Which villages does your family descend from specifically? Although it wouldn’t be surprising if a person of Rusyn descent has never heard of this, since one of the most frequent remarks in histories of the Rusyn people is that the identity has sometimes flourished more in the diaspora than in situ.

My experience is from mid 2019 in communities around Medzilaborce where I was collecting microtoponymic data. I was obviously inclined to think of this minority East Slavic material as Rusyn, but my informants insisted that it was “Ukrainian”. Considering that these communities have produced figures who went on to be famous in wider “Ukrainian” movements, it is no surprise that the two ethnonyms have competed in that region.

EDIT: So I went searching to read more about this using "Čertižné" (one of the supposedly “Ukrainian” villages) as a search term. In this essay[0] where a writer of Čertižné descent is mostly busy criticizing Timothy Snyder, he briefly sketches the phenomenon I witnessed:

"The end of WW2 saw the annexation of Subcarpathian Rus’, renamed Transcarpathia, into the USSR. To legitimize seizure of this territory, Stalin brought the debate over the ethnic identity to a close and deemed all Rusyns Ukrainian. Rusyn became a bourgeoise term placed outside of law and all those who identified as such were now forcefully Ukrainianized. Some Rusyns in Czechoslovakia, given the choice of complete assimilation or at least a partial preservation of their culture, accepted the Ukrainian label. For example, the current director of the Rusyn Museum in Prešov, Ľuba Kráľová, identified as a Ukrainian during the communist regime even though she doesn’t speak Ukrainian. Other Rusyns felt closer to the Slovak ethnic identity than to the Ukrainian one."

[0] https://rusynsociety.com/2023/04/03/where-timothy-snyder-fal...