Love at First Sight and an Arrangement for Life: Investigating and Interpreting a 1910 Hungarian Migrant Marriage

Abstract

In May 1910, the New York Times published an article about an arranged marriage between two migrants from Austria-Hungary. “Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice” was written as more than a charming story of love at first sight. Indeed, the reporter considered the love story an example of near instant assimilation of migrants into American culture. A deeper investigation of the life stories of the couple shows that they did understand some things about American life on the first day they met, namely, the need to falsely report the bride's age as 20 rather than 17. In other respects, the couple retained their ties to Central Europe, choosing to live and work in rural coal-mining villages dominated by migrants from Austria-Hungary. They experienced firsthand the good and bad of life as Americans: the high wages paid to migrant coal miners and the resulting higher standard of living than could be gained in Hungary, but also the violence of management-labor conflicts in the coal fields and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan against Roman Catholic migrants in the American Midwest. Over a lifetime, the couple changed their names from the Hungarian Mihály to “Mike” and from the Hungarian Piroska to “Pearl.” By the time of Piroska's death, her surviving children were so far removed from Hungarian life that they could not even spell their mother's maiden name.

The New York Times Reports

On May 13, 1910, the New York Times ran a story titled “Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice.” In it, Petra Kozkowska, a “twenty-year old Hungarian girl,” disembarked on Ellis Island and met her fiancé Andrew Maller for the first time. That day Petra and Andrew, a miner from Colorado, journeyed into New York City to wed. The groom's mother arranged the pairing, because “she knew the Kozkowska family in the old country and had heard of the beauty of the girl.” The Times account offered an additional bit of reporting: “Negotiations were opened and the result was that the girl consented and crossed the Atlantic to meet the man she had agreed to marry.” The newspaper reporter and editors further wrote that immigration officials were skeptical “if there is such a thing as love at first sight” among arranged marriages, but that “it was manifested when the pair met on Ellis Island.” The story lay forgotten until two recently published books mentioned it in passing.¹

“Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice” was written as more than a charming story of love at first sight. Indeed, the reporter considered the love story of Petra and Andrew an example of near instant assimilation of migrants into American culture. Fashion was the outward manifestation of Petra's one day “transformation,” as the Times put it. When she got off the steamship at Ellis Island, she wore a “quaint peasant costume,” consisting of a “short skirt” and a “short waist” with her “feet shod in long, heavy-soled boots reaching her knees.” The young woman had a “mass of dark hair,” but it was “hid by a bandana handkerchief.” The Times story did not include a photograph; however, readers likely understood that the descriptions of Petra's clothing marked her as an Old World immigrant.

The newspaper reported that Andrew took Petra to Manhattan for shopping. Using his command of English with sales clerks, Andrew soon had Petra outfitted in “a skirt of Scotch plaid, of latest cut,” and for a top, she wore “a revealing silk waist.” The old sturdy work boots might well have been tossed into New York harbor, because after shopping, Petra walked in new “patent-leather boots that peeped out from under her skirt.” Lastly, she replaced the bandana with a “gorgeous millinery confection of wide brim and many feathers,” the sum total of which made her “typically American in dress.” In one memorable day, Petra went from wearing a “costume” that identified her as a greenhorn right off the boat to a newlywed who experienced “all the delights that a shopping tour brings to her American sisters.”

The Times piece had less to say about Andrew, leaving much to be presumed by the reader. His nationality was never mentioned, but if he came from the same “old country” as Petra, then he, too, must have been from Austria-Hungary, even if he had “lived for many years in this country, most of the time a miner in Colorado.” Andrew not only employed his English language facility to instruct sales clerks on clothing for his new bride, but he also used his knowledge of what was current on the New York scene in the spring of 1910 to make sure that Petra's clothes were fashionable. The future groom brought with him a diamond ring for his fiancé and also a “gold nugget which he had mined,” presumably in Colorado. The reporter observed of Andrew that he was a “tall young man, whose face shows a life spent mostly in the open.” Unresolved was the reader's likely question about how a miner working underground could have a face reflecting time spent outdoors. Far from displaying any past peasant origin in Europe, Andrew seemed a cowboy character out of Owen Wister's The Virginian, a true “Westerner” as the Times characterized him. After their New York wedding and shopping trip, the young couple expected to “start West at once.”²

“Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice” appeared in print at a time of mass migration from the lands of the Habsburg dual monarchy, and also a time of political backlash against such migrants as Petra and Andrew.³ The arch, even breezy journalism assumed that a young migrant woman could find happiness and a new American identity, all in a single day. What were the stories of Petra and Andrew before they met? How did their simultaneous courtship and marriage work on the day of May 12, 1910? What happened to them after they “started West” from New York? It is possible to follow their individual and family histories in the records of Austro-Hungarian and US officials and piece together some of their lives. If “Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice” is the newspaper's first draft of the love story of Petra and Andrew, then a century later it is time for the historian to write a fuller account. Such a history reveals that the Times got many facts wrong about the young couple. When the facts about the lives of Petra and Andrew are interpreted in the light of historical scholarship on dual monarchy migrant experiences, the result is a different narrative of transatlantic Hungarian-American identity, not one created by a single day's meeting, shopping, and wedding, but one slowly made over the decades and tempered by living in and among the American history told in the textbooks of labor strife, war, Prohibition, the Depression, and the New Deal.⁴

