem to have been fighting on the local front.
