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What's on this page:
- Thoughts on our immigrant history
- Rusyn textbook from St. Mary's School
- Freeland churches listed by founding ethnic group
OUR IMMIGRANT HISTORY
Freeland has a complex
cultural history, enriched by the various ethnic
groups that came to the Freeland area to live. Earliest settlers were
English, German,
Welsh. They were joined by Irish, and
by other groups: Italians,
Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians (Magyars), Jews, Lithuanians, Tyroleans,
Carpatho-Ruthenians, Portuguese, and others. Immigrants came to the
U.S.
through a small number of specially designated ports, the most
well-known being Ellis Island, pictured at the top of this page. Often,
but not always, the new immigrants would eventually begin the process
of naturalization and then become citizens. Paperwork relating to this
process would be filed at the Luzerne County courthouse in
Wilkes-Barre, shown at left, and they are still
stored there today. 
Many immigrants came
because they had heard that there
was work here; often someone they knew had come over earlier and sent
back reports. Occasionally mine operators even hired agents to go to
Europe
and recruit workers. While many immigrants put down roots in their new
home, not everyone stayed. Some immigrants came
with the short-term goal of simply making money
to take
back to the old country, and others came alone, working and sending
money back to their families. Some made the trip back and forth across
the ocean more than once. Meanwhile, here in the "new country,"
some
Freelanders such as John Shigo (Cajko in the old country) did a good
business as shipping agents, helping immigrants to send goods and money
as well as helping them to travel overseas themselves.RUSYN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOK FROM ST. MARY'S SCHOOL
This Rusyn textbook, in
use in St. Mary's in the 1920s and perhaps later, is an interesting
piece of Freeland's history. St. Mary's was founded by
Carpatho-Ruthenian immigrants, whose children were
taught Rusyn in school to maintain a cultural connection with the old
country. The book was given to me by a classmate, Patricia Bzdil (now
Patricia Paul), and so it's thanks to her that it's online here.
As an aside, the effects of the American melting pot took hold
over several decades. By the time I attended school at St. Mary's in
the
1950s, we were no longer taught to read, write and speak Rusyn. We did,
however, learn to pray in Rusyn (referred to as Porusski - the Slovak
word for Russian
language, but in this case it was Rusyn), we were given dual language
prayerbooks for our First Holy Communion ("Heavenly Manna - Nebesnaja
Manna"), and we sang the mass in Porusski six days a week. That
linguistic connection was all but obliterated when the Vatican decreed
that Catholic masses would only be celebrated in English.
1917 Rusyn
language
textbook from St. Mary's School - Clicking this link will open an
Adobe PDF file of the textbook. If you don't have Adobe Reader on
your computer you can download it for free at <www.adobe.com>.
This textbook PDF size = 3.2 MB.