Behind the Headlines, Up from the Documents

The first rule of journalism is to report accurately the names of persons mentioned in a news story. “Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice” failed to meet that standard; indeed, it got the names of both its subjects wrong.⁵ Checking the details reported in the story reveals some errors of fact and, when corrected, leads to different possibilities of interpretation. The Times article noted that the intended bride sailed to New York City on the Cunard liner Carpathia. The public today knows that ship as the one that came to the rescue of more than seven hundred survivors of the April 1912 wreck of the Titanic. The Carpathia was a regular on the Fiume (now Rijeka)–New York run, one of the ships that the Cunard Line ran between the then-Hungarian port and the United States. In 1903, the year after the Carpathia was launched, the Cunard Company and the Kingdom of Hungary signed an agreement whereby the steamship company would take at least thirty thousand migrants annually from Fiume to New York.⁶ US immigration law, dating back to 1819, required every captain of a passenger vessel to prepare a manifest of disembarking travelers. The Carpathia's manifest for its Fiume–New York run of April 27 to May 11 did not list a “Petra Kozkowska.” The surname “Kozkowska” was not a typical Magyar (Hungarian) name. A careful search of the passenger manifest shows only one person who could possibly have been the “Hungarian girl” seen by the New York Times reporter. That woman was named Piroska Kotroczó.⁷

Piroska's name first appeared, misspelled, on page 54 of the manifest, where she was described as a seventeen-year-old single female domestic servant, standing five feet six inches tall, with fair hair, brown eyes, a dark complexion, and in good health. The Times had not commented on her height or eye color or complexion, and to be fair to the reporter, he might only have guessed at Piroska's hair color (“dark”) because, after all, her hair was done up unseen, inside a bandana. Aside from getting her name wrong, the reporter also misstated her age: she was seventeen, not twenty. The Carpathia's passenger manifest reported that she could read and write, was a Hungarian national, and spoke Magyar as her native language. The manifest further indicated that her home was in Heves County in the town of Sírok, and that her father, also from Sírok, was named József Kotrocsó (ending, in other records, in -czo instead of -cso). He paid her steamship passage. Finally, the manifest stated that her travel destination in the United States was Walsenburg, Colorado.⁸ Assuming that “Piroska” (the Hungarian-language diminutive for “Red” or “Red Rose”) was the “Petra” of the newspaper story, the information gleaned from the passenger manifest helps fill in her history. She was traveling by herself with a destination of Walsenburg, Colorado, located in Huerfano County and in 1910 a center of bituminous coal mining. The required $25 she carried with her showed US immigration authorities that she was not indigent and would not become a public charge on the American taxpayer.⁹

The Cunard Line had the Carpathia built with two passenger classes: second class, with rooms for two hundred travelers; and third class (“steerage”), able to accommodate seventeen hundred passengers. On a typical voyage, such as the one the Carpathia embarked on from Fiume on April 23, the ship would reach New York in about three weeks (for Piroska's voyage, on the evening of May 10) and wait off Staten Island for daybreak and the boarding of the ship by Immigration Bureau health inspectors. On the morning of May 11, that inspection took several hours and, upon completion, the Carpathia ventured up the Hudson and docked at Cunard's Pier No. 40 at the foot of West 14th Street in Manhattan. Second class passengers were then free to disembark, but third-class passengers, including Piroska, took a ferry boat from Manhattan to Ellis Island for immigration processing.¹⁰

If the Carpathia had finished unloading its second-class passengers in Manhattan by nine in the morning on May 11, the third-class steerage passengers would have ferried to Ellis Island by ten or eleven. At Ellis Island, friends and relatives of the incoming steerage passengers could meet and assist the new arrivals. Late that morning, something went horribly wrong for Piroska. The Carpathia's passenger manifest contained a second page that listed “Piroska Kotrocsó” as a “detained alien” held in custody at Ellis Island. The chronology of that spring 1910 voyage of the Carpathia was, again, not what the newspaper reported had stated. The Times omitted the fact that Piroska was held in custody. Simply put, US immigration officials did not believe her story about an “int[ended] hus[band]” expected to meet her upon arrival.¹¹

Andrew Maller did not reach Ellis Island before the Carpathia docked. The Times headline blared “Hastens to Marry His Mother's Choice,” but apparently young Andrew was not in a sufficient hurry to meet the Carpathia on time. It is more accurate to say he tarried to meet his mother's choice. Despite her father's assent to the voyage and the $25 she carried, US authorities doubted the story Piroska told of the supposed Colorado husband. They detained her on suspicion of attempting to enter the United States for immoral purposes; that is, they suspected her of being a prostitute.¹²

