The
Oravetz Family
of
Barnesboro, Cambria County, Pennsylvania
Joseph and Mary (Lelak) Oravetz and daughter,
Margaret Ann (Oravetz) Rebar
The family of Joseph and Mary (Lelak)
Oravetz of Barnesboro, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, just like the Andrew
Rebar family in Clearfield County, had its American roots in the rich
coal fields of Western Pennsylvania. The mines that brought Joseph to
Barnesboro in search of work are the same mines that ultimately drew my
father, John S. Rebar, to Barnesboro some 15 years later. However, John
was also attracted to the town because of several relatives he had living
there: Mary (Kozak) Valco, Barney Valco's wife, was John's mother's sister;
and Joseph Herpak, son of Peter and Anna (Kozak) Herpak, was his first
cousin, as Anna was another of John's mother's sisters. The Rebars and
Oravetzes did not originate in the same village in Slovakia, and they
had little in common by way of family life experience, and the events
that brought them together were not at all uncommon in turn-of-the-century
Hungary. Once they reached America, their experience was not unlike that
of the thousands of Slovaks who preceded them. They became part of an
extended immigrant family in a corner of America's industrial heartland
and became model citizens. However, the Oravetz and Lelak stories are
a bit more convoluted than the Rebar tale, and they require a little more
background information here.
Conditions in the "Old Country"
In the latter part of the 19th century in Northern Hungary, as Slovakia was called at
the time, numerous forces were slowly grinding away at the economic and political
stability that the Slovaks in the mountains and valleys surrounding Kosice had enjoyed for
more than two centuries. In the mid-1860s, Hungary was given jurisdiction over Slovakia in
the formation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and the process of denationalizing
and assimilating the Slovaks began at a furious pace. How much this affected the Oravec
family is a matter of speculation, but there is ample evidence in the stories passed down
through the family that there was considerable enmity between my ancestors and the
Hungarians. However, I do not believe that the Oravec family emigration, first to Hungary,
and later to the United States, was motivated by anything other than economic reasons.
South and southwest of Kosice the land is agriculturally rich; the flat plains and hot
summer temperatures are ideal for growing grains and sunflowers, and the angle of the sun
on the rolling hills to the north of the flat land is perfect for growing grapes. Working
the fields was the only life that the Rebars had known for centuries. The valleys are wide
and stretch far into Hungary, but almost none of it was owned by the Rebars, Kozaks, and
Herpaks. They were at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, farmer-peasants who owned
little and much of whose time was, for all practical purposes, owned by the landowners. It
is probably safe to say that their reasons for migrating were almost entirely economic,
for it gave them a chance to actually own land and a house, an opportunity most of them
would not have had in Slovakia.
The First Migration
The rail line from Kosice to Miskolc, Hungary, had been laid in the
1840s, and was followed a few years later by the line that ran north from
Miskolc deep into present-day Slovakia. North of Miskolc in Slovakia are
the grapevines, and north of the vineyards are the Rudohorie, the Iron
Mountains, that had produced the precious metals that had made this a
major trade route for centuries. When the gold and silver ran out, there
was still plenty of iron ore and copper here to keep the work booming
for several more centuries in the foundaries in the Rudohorie region itself
and in the towns and cities supplied by the rail lines. But the ore eventually
ran out, too, and the people in towns like Smolnik, Zakarovce, and Opatka,
who had mined the ores and worked in the foundaries for generations, suddenly
found themselves without jobs in the 1870s and 1880s, so they moved south,
to places with strange-sounding names like Diosgyor and Pereces, where
the factories and mines were still producing, and where there were plenty
of jobs.
In Diosgyor and Pereces, the other half of my family history unfolds.
When the ore ran out in the mines around Smolnik, Slovakia, the able-bodied
men one-by-one began to move south to industrial Pereces, near Miskolc,
Hungary, where there was plenty of work for a strong back. In looking
at the Roman Catholic parish records of births, marriages and deaths for
the main parish at Diosgyor, it seems as though entire villages went south,
beginning with a recession in the 1870s, the exodus lasting well into
the first decade of the 19th century. It was under these circumstances
that Gaspar Mathias and Theresia (Majdik) Mihalik moved with the youngest
of their eight children in the late 1870s from Smolnik to Pereces.
