The first generation of immigrants, Tim Peters said, was preoccupied with earning a living and the second generation wanted to quickly become Americanized.

"The third generation wants to know about their roots," he said, "but by now a lot of the older family members have died and they don't have access to any records."

It's not easy to research eastern European ancestry. A professional genealogist specializing in Carpatho-Rusyn and Slovak origins, Peters is in demand for lectures and seminars and as a resource to people who want to trace their roots. Most of the time, they don't even know where to start.

Compound that by the confusion that they might not even know their families are Rusyn.

I can tell you that most people with this ancestry have only a vague idea," said the Clifton, N.J., man who will be a featured speaker at next month's Carpatho-Rusyn seminar in Greensburg.

Some "dead giveaways": They are from Austria-Hungary but aren't Polish, Russian, Ukrainian or Slovak; they are Greek Catholic or Orthodox, or they are Jews who came from the Carpathian Mountains.

On his mother's side, Peters is Carpatho-Rusyn and Slovak. When relatives reminisced at her funeral 17 years ago, he started wondering who her people really were. His personal quest led to years of research and eventually to a full-time career in genealogy.

He recommends a book, "Our People" by Paul R. Magocsi, as a reference to Rusyn villages. The author, considered the world's foremost expert on the culture, has listed about 1,000 places of Rusyn origin.

Information is also available on the Carpatho-Rusyn Society's Internet Web site, which is designed and maintained by Greg Gressa of Davisburg, Mich. A second-generation American, he grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and has Rusyn grandparents on both sides of the family. Gressa will be available at the conference to translate documents and offer advice on finding family history.

"You really can't do any research without knowing the village of birth," he said.

Possible sources for that information: passenger lists from ships that arrived at Ellis Island or other ports of entry (but the exact date must be known), applications for U.S. citizenship or Social Security, and church records of marriages, baptisms and deaths.

Richard Custer's parents grew up in Cambria County and his mother's maiden name Chromoho was Americanized to Chromo. "The best she could really explain to me about our ethnic background was that her parents were from Austria and that we were Russian," he said.

Years later Custer, who lives in Washington, D.C., realized that his maternal ancestors were Rusyn. He has spent most of his free time in the last seven years researching Rusyns in the entire state of Pennsylvania. He's now an expert in linking European villages with immigration destinations. Name a local town and he probably knows where its Rusyns came from.

"There were a lot of Lemko Rusyns from Losja who settled in Pricedale," he said. "For several decades they hosted an annual festival called the Losja Kermesh."

Rusyns from Jakubjany settled in Greensburg, Bradenville, Arnold and the Indiana County towns of Black Lick, Graystone, Ernest and Homer City. In Export, the Rusyns came from two adjacent villages, Novoselycja and Torun in the county of Marmarosh.

He knows trivia, too: Trauger, just south of Latrobe, is the oldest organized Rusyn community in Westmoreland County and Wilpen was the most isolated. Monessen had the largest single concentration of Rusyns.

They also settled in Rankin, McKeesport, Glassport, Clairton, Braddock, New Kensington and other mill towns along the rivers. They lived in Johnstown, Uniontown, Leisenring, Windber, Canonsburg, Hannastown, Herminie, Rillton, Lowber, Wyano, West Newton and other places where tunnels bored into coal seams, the men came home dirty and coughing and the women dusted coke oven soot off everything.

Some of the communities were ethnically mixed, for instance the congregation of St. Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church near New Alexandria.

Some were from present-day western Ukraine," Custer said. "Others were Carpatho-Rusyns from a couple of villages north of Uzhorod. That's in Ukraine today but before that it was in a province of Czechoslovakia called Subcarpathian Rus' or Ruthenia."

Immigrants who settled in Glenwood near Pittsburgh were from what Custer calls a "gray area."

"Some of the villages were on the edge of where Rusyns were considered Ukrainians," he said.

Custer knows a lot about Rusyn churches, too. St. John's Ukrainian Catholic Church on Pittsburgh's South Side drew many of Glenwood's immigrant families. St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church was founded in Duquesne in 1890. Four years later, Rusyns in Trauger founded St. Mary's Byzantine Catholic Church, which still exists.

I'm getting very close to the end of my research and am trying to computerize a lot of data," said Custer, who will be at the seminar, too. "I'm in the process of writing and rewriting what I've collected, and I'm going to turn it into a book."

The Carpatho-Rusyn Society, 915 Dickson Street, Munhall, PA 15120-1929 has information on the culture, maps, genealogy, customs, food, contact resources and listings of Rusyns who are looking for family. The site is updated daily. For membership information, please Click here.

"I must tell you that there are some older people who, having been raised believing that they are Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian or Polish, then finding out that they are something else ... they have an aversion to this," Righetti said. "And I can understand their reaction."

For centuries the peasant people who lived in the Carpathian Mountains struggled to maintain their identity. Years later and miles removed, many outsiders still don't understand who they are.

Note:
Maryann  G.  Eidemiller  is  a
Greensburg free-lance writer.