At some point mid-afternoon on May 11, Piroska was rescued not by her intended husband, but by the employees of an organization funded in part from a more famous arranged marriage, that of Count László Széchenyi of Hungary and American heiress Gladys Vanderbilt. The passenger manifest shows that an immigrant-aid association, the “Hungarian Home” of New York City, intervened on Piroska's behalf. The Hungarian Home benefited from generous contributions from the count and countess to fund its immigrant assistance work. The US authorities released her in the care of the Hungarian Home, not to Andrew Maller. Indeed, Piroska was one of the first detained aliens to be released from custody, at 3:15 p.m. on the 11th. The record of “Detained Aliens” shows that she did not take any meals during her incarceration, although the record does not say if this was due to protest and resistance on her part, or simply because of a quick release. In any event, she left Ellis Island in the care of officials from the Hungarian Home, took the ferry back to Manhattan, and then walked with them the short distance to the Hungarian Home at 32 Pearl Street, not far from the Battery. When her fiancé arrived in New York, whether late on the eleventh or the next day on the twelfth, she was in Manhattan—not on Ellis Island, where the Times story placed her—and it was in Manhattan where she and Andrew got married and went shopping, in that order.¹³

The Hungarian Home of New York City was established in 1903 as a refuge where, as its founders stated, “destitute and helpless people would be sheltered.” Until that date, Hungarian migrants could seek assistance from the “Austro-Hungarian Home,” but after charges of mismanagement by US officials, that society split into several separate organizations. Piroska might not have been destitute, but as she disembarked into a strange country, she may well have felt helpless, and she definitely needed shelter. The new Hungarian Home served as the residential headquarters of an immigrant aid society, the Hungarian Relief Society, assisting migrants with travel, family, and work problems in the United States. Morris Cukor, the head of a New York group known as the “Society of the Fifteenth of March” (the date in 1848 when Sándor Petőfi read his revolutionary poem Nemzeti Dal), also took on leadership of the Hungarian Home. Cukor was one of the most prominent Hungarians in New York City, and as an attorney he had represented Count László Széchenyi in a publicized assault trial in 1909. Countess Széchenyi generously contributed $4,000 to the building of a new headquarters for the Hungarian Home at 32 Pearl Street. Money from the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the Hungarian Prime Minister's Office, and from Mrs. Széchenyi allowed the Hungarian Relief Society to hire staff members to be on site at Ellis Island to offer help to newly arrived migrants. The young Piroska, alone and no doubt bewildered at finding herself in legal difficulty at Ellis Island, was fortunate that the Hungarian Relief Society was present to offer assistance.¹⁴

What is known of the tardy Andrew Maller? The Times said he had lived a long time in the United States, most recently in Colorado. However, the US population census of 1910 does not list anybody by the name of Andrew Maller living in Colorado. András would have been the more common Hungarian given name, and Molnár or even Mallér were the more likely Magyar surnames. Piroska said on the Carpathia that she was headed for Walsenburg, Colorado. The closest match in the 1910 population census for Huerfano County, Colorado, where Walsenburg is the county seat, was a “Mike Mallair.” The census marshal came through “Precinct No. 28” of Huerfano County, Colorado, on April 2, 1910, and recorded that individual as twenty-five, born in a place listed as “Austr-Hungary” and working as a coal miner. The census enumerator further recorded that Mike Mallair migrated to the United States in 1904, was literate in reading, spoke English, and as of 1910, had taken out his naturalization papers to become a US citizen.

Mike Mallair lived in a boardinghouse run by a Hungarian couple, Steve and Susie Sjwara. Steve had migrated to the United States in 1904 at the age of twenty-three, and Susie preceded him in migrating a year earlier in 1903. They wed in 1907, and Susie bore a daughter, Edna, in 1909. The Sjwaras were also listed as having been born in the same “Austr-Hungary,” with Magyar their native language. Like Mike, Steve claimed the ability to speak English. The boardinghouse that Susie ran was small, as it included only another Hungarian-speaking miner and a Croatian-speaking miner, in addition to Mike Mallair. Steve himself worked as a coal miner.¹⁵

Was Andrew Maller the same person as Mike Mallair, and when and how did he reach the United States? The closest match to the coal miner “Mike Mallair” of Colorado in the passenger ship manifests collected and digitized by the genealogical website Ancestry.com is a “Mihály Maler,” who sailed on the steamship Pennsylvania from Hamburg to New York City in late 1903. Mihály was nineteen years old, single, a laborer, Hungarian in nationality, Magyar-speaking and also able to read and write that language. Many Hungarian male migrants with the given name of “Mihály” became “Mike” in the United States. He informed the Pennsylvania's crew that he was from Abasár (sometimes appearing in records as Sár and Asár) in Austria-Hungary and that his destination was Toledo, Ohio, where he expected to reside with a friend named “Shandi” on Genesee Street in the Hungarian quarter of that city. His whereabouts between Toledo and Walsenburg over the next six years are unknown. Mihály was lucky to be allowed into the United States at all. The immigration officials at Ellis Island noted that he had a “corneal” dysfunction and suffered from conjunctivitis. Apparently, the officials decided his “pinkeye” was benign and not a symptom of contagious trachoma, grounds for denial of entry into the United States and repatriation back to Hungary.¹⁶

