Carpatho-Rusyns in Western PA: Presentation at Heinz History Center

On Sunday, June 29, 2025, I was a featured speaker at the Pittsburgh-based Heinz History Center’s all-day Czech and Slovak Genealogy Workshop. (The Heinz History Center is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.)

Although Carpatho-Rusyns weren’t named in the title of the program, between my talk and the Carpatho-Rusyn Society’s on-site information table (and occasional mention of Carpatho-Rusyns by the other speakers, Michal Razus and Jim Hudec, especially Mr. Razus), we provided more than a token amount of Carpatho-Rusyn-specific content for the numerous attended of our heritage. Attendees could register to attend in person at the Heinz Center in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, or follow the presentations live via Zoom. And the whole set of presentations and Q&A sessions was available to all registrants on-demand online for two weeks following the event.

Pictured below: attendees at the workshop, Rich Custer's presentation, as well as Mary Huzinec and Alexandra Plummer, who generously ran a Carpatho-Rusyn Society booth at the event along with Christina Duranko. (Alexandra Plummer / Carpatho-Rusyn Society)

My talk, “Carpatho-Rusyns in Western Pennsylvania: Identity Questions, Genealogy Research Challenges, and How to Overcome Them,” lasted about an hour with two follow-on Q&A sessions I was part of. I also provided an 8-page handout for the registrants to follow the presentation and numerous resources and further reading for their research.

For those who weren't able to participate, I'd like to share some excerpts from my talk.

First, a word about me. I’m not primarily a genealogist. What I primarily am is the grandson of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants on my mom’s side. Mom was born in western PA, as was my Dad, although he wasn’t a Slav of any sort. I had my Carpatho-Rusyn grandmother, baba, in my life until I was about 8 years old, and in the years that followed, I became more and more interested in where she and my grandfather came from. I regret I didn’t really have the chance to learn about our roots directly from her, but I’ve tried to make up for it by learning, researching, and gathering as much info as I possibly could about the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant experience, especially in Pennsylvania.

So today I’m going to share some of that with you, so that if you, like many Carpatho-Rusyn Americans, were ever confused about what your ancestry really is, if perhaps your ancestors were Greek Catholic or Orthodox, spoke a language your relatives might have called Slavish, or Russian, or Ruthenian, or Slovak, but some of your relatives might have said you were Czechoslovak, or Byzantine, or Carpatho-Russian, we can sort it all out and I’ll leave you with many ways to find more answers, more information, and gain a better sense of who these folks from the Carpathian Mountains are.
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CARPATHO-RUSYNS: ETHNIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Carpatho-Rusyns are:

• A Slavic people, specifically of the Eastern Slavic group (along with Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians). Culturally, they share more similarities with their Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish neighbors.
• Indigenous to the territory of Carpathian Rus’. There were several waves of migration from lands to the north and east, present-day Ukraine, then called Rus’, from the 11th to 16th centuries, and those people mixed with an early Slavic tribe, the White Croats, living in the Carpathian Rus’ area. [And later, Vlach/Wallachian shepherds colonized the region, adding another ethnic/cultural dimension to the local Slavic/Rus' peoples.] Their descendants are the Carpatho-Rusyns.
• A stateless people, meaning there is not a country carrying their name (ethnostate) such as Slovaks have “Slovakia”, Ukrainians have “Ukraine”, the French have “France”, etc. The vast majority of peoples worldwide likewise do not live in a country named for them. But they are citizens of those countries nonetheless.
• Speakers of an Eastern Slavic language, Rusyn, usually written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
• Historically known as Rusyns, Ruthenians, Carpatho-Russians, Uhro-Rusyns, or Galician Rusyns; some today, mainly those living in Poland, since the early 20th century also use the name Lemko. “Carpatho-“ references the Carpathian Mountains, in the foothills and valleys of which their villages are found.

Before national movements began in this part of central Europe mostly in the 1800s, creating a ethnonational consciousness for Slovaks especially, ethnic groups were mostly distinguished by the language they spoke and by the religion they professed. Carpatho-Rusyns, most of whom spoke an East Slavic language in contrast to their Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish neighbors (depending on where in Carpathian Rus’ we’re talking about), were additionally different by their Eastern Christianity, originally part of the Eastern Orthodox Church but in the 17th century coming into union with Rome and the Catholic Church yet retaining their ritual, married clergy, and other Orthodox practices. Whereas Slovaks, Hungarians, and Poles were generally Roman Catholics or Protestants. We’ll note that in the 19th and early 20th centuries some people once classified as Rusyns, then either through assimilation or acquiring a new national consciousness began to identify as Slovaks or Hungarians, while retaining their Eastern Christianity, specifically Byzantine/Greek Catholicism.

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Since the emphasis today is on the Czech and Slovak territories (or perhaps historical Czechoslovakia), I won’t say too much about Galicia and the Lemko Rusyns. But suffice to say they historically felt themselves to be the same people as their Rusyn neighbors just across the mountain passes – very similar dialects, songs, same Greek Catholic religion, just different political circumstances. And political circumstances had a lot of influence on why Carpatho-Rusyns are today considered a people separate from Ukrainians, and why Carpatho-Rusyns in the United States had so many different names and communities that until recently were pretty much estranged from each other.
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IMMIGRATION TO THE U.S. AND DEVELOPMENT OF CARPATHO-RUSYN COMMUNITIES

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Within Pennsylvania, Carpatho-Rusyns are concentrated in these areas:

• east central/northeast (Pottsville, Hazleton, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Tamaqua, Allentown),
• southeast (Philadelphia, Pottstown, Phoenixville),
• central/north-central (Philipsburg, Houtzdale, Punxsutawney, DuBois),
• southwest (Altoona, Johnstown, Indiana, Latrobe, Greensburg, Uniontown),
• greater Pittsburgh,
• and northwest (Erie, Sharon, New Castle),

primarily where coal mining, steel making, and other industrial production were the predominant industries. Some Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants also took up farming, especially in rural parts of northeastern and northwestern Pennsylvania.

