Why were there mass exit of people in the eastern european country of Galicia in the late 1800's?

Question

many people from the Austro-Hungarian empire came to the U.S. around 1860-1915 , was there any famines, or civil unrest, I am trying to track my family tree on my mom's father's side, there last names were Slimak and Cubalo, on cencus's I found which they filled out they had said there country of birth was Austria( as in austro-hungarian empire) and that there mother tongue was polish. please help! they said they immigrated to U.S. in 1890 but we don't have any ship records or anything, if anyone knows why alot of people from this region came, that would be great, thank you so much!

Answer 1

OK, many things to tackle, so we'll go one by one.

First off, Galicia was not a country, but is a region. It's the same as referring to Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin as "The Great Lake States". It was never a country, just a piece of land with a common ethnic heritage that was chopped up over and over as one country paid it as reparations to another country. It's also Central Europe, not Eastern. They do take offense to being called Eastern European because that would mean they are Orthodox Christians and not Roman Catholics. That's the whole division between Central and Eastern Europe and it's very important to those who lived the fight and stayed loyal to "their patriarch". That's where the Schism was really played out and the reason behind the wars still raging in places like the Balkans today.

Austria-Hungary was the country of allegiance, so it was legally their nationality. Austria issued the exit papers, so when the ship's purser filled out the passenger lists that's what he listed. Most Galicians considered themselves Polish. A few were Slovak, Ukrainian or Lithuanian.

As for not finding the records, they do exist. But 1890 is well before Ellis Island was built as the national passenger immigration point. But there were other points before that, particularly the Port of New York (see http://www.castlegarden.org ), Philadelphia and Boston. Many also came through Montreal on their way to Detroit. So it's possible that you'll find them on immigration records for the Port of Detroit.

As for why they left en masse, that's a little longer story. But there was no famine or war behind it.

When Poland was partitioned, the Prussians (who later unified and became part of Germany) were the most lenient with their Poles. Austria wasn't exactly lenient, but they did get to the point that they realized emigration was necessary. Russia was downright nasty to "their Poles" and treated them as slave labor.

Prussia was the first to allow emigration from their Polish lands to Canada and the US. The gist is that the US was in the middle of a major economic boom and needed cheap labor. They went into Prussia to recruit hearty, impoverished men who were looking for a way to do better in this world. In exchange for passage to the US, railroad or steamship transport into the Midwest and lodging for a specified number of years, the Poles would agree to work hard in logging camps or copper mines. After a specified number of months or years of hard work, they could get their wives/girlfriends and children brought over at company expense...their bonus. Also, once the timber was cleared from the land, they could buy it at $1/acre and clear out the stumps so that they could build their own homes and create a prosperous farm.

It was a very successful program and, of course, it was very profitable for everyone during the age of westward expansion when the need for lumber was high and the railroads had been built that could carry it long distances cheaply and quickly. By the late 1880s, they needed more men than they could find in the Prussian/German lands.

So that's when they went to Austria and worked out a deal to take their impoverished, land-poor farmers and get them out of the way. The issue, particularly in Galicia, was that when a man died his land was split equally between his wife and children. Take that out a few generations to grandchildren's wives and children and suddenly a nice little farm was reduced to something the size of a garden patch. The land couldn't house that many people nor could it produce enough food to feed that many people. To alleviate that, the recruiters went into Galicia/Ukraine/Lithuania and started recruiting from the Austrian lands. That was in the late 1880s to just after WWI.

The Russians were very late to allowing emigration from their lands. They were using their serfs as indentured slaves and it took a long time for them to realize that alleviating the overcrowded conditions made it more productive, not less productive for those who stayed. They didn't allow any emigration until the late 1890s and they were the majority of Poles coming into the US through the end of WWI and into the early 1930s.

I hope it helps you. If you need any help with your research, feel free to drop me an email. I would be happy to help you through the records out there and to find what you need to trace your family. Forget about civil records over there. If the records exist, the Catholic and Lutheran churches are holding them. There is a Jewish GenWeb project that's making in roads finding records on the Ashkenazi, but they're not cohesive.