Turning to another public record, the marriage license issued by New York City, one is able to reconstruct more information about the wedding day of the couple more properly known as Piroska and Mihály. After their initial meeting at the Hungarian Home, they ventured uptown to the city hall, where they got married in a somewhat complicated two-part bureaucratic procedure. First, they got in line at the Marriage License Bureau, along with one hundred other couples that day. With the help of the bureau clerk, Michael Harris, they completed an application for a marriage license. Mihály paid the $1.00 fee, a levy required by state law starting in 1908 to ensure that couples took the act of marriage seriously.¹⁷

The clerk recorded the groom's given name as “Mihael,” his surname as “Mallar,” and listed his place of birth as Asár, in Heves County, Hungary. The parents of the groom were named as Mihael Mallar and Elisabeth (née Fehér). According to the Times it was Elisabeth Mallar who oversaw the “arrangements” of the two families. “Mihael” reported his age as 25 and his occupation as miner, matching the Mike Mallair in Huerfano County. He told Clerk Harris this marriage was his first. At the bottom of the page, Mihael signed his name with firm penmanship, not as Mihael Mallar but as “Mihály Mallér.” Whether Mihály tried and failed to correct Harris's recording mistakes of vowels without diacriticals is not known. His signature with his own name is evidence that he knew who he was, even if the ship's officers on the Pennsylvania, the US Census Bureau, the New York Times, and the New York City Marriage License Bureau called him by various other names.¹⁸

The clerk wrote that “Piros Kotroczó,” not “Piroska” nor “Petra,” nor “Kotrocsó,” was born in Sírok, Hungary, also in Heves County, and that she had an occupation, domestic servant. When she further told the clerk her age was eighteen, he asked her precise birthdate. She (or perhaps Mihály) answered December 23, 1891, showing she did not need the signed and notarized permission of her parents, Joseph Kotroczó and Elisabeth (née Gábor) Kotroczó. New York marriage law permitted those under eighteen to wed, but only with parental permission. Piroska said she was of legal age to make her own marriage contract. Somewhere between saying she was seventeen on the Carpathia and her appearance at city hall, Piroska aged herself another year. Somewhere between the Hungarian Home and city hall, somebody—perhaps her fiancé—told her she would have to lie about her age. Piroska lied, or maybe Mihály lied for her, and in either case this allowed the wedding to take place. Sometime between City Hall and the interview with the Times reporter, Piroska (or Mihály) added yet another two years to her age to make her twenty years old. Admitting the truth of her age would have resulted in denial of a license and perhaps worse; the immigration officials at Ellis Island, after all, had access to the Carpathia's passenger manifest in which they could read Piroska's true age. Finally, to indicate her consent, the clerk asked her to make an “X” on the signature line, thereby assuming she was illiterate and once again being at odds with what she had reported to the Carpathia's officials. Unfortunately, Piroska's inability to sign the marriage license application in her own hand deprives today's historian of a clue as to what she called herself and how she spelled her names.

The New York City marriage license application confirms that Mihály and Piroska were the same two people who came to the United States aboard the Pennsylvania and the Carpathia in 1903 and 1910, respectively. Although the spelling of their names does not exactly match the marriage license application, the home towns in Hungary listed for each do match: Abasár for him, Sírok for her, both in Heves County.

License in hand, Mihály and Piroska walked to another part of city hall to find a civil official who could perform a wedding ceremony. They located John McCann, the Irish-born alderman who represented the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York, and he performed the wedding service in a language—English—that Piroska did not understand. Alderman McCann collected his fee of $2.00 from the groom and filed the paperwork back at the Marriage License Bureau. And with that, Mr. and Mrs. Mallér were legally married and off on their shopping trip.

What can be learned from Hungarian statistical records about the two people and their families? Alas, for the social historian, the manuscript census forms for Heves County for the 1890, 1900, and 1910 population census counts were destroyed by the Magyar Királyi Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (MKKSH, or Royal Hungarian Central Statistical Office), but only after the MKKSH published detailed aggregate social and demographic statistics. In 1900, the last census before Mihály departed for America, Abasár was a small agricultural village. The Sírok that Piroska left in 1910 was a modest regional market town.¹⁹ The MKKSH published a volume in 1918 on emigration from the Kingdom of Hungary and return migration back, covering the years 1899 to 1913. That study contained detailed breakdowns at the county level of departing migrants and returning migrants by year, age, sex, religious confession, and occupation. The data for Heves County shows that emigration in 1903, the year that Mihály left Abasár for Toledo, Ohio, totaled more than 650 individuals, 85 percent of whom were men. Emigration fever hit Heves more strongly in the years 1905–7, with emigration averaging close to two thousand persons per year; again, the migrants were overwhelmingly men. Emigration plummeted in 1908, the year of an economic slump in the United States, but rebounded by 1910, the year Piroska left Heves County. The gender ratio began to change toward more women migrants in 1910, and in 1912, a majority of the people leaving Heves County for America were women. The largest city in Heves, Eger, was a net recipient of domestic migrants, as were other cities in industrializing Hungary, especially Budapest. However, rural Heves had more people leaving than arriving. In fact, the MKKSH report identified the triangle around the towns of Sírok, Bodony, and Recsk as the center of the area's emigration.²⁰

