Grandma’s mother has been a major mystery. According to grandma, she was born in New Jersey but kicked out of the house by her step father when she was 13, around 1908. She rarely spoke of her family, and grandma knew next to nothing. When their mother died in 1950, grandma and her sister Dot got curious and managed to find their mother’s half-sister, Anna Barna, in East Paterson, New Jersey. Anna Barna told them that their grandmother was Russian (Rusyn). She also told them that they their grandmother Julia had died just a year before, and their uncle Mike had died not long before. The only other clue I had to grandma’s mother’s past was a photo found in her purse when she died of a football player that grandma knew was a cousin. On the back was the name Uzick.

I’ve spent countless hours looking for Anna Barna and any trace of the Uzicks of New Jersey to no avail. The other night, entirely by accident, I found Anna Barna in the 1930 census. How was I certain it was the right Anna Barna? She and her husband and baby were living in the same house - 59 Lester Street in Wallington, New Jersey, as Julia and Mike Uzick. So grandma’s mother’s step-father’s name was Michael Uzick and her brother Mike was using the Uzick name.

After that, I found Anna Barna and her family in the 1940 census. They had three kids this time and were living at 57 Lester Street. The house at 59 Lester Street didn’t appear in the census forms - either the house was gone or the census taker had missed it. The Uzicks could not be found in the 1940 census - either they were all dead, weren’t counted or were using a different name. No death records for any of them could be found.

Then I started working backward. The 1920 census shows Micheal, Julia, Mike and Anna Uzick again at 59 Lester Street in Wallington. I found Mike’s World War I draft card - he signed it just about two months before the war ended, so it doesn’t look like he ended up serving. In the 1910 census, the surname is spelled Yuzik, and the family is living at 34 Aspen Street in Passaic.

Grandma’s mother, later known as Marion Smith, was still with her family and called Mary Yuzik. Although she had attended school since 1 September 1909, she was also working as a folder in a mill, most likely in the textile industry. This description of the conditions fabric mill workers like young Mary faced does not paint an image of a happy childhood:

“A typical day for unskilled workers meant 12 hours standing at a machine doing boring, repetitive work, with only a 20-minute break for lunch. Conditions at various mills were described as ‘filthy, dingy, damp, and dank, and just short of inhumane.’  Workers were paid little more than a dollar a day during their first few years at the mills. Sexual harassment laws did not exist, and some bosses were sleazy characters; others were just downright mean.”

And then I found the 1900 census, which shows Mary and Michael, their mother Julia and their father, who would die before the 1910 census. The family’s surname was Gulyas and so grandma’s mother’s original name, before she decided she was Marion Smith, was Mary Gulyas.

Both of her parents are listed as Austrian and their native language as “Slavish” – in early 20th century census forms, Slavic languages were often lumped together into the rubric “Slavish;” most often, it refers to Rusyn (Ruthenian). So Mary Gulyas was the daughter of Rusyn immigrants from northeastern Hungary who came to Passaic, New Jersey, her father in 1883 and her mother in 1891. Most likey they were from either Saros or Zemplen County in old Hungary.

According to her application for a marriage license from 1920, we know that Marion’s first husband died when she was 17. She left New Jersey and went first to Altoona, and then to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to work as a housekeeper. The 1920 census shows a Mary Smith as a servant in the home of an English family, the Slaters. She was so desperate to cut ties to her family in New Jersey that she put their names on her application for a marriage license as “John Smith” and “Julia Jones.”  According to Anna Barna, Julia never gave up trying to convince Marion to come home and often wrote letters and called, but Marion stuck to her guns and refused to return.

Sadly, Marion’s later life was not much better than her childhood. After her drunken abusive husband died in 1943, she had to put her two youngest children (including grandma) into an orphange because she could not afford to keep them. She died six days after her 55th birthday in March 1950 from complications related to diabetes.

I recently found a book online called Surnames of the Galician Lemkos in the 18th Century, published by Ivan Krasovs’kyj around 2001. The author reviewed the metryka (registry) records and Austrian cadastral records of all of the Lemko villages of present-day southeastern Poland and compiled a list of surnames present in each village at the end of the 18th century, after 1772 when Austria annexed the area as part of the First Partition of Poland and created the new Kingdom of Galicia within the Austrian Empire. Lemkos are a branch of the Rusyn ethnic group, which some consider a separate East Slavic group and others a branch of the Ukrainians.

Of my Lemko ancestors, my great-grandfather’s surname was Paserba, and his mother’s maiden name was Orletsky (Orletska is the female form); and my great-grandmother’s surname was Hranycznyj (Hranyczna), and her mother’s maiden name was Kowal’czyk. They were all born in a small village called Hyrowa (Chyrowa). This is a very old village - the earliest mention of it comes from 1366, when it and several nearby villages were inherited by the nephews of a Polish lord in the time of Kazimierz III the Great (1310-1370).

Read More

Lately, I’ve been looking into the Lorditches and it was very confusing. Their immigration record says they were from Bohemia (therefore, Czech or German) and later censuses and other documents say German, Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and/or Serbian. I had suspected they were Slovenes who considered themselves German, so I started poking around the Digitalna knjižnica Slovenije (Digital Library of Slovenia) and hit the jackpot.

It looks like I’m a descendant of the first Slovene immigrant in Johnstown, Pennsylvania!

Read More

My great-great grandmother loved to write in letters to Slovene Catholic newspapers in America. It seems that the family may have had some heated political discussions back in the 1920s, though, since I’ve discovered my great-grandfather may have dabbled in Socialism.

Read More

In what may be the strangest genealogy bit yet, I recently discovered that my great-great grandparents had two children I’d never heard of - and the reason I’d never heard of them is that they died in a gunpowder explosion on 4 November 1912!

Read More

Grandma and Aunt Deb at Southside Tavern, and grandma’s dad’s World War I draft card listing his address as 36 Bridge Street. We knew he lived there at least til 1920, when he married grandma’s mom. We did not know until the other day that 36 Bridge Street used to be the Stonycreek Hotel and is now Southside. Grandma, two of my aunts and a bunch of my cousins (and me) were all just there at Christmastime for a trivia night!

The 1940 census was released on Monday, and I took the day off just so I could pour through it looking for (cyberstalking!) my grandmother in her first appearance in a United States census at the age of seven and a few of her relatives for my family history project. I managed to get everyone I was looking for except for my grandmother’s sister and aunt Maggie and her family. Of course, I also ended up in the hospital…

Read More

Read More

My great-uncle Henry Quinn Jr. was born in Croyle, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, in June 1889. He appears in the 1900 census -  10 years old with no occupation (his 15 year-old brother is a coal miner, and started working in the mine at 9, so this is somewhat unusual) and four years of school (so he’s probably still in school) - and in the 1910 census - 21, still living at home and a fireman with the railroad. But he doesn’t appear in the 1920 or 1930 censuses. My grandmother recalls that he was killed in a railroad accident and the family apparently got a sizable settlement, but there doesn’t seem to be any record of his death anywhere…

Read More

Read More