In about 1881, Gaspar's and Theresia's daughter, Josepha, met and married
Matyas Lelak, a young man two years her junior who had himself emigrated
to Pereces from Zakarovce, a town barely 18 miles up the main highway
from Smolnik, in search of work. Life for Matyas and Josepha was not easy;
their first child, Maria Josefina, died of scarlet fever when she was
only three and a half years old. Their next child, Maria, my maternal
grandmother, was christened with one of the names of her dead sister,
while the other name was eventually given to another sister, Josephine
"Pepi" (Lelak) Herpak, my great aunt. In all, four of the Lelak
children survived the many diseases that thrived in the crowded work camps
of late 19th century Hungary. According to family lore, Josepha herself
died from an injury she sustained while lifting heavy, wet carpets that
she had just washed at the stream in Pereces. I do not know the year that
she died, but it was before my grandmother emigrated to America in 1908.
In the same village of Pereces there lived a man named Janos Oravecz.
Both he and his wife, Etel (Soltesz) Oravecz, had been born in Opatka,
Slovakia. Janos had gone to Pereces sometime around 1890 to work, and
he returned briefly in 1894 to marry Etel, whom he took back to Pereces.
Sometime probably late in the 1890s, Janos' brother, Jozsef, came to work
in Pereces as well, probably staying with Janos and his family.
To
the New World
It was in Pereces that Jozsef met Maria Lelak, probably in about 1905
or 1906. They decided to marry, but not until Jozsef was financially capable
of supporting a family. Jozsef's brother, Sandor, had emigrated to the
United States a few years earlier, and Jozsef and Maria gambled that the
New World would give them the financial stability they probably would
never know if they remained in Hungary. And so, on an early Winter day
in 1906, Jozsef boarded a train in Miskolc and made the journey through
Budapest and then southwest to Fiume on the Adriatic (now Rijeka, Croatia),
where the S.S. Ultonia of the Cunard Line was waiting to take him to the
New World.
Jozsef Oravetz arrived in New York City on January 5th, 1907, just two
days shy of his 26th birthday. After clearing the immigration hurdles
at Ellis Island, he took a ferry to the city and boarded probably the
first available train for Graceton, Pennsylvania, where his brother, Sandor,
was living with his wife, Elizabeth (Javorszky). Sandor worked in the
coal mine and got Jozsef a job there; workers were always in short supply,
and it did not matter that Jozsef spoke no English, as nearly all the
miners were foreigners, and the Slovaks worked together.
The pay at the Graceton mine was good, and Joseph (as he now preferred
to spell his name) was quickly able to pay back the money he owed his
brother for his passage. By carefully watching what he spent, he managed
also to save enough money to send for Maria a mere 15 months or so after
his own arrival. Barely 20 years old, she took a train in late September
or early October 1908 and travelled to Bremen, where she boarded the S.S.
Friedrich der Grosse, leaving behind her father and three sisters; two
of her sisters, Josephine and Margaret, would follow her several years
later, but it was the last time she ever saw her father. It is not known
if her sister, Gizela, was still alive at that time, but her memory was
preserved later by Josephine (Lelak) Herpak, who named her only daughter,
Gizela (Herpak) Prusak, in her sister's memory.
There is a somewhat painful story associated with the arrival of Maria
Lelak in the United States. Maria arrived in New York on October 14, 1909,
and she lived with Joseph for several months at Sandor's and Elizabeth's
house. During the months that he worked in the mines he managed to save
enough for Maria's passage to America, and he also accumulated enough
money to get married and set up house as soon as she arrived. Under mysterious
circumstances, all the money was stolen from its hiding place, thus forcing
them to postpone their marriage and prolonging their stay at Sandor's
and Elizabeth's house. Joseph and Maria moved to Barnesboro in the early
months of 1909 where they were married on March 31, 1909. Maria was already
five months pregnant with my mother, Margaret Ann (Oravetz) Rebar, on
her wedding day.
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