Until 1896, Hungarian vital statistics (births, deaths, and marriages) were maintained by religious denominational officials. The Sírok Roman Catholic birth register shows that Piroska was born May 31, 1892, the fifth of nine children, and the third of six daughters born to Erzsébet Kotroczó (née Gábor, 1853–1931) and József Kotroczó (1850–1935), spelled with a “cz” rather than the “-cs-” in Piroska's immigration files. The oldest child, József, was born in 1883, and the youngest, Piroska's little sister, Katalin, was born in 1894. József married Erzsébet when she was in her late 20s, and Erzsébet had nine children spaced more or less annually before concluding her childbearing. Following Piroska's journey to America, a second Kotroczó daughter, Borbála, born in 1890, migrated to the United States in 1912, traveling on the Carpathia's sister ship in the Cunard Line's Mediterranean immigrant service, the Ivernia. The next year, in Illinois, Borbála married Ferenc (later “Frank”) Kovács (later “Kovachs”), a coal-mining migrant from the Calvinist region around Debrecen, Hungary.²¹

Mihály Mallér was baptized as a Roman Catholic in Abasár, Heves County. He was the second child born to Mihály and Erzsébet Mallér. The couple had seven children, but only three survived infancy: Mihály, Erzsébet, and János. Piroska and Mihály were unusual among Catholic migrants in New York City in that the pair did not seek the auspices of a clergyman to conduct their marriage in New York City but rather sought the very civil authority of Alderman McCann. Starting in 1896, Hungary (though not Austria) required couples to register their marriages with the civil authorities. Perhaps the Mallérs' choice to have a civil wedding showed their haste to get their wedding completed before departing for Colorado. It could also have reflected the new Hungarian practice of registering civil marriages.²²

In the story reported by the New York Times, how did Mrs. Mallar in the old country know the “Kozkowska” (Kotroczó) family? And how did the future mother-in-law know of her prospective daughter-in-law's beauty? The specific mechanism by which so-called Andrew Mallar's mother contacted the so-called Kozkowska family is not known. In describing the intermediary role of the groom's mother in arranging the marriage, the New York Times account switched to the passive voice with the phrase “negotiations were opened.” Presumably these negotiations were between the actual Mallér and Kotroczó families. But who did the opening? Who negotiated with whom, and just what did they negotiate? At what point did Piroska give her consent to marry a man living five thousand miles distant?

Unstated in the Times article was any mention of either a dowry (hozomány) conveyed by the Kotroczó family on behalf of Piroska to the Mallér family and her new household in America, or the reverse, a bride price paid by the groom's family to the Kotroczó family. What is more certain is that the groom in the 1910 story must have accumulated some savings in the half-dozen years he had lived and worked in the United States. After all, he had to pay his own round-trip rail fare from Colorado to New York, as well as the one-way train fare to Colorado for his new bride. In addition to the new clothes he bought for Piroska, Mihály also bought her a ring and made a gift of a golden nugget to her. He had clearly succeeded in his labor in the United States, but to what purpose? His reluctance to complete his US naturalization may indicate that he and Piroska may have intended to return to Heves County, perhaps with a small fortune earned in the mines and supplemented by Piroska's work as a domestic or maybe as a boarding-house keeper in coal country.

If Piroska was a noted beauty in Sírok in 1910, as the Times story contended, Hungarian communication networks were apparently good enough that Mihály's mother learned that news twenty-five kilometers away in Abasár. There is no evidence that Erzsébet Mallér—Mihály's mother—ever came to the United States, so match-making efforts on behalf of her son must have been conducted by international post. Perhaps she sent a likeness or photograph of Piroska to Colorado, the same way that Japanese “picture brides” did in their arranged marriages. Erzsébet must have sent word to Mihály about the satisfactory arrangements between the two families and also news about Piroska's departure aboard the Carpathia bound for New York on April 23rd.

The New York Times story on “Andrew” and “Petra” ended with the sentence “Mr. and Mrs. Mallar will start West at once.” Presumably, this meant that the newlyweds planned to travel to Huerfano County, Colorado, and for the husband to resume work in the coal mines. Mihály Mallér of Precinct 28, Huerfano County, worked in the Toltec Mine, owned by the Aztec Coal Company. Aztec, along with the Victor-American Fuel Company and the Colorado Iron & Fuel Company, offered prospective miners higher wages than in eastern states' bituminous mines, but also at higher risks and under greater company control. Central European migrant miners working in a Colorado coal mine in 1910 could earn wages up to twenty times more than what they would have made had they stayed home and worked as agricultural laborers on a great estate.²³ The county was home to thousands of miners of Austrian, Hungarian, Slavic, Romanian, other European, Japanese, and Mexican descent.²⁴

The comparatively high wages that Mihály and other miners earned working in the Colorado mines came at a high cost. A US Senate investigating committee reported that the Toltec Mine where Mihály worked had numerous fatal accidents between 1907 and 1910, when he set out for New York to meet and marry Piroska. The deaths were the result of individual mine accidents, usually the result of the collapse of a ceiling or support shelf onto an unwary miner. Just two weeks after their marriage, and presumably shortly after their arrival in Huerfano County, a migrant miner from Italy, Frank Lenzeni, was killed in an accident in the Toltec Mine. Although the men working the Toltec Mine never suffered from a catastrophic explosion of the type that made national headlines, they were nonetheless called on to help when other southern Colorado mines suffered disasters. Earlier that same year of 1910, an explosion in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company's Primero Mine killed seventy-five miners, many of them Austrians, Italians, Bohemians, Croatians, Hungarians, and Mexicans. The Primero Mine had three years earlier been the site of a similar explosion, killing thirty-four miners. In each case, men from Toltec, possibly including Mihály, were summoned to help remove debris and rubble and recover the bodies of dead miners. Mihály may have been comparatively well compensated, but he worked at the most dangerous occupation in the United States and in the most dangerous mining district in the country, with death rates twice those of Appalachian mines.²⁵ Only after 1910 did the Colorado mining companies begin to address safety in a rigorous way, and only then upon prodding from state and federal authorities. The Victor-American Fuel Company decided in 1913 to print a pamphlet titled “How to Avoid Accidents” in six languages for its employees, including in English, the “Austrian” language (presumably Slovenian), and Hungarian.²⁶

The 1920 census records show that Mihály and Piroska no longer lived in Huerfano County. Instead, they and their growing family resided in Harrisburg, Illinois, the same location as Piroska's sister and brother-in-law, Borbála and Ferenc Kovács. Both Mihály and Ferenc worked as coal miners in the coal fields of Saline County, Illinois. An examination of the birth years of the Mallér children gives an indication of when the couple left Colorado. Piroska gave birth to her first child, Matthew, in Colorado, in 1912, while her second child, Lizzie, was born in Illinois in 1915. The timing of Matthew's birth suggests that the family lived through the “Colorado Coal War.” Huerfano County became notorious in the years 1913–14 for the struggle between the United Mine Workers, on the one hand, and the hired vigilantes and Colorado state militia that sought to suppress miner strikes, on the other, most violently at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914.²⁷

Of course, neither Mihály's nor Piroska's names appear on the list of the dead at Ludlow and elsewhere in southern Colorado coal country. Neither Mallér was one of the hundreds jailed by the Huerfano County grand jury or indicted by the county's grand jury on charges of murder and insurrection. Unknown is whether the Mallérs were evicted from their Aztec Mining Company house in Precinct 28 after the Ludlow Massacre and the eventual collapse of the miners' strike, or whether they chose to leave. Also unknown is whether Mihály was blacklisted by the Colorado mining companies. What is known is that Mihály and his landlord, Steve Sjwara, as aliens who declared their intention to become US citizens, could vote in Colorado elections for local, state, and federal officers. However, the Huerfano County Board effectively took away the right to vote in the ironically named Precinct 28 by closing the precinct and telling residents that if they wished to vote, they would have to travel to a consolidated precinct far distant in the county. The purpose of this voter suppression tactic was to keep control of county offices, especially the county coroner, in the hands of company-friendly men. Each time a miner was killed in an industrial accident, the coroner's office ruled on the cause and on any negligent factors. Aztec Mining Company and the other firms made sure that coroners and the juries they impaneled always ruled that deaths were the fault of the miner, never the company. Before and after the great Coal War of 1914, Huerfano County was and remained a corporate stronghold of the Victor-American Fuel Company, the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, and scores of smaller coal companies, including Aztec.²⁸ By then, the Mallérs had moved to Saline County, Illinois, and built a new home there in a coal mining village. The couple had eight more children after Matthew and Lizzie, the last of whom, Joseph, was born in 1932 when Piroska was forty years old.²⁹ The demand for American coal surged with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Mihály found work with the Saline County Coal Company, and the family settled in Ledford, near Harrisburg.

When Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia in July 1914, his armed forces called up men in reserve battalions as part of the planned mobilization. Mihály, aged 30 at the time, likely received a reserve call-up, as did some three quarters of a million men from the Habsburg Empire living in the United States in 1914. Given the British navy's blockade of commercial shipping to and from imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, few of those men were able to report to their assigned barracks for wartime service, even had they wished to fight for king and country. Mihály certainly did not. He continued to dig coal in Harrisburg, Illinois.³⁰

Mihály may have escaped military service in the Austro-Hungarian army, but when the United States entered World War I, he had to register with the American draft in 1918, even though he was married, had children, and was doing critical war work digging coal. His 1918 draft registration form shows that he was a man of “medium” height, “medium” build, grey-eyed, and black-haired. He called himself “Mike” and listed his wife's name as “Peri.” His signature on the draft registration card showed him halfway between his new American identity (“Mike”) and his old Hungarian language use: he spelled Mallér with a diacritical “é.”³¹

Mike had still not applied for US citizenship in 1918, fourteen years after he arrived in the United States and a dozen years after he had declared his intent to become a citizen. The United States considered him an alien, and under US wartime law, he was subject to detention as an enemy alien. However, few of the millions of migrants from the Habsburg Monarchy were detained, and certainly not any needed coal miners such as Mike Mallér. Other men from Austria-Hungary working in the Saline County mines also registered for the draft, but, like Mike, most were not US citizens and not called into the US Army.³²

In 1920, the US population census found the Mallér family still in Harrisburg Township, Saline County, Illinois. The census enumerator, William Smith, must have had trouble understanding the Mallérs when he visited their home because he struggled to record certain details of their lives. They owned their home free and clear without a mortgage, making them unusual among their neighbors, most of whom were tenants or had mortgages. Enumerator Smith listed the head of the household Hungarian style—surname first, followed by given name. “Malur, Mack” is what he wrote on the census form for the head of the household. The spouse's first name was scrawled in near-unreadable script as “Madamcofos.” Their children included “Mack” age nine, born in Colorado, and then four daughters, all born in Illinois: Lizzie (four), Sadie (four), Julia (two), and baby Alexis (nine months). Further information recorded about father Mack included his birthplace in Hungary, his native language as Magyar, his arrival in the United States in 1905, his occupation as a coal miner, his status as an alien who declared his intention to become a citizen, and, although he was listed as able to speak English, oddly, the census marshal marked him as unable to read or to write. Wife “Madamcofos” arrived in the United States in 1915, according to Smith, even though she bore a child in Colorado in 1911. Smith left the literacy questions blank, even as he recorded that Piroska could speak English. The older children, Mack and Lizzie, were attending school in Harrisburg, while Julia and Alexis were at home. There was one other member of the household, a thirty-five-year-old widowed Hungarian-born boarder named John Womas. The boarder arrived in the United States just before the war in 1913 and was still an alien who had not made any declaration of his intent to become a citizen. It is apparent that the enumerator had difficulty understanding what Mihály or Piroska told him about their vital information, even if both could speak English.³³

William Smith faced other census enumeration challenges in completing the 1920 tally of Mihály or Piroska's neighbors. Smith had to figure out how to classify people who were born in one of the former European empires that disappeared in 1917/18: the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Russian, and the Ottoman. What was their nationality in the wake of the breakup of the old empires and the bewildering number of successor states? The largest number of foreign-born persons in Harrisburg called Russia their birthplace. By asking individuals their mother tongue, Smith could further classify people. Most Russian-born people spoke Lithuanian, and yet others spoke a language Smith called “Jewish.” After migrants from the former Russian Empire, the second largest migrant population was from former Austria-Hungary. Harrisburg also had another large migrant population in 1920 of people from Appalachia, especially Kentucky and Tennessee; Smith made certain to note that their mother tongue was “English.”³⁴

Saline County had boomed in the war years based on the demand for coal. Six thousand miners worked in thirty mines scattered around Harrisburg, digging between four and five million tons of bituminous coal annually. Pay rates soared to more than $0.90 per ton of coal mined ($0.55 per ton had been the pay in prewar Huerfano County). Early in the decade, Mihály could earn more than $1,000. By 1928, the miners working under a United Mine Workers contract at the Saline County Coal Company earned $7.60 a day. That mine typically employed men for more than two hundred days a year, pushing Mihály's earnings up to $1,500 a year. Mike had become a citizen in 1921, just as the United States tightened immigration entry laws. In addition to enjoying full voting rights, the main benefit of his US citizenship was that he could travel abroad on a US passport. In fact, Mike earned so much he made a return journey to now-independent Hungary in 1925 to visit family. He went as a US citizen and returned to New York on a steamer from Cherbourg traveling in second class without having to pass through immigration at Ellis Island. He did not take Piroska or any of his American-born children.³⁵

Nearby Franklin County, where Piroska's brother-in-law Ferenc and sister Borbála had moved, led the state in coal output in 1920 with more than twelve million tons mined. Again, as in Colorado, high earnings came with great risks. The accident rates in the southern Illinois coal fields in the 1920s were not as high as Mihály had witnessed in southern Colorado the prior decade. Still, the death rate was 2.2 fatalities per 1,000 miners, with 44 serious injuries per 1,000 miners each year.³⁶ Most fatalities came in individual incidents. One or two men were killed in the Saline County mines almost every other week in the 1920s. There were also deadly accidents with multiple casualties. One catastrophe struck close to the Mallérs in 1927 when eight men died from inhaling “afterdamp” (i.e., carbon monoxide) after a coal gas explosion at the Saline County Coal Company's No. 8 mine. One of those men was Joseph Toth, a migrant coal miner from near Piroska's hometown of Sírok. Mihály and the other 191 men fled the shaft to escape the toxic air; after the mine was flushed, the men returned to remove the bodies of the dead.³⁷

