"Why Don’t We Have Rusyn Food Festivals?" C-RS Genealogy Conference 2025 in Wilkes-Barre

The Carpatho-Rusyn Society's Eastern Pennsylvania Chapter held its 9th Annual Genealogy Conference at Kings College in Wilkes-Barre, on Saturday, October 11th, 2025.

The formidable program of speakers included the following:

• Karen Uslin – “Discovering my Rusyn Roots; Embracing Tradition in Modern Life”
• George Pawlush – “How Professional Sports Helped Carpatho-Rusyns Assimilate Into America”
• Christine Hrichak – “Crowd-sourcing Carpatho-Rusyn Places in the U.S.”

My talk was “Why Don’t We Have Rusyn Food Festivals? Carpatho Rusyns in NEPA and Their Identity Crisis.” Provocative? Possibly. I did have to give a bit of a disclaimer that it wasn't my intention to embarrass or shame anyone if I used an example of something that they personally worked on. But that was in a room of about 60 people. For the possible audience of this blog / post, I'm going to censor myself a bit for a few things/events of very recent vintage. Nonetheless, if I've still hit a nerve with an example not well anonymized, you have my advance apology.

That said, here is the bulk of my talk and slides.

Good afternoon, everyone – it’s great to be back in the beautiful Wyoming Valley.

A few words about me. I grew up almost NEPA-adjacent [NEPA=Northeastern Pennsylvania], in the heavily Pennsylvania Dutch country of Lebanon County, living with my transplanted western PA-native parents. I’m thrilled that my Carpatho-Rusyn mom is here with me today. Mom is the daughter of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, and I was blessed to have her mother, my 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 experience, especially in Pennsylvania.

I do have a few close Rusyn connections to this area. My grandparents lived in Tresckow, near Beaver Meadows, for a short time, where their first daughter was born, before they moved to the Johnstown area. And my baba’s sister lived there as well and got married in the Beaver Meadows church before moving to Nanticoke's Hanover Section, where her brother also lived before he returned to then-Czechoslovakia with his family.

Sadly, baba’s sister and her husband died in 1918 just a week apart, from the Spanish Flu. So I occasionally visit their grave in St. John’s Orthodox Church cemetery in Nanticoke [pictured above]. And finally, my mom’s brother lived not far from here, in the Irishtown section of Wilkes-Barre where he raised a family and was active in the Rusyn community associated with Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral, which unfortunately was recently closed.

In any case, for these reasons and for the wonderful Carpatho-Rusyn history in this region that I’ve experienced and researched over the years, I want to talk about why people don’t know us well, why many of our people in this region don’t even know they themselves are Carpatho-Rusyns, and most importantly, what we in this room can do to make it better.

If you’ve spent any time in or around the Carpatho-Rusyn community, it’s no surprise when I say people don't know us.

Yes, it’s no wonder when we consider:

• How many things in this region are actually named Rusyn, or Carpatho-Rusyn? Basically none. There’s a few churches with Carpatho-Russian in their name, but I’m not sure how much that helps in the broader sense.

• How many things in this region are described, by the people who are part of them or the public, as Rusyn or Carpatho-Rusyn, or as founded by Carpatho-Rusyns? Very few – most are called Russian, or Ukrainian, or Slovak.

• How often is the term Carpatho-Rusyn even used? Other than by the Carpatho-Rusyn Society and its chapter here, of course, God bless them! Otherwise, almost never!

And for the most part, even we don’t know us.

This can be partly traced back to the very nature of Carpatho-Rusyns’ self-concept when the emigration to the U.S. began:

As Paul R. Magocsi, distinguished historian of Carpatho-Rusyns, notes: “If a person from [Carpathian Rus’] were asked his identity, he would respond that he was ‘from here’, from a particular village or county...”

They didn’t really identify with a nationality / an ethnic group, and they recognized “their kind” by a common language, which they called po ruskŷ or po našomu (meaning our way) and a common religion, namely Eastern Slavic Christianity.

Nationwide, our scholars like Magocsi say there are around 700,000 Americans with Carpatho-Rusyn ancestry (i.e., they have at least one Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant ancestor).

