Migration and Settlement

The first large-scale migration of Carpatho-Rusyns began in the 1880s and was directed towards the industrial centres of the northeastern United States. Until at least World War I, immigration to Canada was small. After 1924, however, when U.S. restrictions on southern and eastern European immigration were put in place, Carpatho-Rusyns, in particular from the Lemko Region in Poland, chose Canada as their destination. Most came directly from Poland and settled in the industrial centres of Toronto, Hamilton, Windsor, and Brantford in southern Ontario. Others were part of a secondary immigration from the United States. Many of the “American” Rusyns settled in Winnipeg and in small farming communities in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.

While the designations “Ruthenian” and “Galician” appear in Canadian immigration and census records, the terms “Carpatho-Rusyn” and “Rusyn” do not. Therefore, it is impossible to determine the exact number of Carpatho-Rusyns who arrived in Canada. The best estimates are that between 15,000 and 20,000 came to Canada in the course of the twentieth century. Perhaps as many as two-thirds originated from the Lemko Region of Poland, the remainder from the Prešov Region of Slovakia, from Transcarpathia in Ukraine, and even a few from the Vojvodina/Ba™ ka region of Yugoslavia. Most came during the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were motivated to leave their homes for economic reasons. Until the first half of the twentieth century, the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland consisted of about a thousand villages, each with an average 500 to 750 inhabitants, in an agriculturally poor mountainous region. The Carpatho-Rusyns have traditionally eked out a subsistence-level existence from small-scale farming and livestock grazing. Industrialization did not occur – and even then only on a small scale – until the period of Communist rule after World War II.

In the decades since World War II, Carpatho-Rusyn immigration to Canada has been sporadic. During the years immediately following the war, before Communist rule was fully established and the movement of people severely restricted, a few thousand Lemko Rusyns who eluded the voluntary and forced deportation process fled westward and eventually made their way to Canada. Analogously, during the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia and the less restrictive political environment in Poland during the late 1970s, several hundred individuals were able to leave the homeland. Finally, in the late 1980s and 1990s, both before and after the war in Yugoslavia, about seventy-five Rusyn families from the Vojvodina/Ba™ ka settled primarily in and near Kitchener in southern Ontario. Today, there are probably at most 35,000 to 40,000 Canadians who have at least one ancestor who comes from a village in the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland.