Over the past year I have been deeply committed to two projects related to Romanian immigration to Saint Paul and South Saint Paul, Minnesota. Through funding provided by a Minnesota Legacy Grant, in 2013 I worked with a team to record and preserve oral histories of eleven people who are first-generation Romanian immigrants or their children, who came to Minnesota in 1930 or earlier. A subsequent grant in 2014 allowed us to create a documentary video based on those interviews and my own historical research. I worked with other members of Romanian Genealogy Society (www.romaniangenealogy.com) and Heritage Organization of Romanian Americans in Minnesota (www.hora-mn.org). You can view a clip about the project here: http://vimeo.com/88775412.
For thirty years I've been fascinated by the study of genealogy. One of the most challenging lines to research is my dad's Romanian branch of the family tree. I've written before about my quest to find more about my great-grandfather, Ilie Moisescu, who was born in 1875 in a place called Nagy Szent Miklos, in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now called Sannicolau Mare, Romania. My ex-husband is also of Romanian descent, and his family came from a town called Nagy Torak, Hungary which is a place near what is now Bececj, Serbia.
When I exhausted available records about the Moisescu and Albu families, I started looking at other Romanian families who came to Saint Paul and South Saint Paul, Minnesota. There were practically whole villages of Romanian people who came to Minnesota in the early 1900s! Most came from the regions of Banat and Transylvania, and they came to this area because of plentiful jobs in the met packing industry, railroads, and foundries. By 1925-1930, some estimate that around 2,000 ethnic Romanians were living in the cities of Saint Paul and South Saint Paul. One newspaper reported that the Eastern Europeans outnumbered the Germans and Norwegians 2:1. Usually men came first, and women followed-- whether to help earn money to go back, or to plant permanent roots here. One thing that surprised me was that many - in fact, I would learn, most - of them went back to Romania. Some families traveled back and forth, when they could afford it and when immigration policies allowed it. Others were never able to reunite with loved ones who were left behind.
Some of the family names mentioned in our interviews are Sarafolean, Evasku/Ivascu, Stoi, Choban, Logajan, Popa, and Stoi. The stories of these early immigrant families are filled with emotions ranging from heartbreak to triumph. Some accounts can be found in newspapers and a few were documented by family members, but the collection of stories and traditions that were documented through the oral history process are priceless now and will be for future generations. I just wish we had started this project about twenty years ago, when the parents of the people we interviewed were still living!
The documentary video will be completed this summer, and a premiere viewing is planned for sometime in September 2014. We will offer copies of DVD and Blu-ray discs for sale, and it will be aired on local cable TV channel 14 in Northern Dakota County. The program will certainly be of interest to anyone with immigrant roots, regardless of your ethnic heritage, and to those who live or have lived in the Twin Cities.