So the last good data we have from the U.S. census was from 2000, the last time there was a question about ethnic ancestry. Here are those numbers:

These numbers are very sobering. If we combine those 4 related responses into a single Carpatho-Rusyn category, we still have fewer than 10,000 self-identified Carpatho-Rusyn Americans. Compare that with the very non-committal and somewhat generic response “Slavic” – more than 100,000! And the nonexistent ethnicity “Czechoslovakian” and you can guess where a lot of the Carpatho-Rusyns are hiding. And then we have the numbers for Russians and Ukrainians, which could be fairly representative of their true numbers, although some non-negligible amount is definitely Carpatho-Rusyns, especially Lemkos who identified as Ukrainian. And I would say the rest of the Carpatho-Rusyns who answered this question at all are “hiding” in the Slovak category, whether they realize they're hiding or not.

So if we do some back-of-an-envelope calculations, if half of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans live in PA, maybe half of these roughly 10,000 self-identified Carpatho-Rusyns are in PA, and if we take the eastern half of the state, that’s 5,000, and if we subtract maybe a third who live in southeastern PA or the Lehigh Valley, and we’re left with maybe 3,000 or so people in all of northeastern PA who identify as Carpatho-Rusyns. That’s not a lot to work with. So what’s with the rest of the thousands more who are certainly here but not identifying with us?

In Pennsylvania, there were a bunch of NEPA locales in the Top 20 U.S. places by percentage of people claiming Ukrainian ancestry:

I’ll go out on a limb and say every single one of these places is predominantly Lemko descendants who identify as Ukrainian (except MAYBE for Northampton, still very Lemko but with many Ukrainians as well). While there were actual Ukrainians (as I see it) in Schuylkill County, and Olyphant, they made up a quite small percentage of the Ukrainian Catholic churches that no doubt these Ukrainian-identified folks were raised in or are still members of.

If we compare with a similar list for Russian ancestry, there was only one place in PA that made it: at #12: Mayfield near Carbondale. There’s a big Russian Orthodox church there, but it was founded almost entirely by Lemkos and there’s no way there are more than a handful of folks there with any actual Russian ancestry.

And here in the Wyoming Valley, I found numbers from a study that was done just down the street from here at Wilkes University:

The surprising numbers here would be the large numbers for Russians (there weren’t many actual Russians who came to this area) and Czechs (there were no Czech communities of note at all in northeastern PA). So it’s a good bet that most of these people are actually Carpatho-Rusyn.

While I’m sure plenty of the Slovak-identified here were Carpatho-Rusyns, there were so many actual Slovak immigrants to this area that the number would be high even without the Rusyns who identified as Slovaks. And of course, a lot of the Ukrainian-identified would have Rusyn, particularly Lemko, ancestry, but it’s hard to estimate whether they represent more or less than half of the Ukrainian number here.

If we look at more recent data for just Pennsylvania, the picture starts to look bleak.

Only 2,000 or so self-declared Carpatho-Rusyns in the whole state! This is an estimate from the American Community Survey, but if you’re a typical Rusyn pessimist, you might think even that is higher than reality…

So today I’m going to talk about how we got into this mess. And we’re going to see just how many institutions we have that we can and should consider our own. I’ll also propose other places where our name should be known. And last but most importantly, I’m going to share my ideas about how to start to fix these issues going forward.

I’m an observer, over many years, and not a member of any of these communities I may mention as examples. But I haven’t heard anyone in our wider community make these points except maybe in some social media groups. So I want to make sure these things are getting out there and I’m going to do that respectfully but perhaps forcefully. If by chance you have personally been involved in any of the activities that I’m going to show as examples, please don’t be offended, I’m not trying to embarrass anyone, I know how much planning and work goes into any event like these, and you are to be commended for that. I do want to point out that maybe there were missed opportunities and that adding a Carpatho-Rusyn angle that was absent can be a win-win for the church or other organization AND for our Carpatho-Rusyn community here and across the U.S.

Continue to Part 2: Carpatho-Rusyns in NEPA

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