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!

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