Digging Into the Pennsylvania State Archives

Having already finished ¾ of my tenure at the Pennsylvania State Archives as a Scholar-in-Residence, I’d like to give a short update on how I’ve spent the time and what I’ve found.

First, a nod to the Archives itself, which now has a brand-new home, a striking structure modern in design and construction, in a neighborhood almost a mile from the old archives which is ripe for revitalization. And with it perhaps a month or more away from being reopened to the public, I feel extra privileged for being able to conduct my research in a beautiful facility few if any non-staff have seen from the inside.

Also, the few archives staff I’ve interacted with have been exceedingly helpful and responsive to my requests to have additional materials (microfilm reels) ready for me by the next morning.

Since last Monday, I’ve spent about 7 hours a day (not the weekend, though) rolling through dozens of microfilm reels in search of obscure and possibly arcane information contained in naturalization documents of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants and property deed indexes.

I was able to collect (as digital images) many documents for counties I’d never before looked through naturalizations from: Clearfield (399 docs), Centre (48 docs), Greene (150 docs), Armstrong (165 docs), and Lebanon (17 docs). I made a good start with Carbon County (60 docs) and Somerset County (181 docs). I plan to beef up the numbers from the Carbon and Somerset County reels on Monday.

Despite my interest in the little-documented Carpatho-Rusyn presence in western Dauphin County (not to discount the better-known presence in the northeastern parts, i.e., Lykens and Williamstown), I was frustrated that there were no documents from 1929 and later, which is when new forms were introduced with fields for the very interesting data on Race and Nationality, and that the pre-1929 forms were uniformly handwritten by officials who must have been chosen for having failed all penmanship courses or purposely tried to ensure nobody in the future could possibly decipher the information they were recording. Add to that the overwhelming bulk of Slavic immigrants in the county were South Slavs living primarily in Steelton, and finding any needles in this haystack would have been a real time suck indeed.

A few of the remaining counties’ naturalizations I got partway through last summer when I first visited the archives a few times, and I hope in the next day or two to have extracted more or less to my satisfaction the bulk of Carpatho-Rusyn and related immigrants’ documents: in Bradford, Crawford, and Fayette Counties.

I found the deed information limited, if still useful, but after spending the first few hours with the available microfilms, I’ve elected to mostly concentrate on naturalizations. I’d hoped that there was actual deed books that would contain the deeds with the names of corporations (such as the Rusyn churches or social clubs) and individual principals involved. Sadly, the archives has films of few if any deed books from the period where Rusyn immigrants were even in the U.S., much less in a position to be buying property as a corporation.

What exists on microfilm for the period when Rusyn immigrants were actively conducting such business is indexes to the deed books (the actual deed books I presume are generally still kept at county courthouses). I pulled the relevant deed index reels for Armstrong and Beaver Counties, but since the time I invested was only yielding a few items of interest, I set the reels for other counties aside, hoping to have extra time at the end of my tenure to look through at least a few more. But with just two days left and a long list of naturalization reels to cover, that’s looking very unlikely.

The Galician “Slovaks” of Clearfield County

The 399 naturalization documents I saved from the Clearfield County reels represent about 150 individuals, mainly from the county’s northwest corner—DuBois, Tyler, Helvetia—and its southeast corner. Coal mining towns/villages of southeastern Clearfield County centered around Houtzdale and Philipsburg—Hawk Run, Morrisdale, Osceola Mills, Ramey, Madera, Smoke Run, Smithmill/Janesville, Beccaria, Ginter, and Irvona—represent one of the larger rural concentrations of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in the state.

Courtesy of Google Maps

The largest portion of this group, especially in the Houtzdale area, originated in Galicia, mainly the villages Smerek, Strzebowiska, Kalnica, Jaworzec, Krzywe, Ług, and Wetlina in Lesko County in the present-day Subcarpathian Voivodeship of southeastern Poland.

To preface, the villages of origin of these Lemko-Boikoish* immigrants were very close to the border with Hungary, which became the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia around 1918-1919. And this region by and large was completely brought within the influence of proponents of the Ukrainian national identity for the Rus’ people of Galicia. And by and large, these immigrants and their descendants in the U.S., even in relatively isolated rural central Pennsylvania, have identified as Ukrainians. Nevertheless, these villages are within historical Carpathian Rus’ and as such they are completely within the scope of my study and future book.

*I’ll use this very informal term as these villages lie in what some ethnographers describe as being at the eastern edge of Lemko territory or in a transitional zone between Lemkos and Boikos. Socially, if not marrying someone from within their village cluster, they seemed to not be inclined to marry Lemkos from farther west, rather, they coupled with Boikos from points east.

The Ukrainian identity can be seen in probably the majority of the post-1928 naturalization forms for these immigrants, but with some interesting and provocative divergence.

The most unusual, especially for this particular group, is the occurrence of “Slovak” for Race, or occasionally for Nationality. If I had found this on one form, I’d dismiss it as a recording error or the mistaken response of a confused individual. But no, I found such an answer on the forms for more than 10 Rusyn/Ukrainian individuals born in Galicia (or whose parents were), the majority of which were from this primary eastern Clearfield County village cluster.

A fair number of natives of that village cluster answered Russniak or Russian on their documents, but almost all of them resided in Madera, where a Russian Orthodox parish was founded in 1909 as a separation from the Ramey Greek Catholic parish.

