Settlements, Organized Communities, Patches, Neighborhoods

From all four corners to the center of the state, to the major cities and all points in between, there are few regions of Pennsylvania where Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants did not find a home.

As mentioned previously, the book’s contents will include an appendix, “List of Settlements” (town, county) with cross-reference to the main entry. While it’s still a work in progress, the list of settlements numbers well over 600. See some examples here of how it looks.

This raises the question about terms that I’ve been using in this blog that I’d like to clarify. What do I consider a “settlement” and what is an “organized community?”

For purposes of this blog and the eventual book:

A settlement is a place (incorporated or otherwise) where Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants resided, regardless of their numbers. It is extremely unlikely, though possible, that only a single Rusyn immigrant or family lived in such a place, and it’s also somewhat unlikely that I would be able to learn of such a place where only one individual or one family was living. For the most part, the settlements are revealed in church records, where the place of a child’s birth or the place of residence of individuals being married or buried is noted. Generally, these locations are noted in some detail, down to the “patch” or village that may or may not be near the town where the church is. Some of these places—especially “patches”—no longer exist as inhabited places, and require reference to an old coal mine map or an excellent site like the Virtual Museum of Coal Mining in Western Pennsylvania.

Transplanting the Village

A significant element of my research has been to study the patterns of chain migration, by which many Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from the same European village all settled in the same place (or several key places) in Pennsylvania.

The information I’ve gathered will be a key feature of my book. I intend for each entry to include at least one map showing the villages and village clusters from where the community’s immigrant members emigrated, and this will be described in additional detail in the narrative. The perspective gained by analyzing the places of origin of the community’s and their local Rusyn churches’ immigrant members provides something that is almost always ignored in histories published previously. There are communities, or maybe one parish of several, that were composed almost entirely of immigrants from two or three, or even a single village! Among studies of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, this information has never been documented in a comprehensive way.

My sources for this information have been:

• naturalization documents
• ship manifests (from Ellis Island & other ports of entry)
• cemetery tombstones
• fraternal organization records
• parish metrical records

What happened to these things? Please help me find them!

Through the course of 20+ years of visits to churches and homes, I've seen a lot of fascinating items that would be of great value in the book I plan to publish. Unfortunately, I saw many of these things before I had a laptop with a scanner. Once I had such equipment, it was much easier to collect and preserve these materials, by doing it electronically. Unfortunately, when I went back to where I saw some of those things, they had disappeared. Other items, like certain photographs, were published in a book but at a small size or with poor quality. If I could find the original, I could reprint it at much higher quality.

I'm hoping some readers may know where to look for them, and can track them down for me, or that they might even have the item in their own possession.

Some of the items I'm seeking are the following:

• Leisenring: 25th anniversary booklet of St. Stephen's Greek Catholic Church. I want to scan the photographs in the book.
• Mayfield: many of the photos that appeared in the 100th anniversary book (1991) of St. John's Russian Orthodox Church, which unfortunately were printed on textured paper that makes them difficult to scan, such as this one:
  
  
  
  Also of special interest from Mayfield is the funeral photograph that appeared on the cover of the 1991 centennial book.
• Newtown/Bobto(w)n: photos of the former St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church. 
• Plymouth: Ss. Peter & Paul Greek Catholic Church - photograph (1910s?) of the church choir holding a sign that said РУССКІЙ ХОРЪ. I came across it in the rectory of Holy Transfiguration Ukrainian G.C. Church in Nanticoke around 1999-2000, but seems to have disappeared. I want to scan the photo.
• Saint Clair: photograph of the dramatic club of St. Mary's Russian Orthodox Church. I want to scan the photo. I have a photocopy but the quality is not suitable for reproducing in a book.
• Sheppton: 50th anniversary booklet of St. Mary's Greek Catholic Church. I want to scan the photographs in the book. (I found a copy in the office of Ss. Peter & Paul Church in Beaver Meadows; it has since gone missing.)
• Simpson: photographs that had been hanging in the hall of Ss. Peter & Paul Greek Catholic Church. I want to scan them. Some of them were reproduced in the 100th anniversary book (2004).
• Simpson: photographs that appeared in the 75th anniversary book (1979) of St. Basil’s Russian Orthodox Church. (I have the book; I'm looking for originals.) I want to scan the photos, especially this one:

