A native of Urman near Berezhany in western Ukraine, Sigmund (Zenon) Bychinsky (1880-1947) emigrated to the United States in 1904 before relocating to Canada three years later. He lived in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and the Vegreville area from 1907 to 1910 before moving back to Pennsylvania for six years. From 1917 to 1919 he resided near Canora, Saskatchewan, then returned to Winnipeg, where he edited the newspaper Kanadiis'kyi ranok (Canadian Dawn) until 1928. During the next two years, Sigmund and his wife Anna lived and worked as Protestant missionaries in western Ukraine, after which they permanently left Europe for North America, spending the remainder of their lives in the state of Michigan.

In Canada, Sigmund served for a time as the editor of Kanadiis'kyi farmer (Canadian Farmer), while simultaneously overseeing the publication of the first collections of original Ukrainian-Canadian writing. Among his many literary achievements, Sigmund wrote biographies of Martin Luther and Jan Hus, as well as a book about Protestantism; wrote a groundbreaking Ukrainian-language history of Canada; and, with his wife, Anna, played a major role in assisting Dr. Alexander Jardine Hunter in the translation and publication of The Kobzar of Ukraine (1922), featuring selected poems by Taras Shevchenko. In the realm of prose fiction, Bychinsky wrote a handful of short stories set in the New World, several of which appeared in the Lviv journal Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk (Literary and Scientific Herald).