In strong contrast, the folks from this village cluster living in Smoke Run, at least judging by their naturalization documents, were strongly Ukrainian oriented, and Smoke Run had several of its own Ukrainian fraternal society branches, whereas most of the other Ukrainian-oriented (not to mention Rusyn- and even Russian-oriented) branches were centered in Ramey where the mother church also was. Few of the Smoke Run residents were members of the “Russian” church in Madera.

 I’ve seen this phenomenon before, but I’m at a bit of a loss to explain it. What might really be interesting is to associate the individuals of these naturalization documents with their church affiliation—(Ukrainian) Greek Catholic in Ramey, Russian Orthodox in Madera, or Ukrainian Orthodox in Smithmill—and see if the Russian/Russniak identification actually correlated strictly with Madera Russian Orthodox membership.

Another observation was that in the years transpiring between an immigrant’s Declaration of Intention and their Petition for Naturalization at least three years hence, their choice of ethnicity under Race changed: often from Russian, Russniak, or Ruthenian on their Declaration of Intention to Ukrainian on their Petition. Surprisingly, I observed the converse for a few individuals, which would not be the usual progression. I do wonder if a change in church affiliation was involved, as opposed to exposure to a growing sense of Ukrainian identity that probably serves to explain the Russian/Russniak/Ruthenian —> Ukrainian change in most cases.

But as far as the “Slovaks” from this village cluster? I can’t make sense of it except that:

1. The villages are very close to the Slovak border, as it was established as the frontier between the First Czechoslovak Republic and Poland in 1918, and perhaps they had strong anti-Polish feeling and warm feelings toward Slovaks and the new Czechoslovak state;
2. These immigrants may have arrived in the U.S. before Ukrainian identity was well established in their native region or even in Clearfield County through the Greek Catholic church in Ramey (founded in 1893 but first manifesting Ukrainian identity in the mid-/late-1910s);
3. Their ethnonational identity was still muddled and perhaps they understood “Slovak” not as a neighboring, independent Slav nationality, but as a synonym for “Slavic,” much the same way some Rusyns from south of the mountains identified with the term “Slavish” even though in the early decades of Slav immigration to the U.S., Slavish meant Slovak, and particularly Roman Catholic Slovaks at that.

Adding another head-scratching point to the above is that Clearfield County isn’t the only place I’ve observed these same villages’ natives putting “Slovak” on their naturalization forms. I believe there are more of these instances in Indiana County, primarily Dixonville/Clymer and Urey, where additional chain migration colonies existed. The Clearfield County documents for this group also showed a bit of evidence of domestic migration from the Dixonville community to eastern Clearfield… and if other Carpatho-Rusyns in Dixonville were also stating “Slovak” en masse, what indeed was behind it?

Not too geographically far removed from this, another curious but not unexpected series of naturalization document “Race” responses concerns the immigrants in Irvona (about 12 miles west of Ramey) from the village Il’nyk (or “Yilnik” as most commonly entered on the forms), old Turka County, Galicia, today in the Sambir District/raion of the L’viv Oblast of western Ukraine. Il’nyk natives, with natives of neighboring villages Losynets' and Radych, made up the founders and bulk of the immigrant membership of the St. Michael Russian Orthodox Church in Irvona. You would think that Il’nyk and similar villages beyond the edges of Carpathian Rus' to the east would naturally be inclined to identify as Ukrainian, especially by the 1930s-1940s, even among those who arrived in the United States a decade or two earlier. But in the United States, that might not be the case, for in Irvona, most of the Il’nyk natives’ naturalization forms I captured had “Russian” listed for Race. Yet another case of religious affiliation strongly correlated in the U.S. with ethnonational identity…

So was Il’nyk a Russophile stronghold when most of these folks came to the U.S. and settled around Irvona? The Ukrainian version of its Wikipedia entry offers no indication of this (either positive or negative), so this articulation of identity, and their decision to found a Russian Orthodox church in Irvona, may well have been an American phenomenon. Especially since the Irvona community seemed primarily affiliated with the Madera Russian Orthodox parish more than with the Ramey Greek Catholic parish until they founded their own local church.

Two Days Left – Still Not Enough!

I figured seven more days at this archive would have been plenty of time for me to extract not just all the naturalization documents I could want but also plentiful info on deeds and incorporations. Right now, with just two days remaining, I’m thinking I should concentrate on the naturalizations, which I can gather efficiently and which probably yield more valuable info than the limited forms of the other items available to me. And so I hope to somehow get through these counties with enough naturalization docs to my satisfaction—even though “too many is never enough!”

• Beaver
• Bedford
• Bradford
• Butler
• Carbon
• Crawford
• Erie
• Fayette
• Monroe
• Somerset
• Susquehanna

There, I even made myself laugh thinking I might finish that list in two days. I guess I’ll be back to the archives yet again, some day… in the meantime, let’s finish the last two days strong—I’ve got a real article to write and good data is essential to good analysis and a compelling narrative, which is the immediate end goal of this residency.

All naturalization documents from Records of County Governments (RG-047), Clearfield County Office of the Prothonotary, Naturalization Records 1912-1999 (LRGP46), Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg.

Original material is © by the author, Richard D. Custer; all rights reserved.