  

  "Old Country Wedding" by members of St. Basil's R.O. Church,
  Simpson, ca. 1941. The cast is wearing Lemko Rusyn costumes,
  unlike in many other "Russian" parishes where they adopted
  ethnic Russian-style folk costumes for such productions.

• Taylor: 50th anniversary booklet of St. Mary's Greek Catholic Church. I want to scan the photographs in the book. (I found a copy in the office of St. Nicholas Church in Old Forge; it has since gone missing.)

If you have knowledge of any of these items' whereabouts, please contact me in the comments or better yet at rusynsofpa@gmail.com.

As I locate some of these materials, or identify others that I need to find, I will update and re-publish this post.

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

Photos imagined and...real?

In a recent post, I wrote about a lot of things -- mainly photographs -- that I saw once upon a time that have since gone missing before I had the chance to scan them. There's a whole other realm of photos that may have never existed. But that won't stop me from searching for them. If you know of any of these images, please let me know at rusynsofpa (at) gmail (dot) com. Many thanks in advance!

• Aliquippa: photographs (exterior & interior) of the original Ss. Peter & Paul (Ukrainian) Greek Catholic Church (replaced by a new church built in the 1960s).
• Barnesboro: photographs (exterior & interior) of the original St. John the Baptist Greek Catholic Church which burned down in 1924.
• Colver: photographs (exterior & interior) of the original Holy Ascension Russian Orthodox Church which burned down in the 1920s.
• Minersville: interior photograph of the original St. George Greek Catholic Church.
• Old Forge: interior photograph of the original St. Nicholas Greek Catholic Church with a full view of the icon screen.
• To be continued...

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

Table of Contents-to-be

Here’s my first experiment in crowdsourcing the content. Feel free to offer your opinion/reaction/suggestions in the comments.

I foresee the book to be organized as follows.
-------------------
Table of Contents
Dedication & Acknowledgements
Notes (on transliteration, spelling of proper names, spelling of village names)
Introduction (essay)

History by region:

Lower Anthracite Region
Upper Anthracite Region
Southeastern PA
Lehigh Valley
Central PA
Altoona-Johnstown Region
Pittsburgh Region
Monongahela River Valley / Southwestern PA
Westmoreland Region
Allegheny-Kiski Valley
Northwestern PA

Appendixes

List of Settlements (town, county) with cross-reference to main entry
Lodge listings by organization (sorted numeric / by location)
Chain Migration by village

Glossary
Bibliography
Index (of proper names? – localities will be indexed in the Appendix: List of Settlements)
-------------------
Within each region (I may call these the “chapters”), there will be entries for each main community.

Launching now!

Even though a blog shows the most recent posts at the top, since we're starting with a bunch of posts already published, you should probably read the Welcome & Intro post first, then go on to the others. So to avoid confusion about what this is, please start here.

Carpatho-Rusyn Immigrants, Carpathian Rus’, Identity

Perspective on the identity question

Carpathian Rus’, 2004. Used with permission.

The author identifies himself, and the immigrants in the scope of this study, as Carpatho-Rusyns. That is, Carpatho-Rusyns are a distinct East Slavic people whose homeland has been a defined territory known as Carpathian Rus’ or Carpatho-Rus’, which is found in the present-day countries of Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania. [maps: Carpathian Rus’ in the 19th Century | Carpathian Rus’ in 2004] The Rusyns of former Yugoslavia—present-day Serbia and Croatia, the historic Bačka and Srem regions—are also included in this study. (The question of Greek Catholic Slovaks and Hungarians, and their inclusion in this study, will be dealt with in a separate post.)