By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Twenty-eight years ago, when Richard Elnicki was in my American Studies class at Otter Valley, he speculated that his paternal great-grandparents came from either Austria or Hungary. Continuing later conversations with some of his younger cousins, also my students, they claimed the family came from Czechoslovakia. To understand the truth in each one of these claims, one needs a crash course in how boundaries and countries of Eastern Europe changed in the 20th century.
We’ll start our story in June 1913, when eighteen-year-old Mary Paszuhanich sailed from Trieste, Italy, about 500 miles from her home. She joined her uncle Gyorgy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Mary’s descendants possess a remarkable copy of her Russian language birth certificate, written on the left side in Cyrillic and on the right with the Latin alphabet. Ethnically a Slovak, Mary was baptized in the Greek Catholic Church—hence the religious symbols—similar in ritual to the Russian Orthodox Church but acknowledging the sovereignty of the Pope. Mary was born in Nove Davydhovo [Новe Давидково], a small farming village at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, which until World War I was part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Emperor Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, was also the King of Hungary, a political fusion created by the Dual Monarchy of 1867. After World War I’s breakup of Austro-Hungarian Empire, the territory around Nove Davydhovo morphed into the newly created country of Czechoslovakia. Overrun by the Nazis in 1938, Czechoslovakia continued to lose territory to the Soviet Union after World War II. Looking for Mary’s native village today, you would find it in Ukraine.
On June 3, 1916, Mary married fellow Slovak immigrant Michael Elinski, later Elnicki. Did they know one another in the old country? No—but they were certainly part of a community of émigrés from the same geographic area. The Elnicki family also has a similar birth record for Michael that records his birthplace as Valaskove, then part of Hungary. Even tinier than Mary’s village, it possessed 49 houses when those living in the village were evicted in 1937 to a nearby town. Today, one finds its location in Slovakia, about 40 miles from the border of Ukraine.
A significant mystery, yet unsolved, is why Mike would have traveled a thousand miles south from his home to board the Greek ship Ioannina, later torpedoed by the Germans in 1917. According to his naturalization record in 1925, Mike left Piraeus, Greece on June 3, 1914, arriving in New York thirteen days later. I combed through the ship manifest line by line and failed to find Mike. Most of the passengers were either Greek or Turkish. Perhaps Mike, having reached his twentieth birthday, feared conscription in the Austrian army. With World War I mobilization just two months later, he might not have been able to leave once the fighting started.
In the United States, all men up to age 35 had to register for a possible draft in World War I. Mike’s registration card found him and Mary living in Breckinridge, Pennsylvania, where he worked for the Alleghany Steel Company in Harrison. By 1919, with their firstborn son Charlie, they relocated to Florence, Vermont, where he secured employment for the next 40 years working for the Vermont Marble Company. Certainly, Mike already had relatives living in the area. As the 1920 census reveals, a cousin, George Elsinki, age 60, boarded with them. Over time, the spelling of their surname evolved. In Slovak, his last name would have been written as Hniczki, transliterated as Elsinski/Ilinski, and later to Elnicki—perhaps that last permutation closest to the original name. Interestingly, in the 1940 census, Mike and Mary, alone among their European-born neighbors, gave their birthplace as Slovakia, demonstrable pride in who they were.
Mike and Mary raised seven children. A break from their Greek Catholic baptisms, they belonged to the Union Church of Proctor. Grandchildren recall that evening Bible study was an important daily regimen. Through the 1920s and 1930s, they certainly experienced lean years. Eldest son Charlie said that on Christmas, he received an apple and a penny. He also wore a pair of pants fashioned from a burlap sack. After World War II, the family purchased their own home. Charlie’s wife Aline (Pomainville) Elnicki wrote down some family memories for posterity. Charlie and his brothers built a brick oven outside where Mary would make bread, the smell filling the neighborhood. They raised all their own food and livestock, giving them plenty to eat, and picked wild mushrooms in the fall. After Mike’s retirement in 1960, he and Mary had years to enjoy gatherings with their family. One of his hobbies was fishing.
Mike’s 1978 obituary from The Rutland Herald listed no siblings, so the other Elinskis in the area were, at most, first or second cousins. Mary survived her husband by six years, living long enough to hold her newest baby great-grandchild, Richard Michael Elnicki. At the time of her death in 1983, age 88, Mary had 23 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren, numbers that, of course, have grown over the last forty years.
As we assemble more of these immigration stories of families to our area, we will see the reemergence of social and kinship networks that brought hard-working people here. How did so many people from remote, land-locked regions of central Europe follow a trail to Rutland County, Vermont, in their pursuit of better lives and the American dream?
Acknowledgments: Michael Elnicki, Donna Whitman, and Sergey Mokeyev, for Russian language translations.