Northeastern PA of course was dominated by the anthracite coal mining industry, whose recruiters were responsible for bringing many Slavs, Carpatho-Rusyns included, and other Central & Eastern Europeans to this part of Pennsylvania in the first place.

It was in northeastern PA that the first Carpatho-Rusyn institutions were founded:

And the first fraternal organizations and newspapers were founded in Shenandoah, then Wilkes-Barre...

And of course the community had its entrepreneurs (male and female) who opened bars, hotels, groceries and butcher shops, ran boarding houses, sold steamship tickets, and even became undertakers.

In many cases, the business owners were also lay leaders in the local Rusyn church and in the fraternal lodges. This would often set them up for conflict with the other Rusyn community leader, the parish priest.

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In western Pennsylvania, some of the largest and most developed Carpatho-Rusyn communities were:

• Johnstown
• Barnesboro
• Windber
• Punxsutawney
• Sheffield
• Latrobe
• Pittsburgh
• Homestead & Braddock
• McKeesport & Duquesne
• McKees Rocks
• Ambridge & Aliquippa
• New Kensington
• Lyndora
• Carnegie
• Canonsburg
• Monessen
• Charleroi
• Donora 
• Brownsville
• Uniontown
• Sharon
• Erie

In all of these places and many others, Carpatho-Rusyns founded Greek Catholic and Orthodox churches. Most of these congregations were almost entirely Carpatho-Rusyn, although in some there were also Hungarians, Ukrainians, and even a few Croatian Greek Catholics.

[a small subset of the slides displayed in the presentation] 

Some of the Hungarians later founded their own Greek Catholic parishes (around Pittsburgh), although many of them were actually from villages that 100 years before were Rusyn-speaking but had assimilated to the predominant surrounding Magyar/Hungarian ethnic identity.

And in many cases, the Ukrainian churches were founded by Lemko Rusyns and other Carpatho-Rusyns but either had an influx of Galician Ukrainians who changed the character of the parish to a more Ukrainian orientation, or were led by a nationally-conscious Ukrainian priest to think of themselves not as Rusyns but as Ukrainians. This in part explains why the landmark Ukrainian church on Pittsburgh’s South Side was founded in 1891 as a thoroughly Carpatho-Rusyn congregation but is today the most recognizable landmark of Pittsburgh’s Ukrainian community, and why Ss. Peter & Paul Church in Carnegie was chartered as a “Russian Greek Catholic Church” but is today the largest Ukrainian Orthodox church in western Pennsylvania.

CHAIN MIGRATION

Carpatho-Rusyns, like other immigrants, tended to settle where others of their ethnic background and especially their home village and surrounding villages were already living, through family and social ties, correspondence, return migrants, and related factors. 

[I then provided many examples of chain migration of Carpatho-Rusyns from individual villages, as well as from village clusters, to towns in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere.]

RESEARCH RESOURCES

Metrical, or sacramental, records of Carpatho-Rusyn churches in the U.S. can be a rich source of genealogical data as are these records in the European homeland villages. Unfortunately, there is no central repository for them, most have not been microfilmed, and access to original records is often restricted for privacy reasons. Contacting the parish priest or parish secretary with record lookup requests can be a real hit-or-miss proposition regardless of denomination.

In my more than 30 years of researching Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in Pennsylvania and other states, I’ve had quite a few times where I was simply refused when asking to be allowed to do research with these records, and usually if I waited long enough, there would be a new parish priest whom I would simply ask again and keep asking if he also refused. In a few cases the bishop was involved and ultimately I’ve been able to see almost every set of records that exist. But it does seem that the last few years this has become more difficult and so I would wish you to tread lightly and be charitable toward the custodians of these records if perhaps you are not able to access them the first time you ask.

But let’s assume you are successful: what do these records tend to look like? There’s a bit of difference between the Greek Catholic records and the Orthodox records, not so much in terms of content, but due to the specific pre-printed registers most of them used as to how the information would have been presented. Sometimes the entire register was a basic ledger with no columns, just blank pages. Those are the most fun, especially if the priest was penmanship-challenged. And then there’s the issue of language, which I’ll get into in a minute.

[At this point I presented some examples of Greek Catholic and Orthodox parish metrical records from western PA and explained the typical content and formats, whether in the Latin or Church Slavonic/Russian languages or the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets.]

[At this point I talked about Carpatho-Rusyn fraternal organization records covering western PA and elsewhere: what is available in which archives and how to access them, especially those of the Greek Catholic Union, the Russian Brotherhood Organization, and the United Russian Orthodox Brotherhood of America.]

[Finally, I spoke of other possible sources of information on Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants' birthplaces, such as tombstones, a small number of which have the deceased person's birthplace noted, some written in the Latin alphabet, others in Cyrillic.]

STILL NOT SURE IF YOUR ANCESTORS WERE CARPATHO-RUSYNS? 

So I will close with some encouragement – if you are new to the concept of the Carpatho-Rusyns as a nationality or distinct ethnic group, or still trying to wrap your head around family tradition or documents that say your ancestors were Slovaks, or Russians, and you know or think they came from the area of Carpathian Rus’ and suspect they may have actually been Carpatho-Rusyns, you’re not alone, lots of us have been there and we’re all still learning. Sometimes the research can be challenging, especially since we don’t have the kind of archives of certain documents like our ethnic Czech, Slovak, or Polish neighbors do, but there is a lot out there to be found.

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