His maternal grandfather, Trokhym Ivanovich Lukashenko, had been born in the Sumy Oblast of Ukraine near Shostka (today village of Sobycheve). Lukashenko grew up without a father in his childhood, leading him to be taunted by his schoolmates for having an unmarried mother. Due to this, the origin of his patronymic "Grigorevich" is unknown and there are various rumors about who Lukashenko's father might have been with the most popular version being that he was a Roma gypsy passing through the region. His mother, Ekaterina Trofimovna Lukashenko (1924–2015), gave birth to another son, Alexander's older brother who died. Ekaterina worked unskilled jobs on a railway, at a construction site, at a flax factory in Orsha and finally as a milkmaid in Alexandria, a small village in the east of Belarus, close to the Russian border.