Pennsylvania Migrants in the Austrian State Archives and Hungarian National Archives: Dual Repositories for Migrants from a Dual Monarchy

Abstract

Pennsylvania Migrants in the Austrian State Archives and Hungarian National Archives:Dual Repositories for Migrants from a Dual Monarchy Kristina E. Poznan (bio) Hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to Pennsylvania from the 1880s through the First World War, and east-central European archives contain untold amounts of material documenting their experiences. Immigration historians have long researched in federal, state, and local records in the United States to tell migrants' stories, but they have less often made use of overseas documents about those same communities and individuals. Both the Austrian State Archives in Vienna and the Hungarian National Archives in Budapest are troves of Pennsylvania history. Austro-Hungarian officials collected information on many facets of migrants' American lives and organizations, from churches and benefit societies to social clubs and newspapers. In addition, several different branches of the Austro-Hungarian government documented their own work in the United States to financially assist migrant institutions, investigate industrial accidents and labor conflicts, and sometimes even monitor individuals politically at odds with the home government. European sources thus not only expand our evidence for examining familiar themes in Pennsylvania's industrial history, but they also speak to less familiar topics that connect Pennsylvania migrants to broader transnational and European political questions of mobility, nationalism, and citizenship. Among the most striking insights gleaned from east-central European archives is how actively foreign governments operated on US soil. In addition to operating official embassies and consulates, the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry supported Pennsylvania migrant churches (providing ministers' salaries and financing church mortgages) and newspapers (paying stipends for printing and distribution costs). These actions enriched the cultural life of Pennsylvania's migrants and also served an important political function for Austria-Hungary, as the government tried to use these organs to maintain migrants' loyalty to the homeland. Pennsylvania's Austro-Hungarian migrants had to contend, [End Page 417] then, with two sets of bureaucracies—American and Austro-Hungarian—both of which at times imagined them to be dangerous political actors. European archival sources portray migrants not as culturally "uprooted" or economically "transplanted," as earlier interpretations have characterized them, but instead as politically and diplomatically engaged and significant.1 Austro-Hungarians' travels back and forth across the Atlantic forced the governments of Austria-Hungary and the United States to debate their parameters of citizenship, requirements for military service, and responsibility in cases of industrial accidents, and to consider how migration encouraged the transmission of such ideologies as democracy, socialism, and nationalism. Records documenting Pennsylvania's east-central European migrants appear in a number of archival collections in Vienna and Budapest.2 The Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv of the Austrian State Archives houses the files of the pre–World War I Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the Ministerium des Äußern.3 The Hungarian National Archives (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár) overlaps somewhat with Austrian holdings on American affairs from the period of the dual monarchy but contains dozens of boxes of original material about migrants from the Kingdom of Hungary.4 Aside from consular affairs, many of the documents in these archives address [End Page 418] the development of Slavic national projects abroad and the efforts of the Austro-Hungarian government to maintain migrant loyalty, particularly through the use of migrant religious institutions, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Reformed alike. Language poses obstacles to fully utilizing foreign archives to write the history of Pennsylvania's east-central European immigrants. They spoke German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Yiddish, Carpatho-Rusyn, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, and other languages. To the researcher, one of the benefits of Austria-Hungary's dual imperial structure is that many documents were routinely translated into or between the governments' main operational languages. Thus, a reading knowledge of either German or Hungarian can be sufficient to undertake productive research in either archive. Pennsylvania's east-central European migrants lived transnational lives by becoming active citizens in Pennsylvania and the United States more broadly but also maintaining close ties to their homelands. As scholars seek to better understand migration history, international research will aid in illuminating the ways in which individual experiences often crossed national boundaries. [End Page 419] Kristina E. Poznan College of...