The census of 1930 shows that “Mike” and his wife, now “Pearl” Maller, continued to live in Saline County, in the hamlet of Ledford, about three miles from Harrisburg, with Mihály still mining at Saline Coal. Unlike the 1920 census, the 1930 manuscript more accurately reported that Mike arrived in the United States in 1903 and Pearl in 1910. The census gave the further information about their place of birth down to the village level, previously excluded from censuses. They reported that they owned their home with an estimated value of $800. The family numbered six children with the baby called “Alexis” in 1920 now an eleven-year-old named “Pearl.” A new child, four-year-old Anna, had been born since the last census. The gap of seven years between the birth of Pearl and of Anna suggests that Piroska might have had pregnancies not carried to term or, alternately, children born who died in infancy. Piroska no longer took in paying boarders. Mihály's wages as a miner, even in the Depression year of 1930, were sufficient to support a family of eight. Their next-door neighbor George Dohany lived alone in a rental cabin. A native of Heves County, he and the Mallérs lived with other Hungarians and Central Europeans on the rural road known locally as “Hunky Row.”³⁸

A decade later, the 1940 census found ten members of the Mallér family still living in Saline County, Illinois, but with a residential change. The family no longer lived in Ledford (rural Harrisburg) but in the city of Harrisburg itself. The house worth $800 in 1930 was also gone; the family of ten lived in a $200 house. Mihály was no longer a miner but rather a laborer for the Works Progress Administration. Piroska was a housewife, and four of their children had irregular employment. Matthew was employed as an embalmer in a local funeral home, and three of the daughters worked as maids or laundresses. Matthew, aged 28, still lived at home, unmarried. Together, the wages of Mike, Matthew, Lizzie, Sadie, and young Pearl totaled about $1,500, a comfortable sum, but Mike on his WPA wages was no longer able to support his large family alone. Anna, who had been four years old in 1930, was listed as only eight years old in 1940. She had two younger siblings, Charlene, age five, and Joseph, age three. Again, the gap in years between the births of Anna and Charlene suggests Piroska possibly had other pregnancies.

The 1930s was a tumultuous decade in Saline County, as men in the United Mine Workers (UMW) District 12 split from the national union in 1932 over the directive to accept the same lower wages that other bituminous miners earned. Saline County miners left the UMW and formed the Progressive Mine Workers (PMW) Union. UMW president John L. Lewis wanted the lower national wage rate to protect jobs; the PMW wanted regional autonomy to negotiate better wages. Harrisburg was the scene of a violent gun battle between UMW and PMW workers in 1933, and the governor of Illinois sent the National Guard to restore order.³⁹ The Kovaches, Piroska's sister and brother-in-law, left coal mining and southern Illinois for Chicago, settling with their two daughters in the Hungarian colony on the west side of the city.⁴⁰

After the United States joined the fighting in World War II, Mihály made one last appearance in the records of the United States since men up to the age of sixty-five had to register with the Selective Service. He gave his age as fifty-eight in 1942, but apparently he could not remember his birthday since the clerk wrote down “January 1.” He lived out his life serving neither in the armies of Austria-Hungary nor of the United States of America. As in 1918, Mallér in 1942 signed his draft registration card with his Americanized first name “Mike” (not Mihály) but retained the diacritical “é” in Mallér.⁴¹ The Mallérs in America and the Kotroczós in Hungary all faced separation from or loss of loved ones in the war.⁴²

Mihály Mallér lived until early 1950, when, in ill health, he took his own life. He was buried in the cemetery at Ledford.⁴³ Piroska lived a long life after Mihály's death, not remarrying, and remaining in Harrisburg until her own death at age ninety in 1983. In 1971, she began collecting Social Security payments as a surviving widow, informing the Social Security Administration that her birth date was May 29, 1892, and thereby confirming that she was truly only seventeen on her wedding day in New York on May 12, 1910.

The sons and daughters of Mihály and Piroska Mallér for the most part stayed in southern Illinois, or at most, moved to southern Indiana or northern Kentucky. In fact, several lived adjacent to Piroska's house outside of Harrisburg and assembled a sort of estate of offspring over several generations living nearby and assisting one another in chores and tasks for the betterment of the extended family. In this sense, Mihály and Piroska transplanted what scholars call the “East Central European” family model to Saline County, eight thousand kilometers from Heves County.⁴⁴ Yet, the Mallér children did not marry other Hungarians or second-generation Hungarian-Americans. Piroska did not replicate her mother-in-law's action in finding a mate for an arranged marriage to her sons or daughters. Instead, most of the Mallér children married into families with backgrounds from the British Isles via Appalachian America; some married Protestants.

There was pain in Piroska's life after Mihály's death. Her oldest son, Matthew, like his father, took his own life in 1958, and a son-in-law committed suicide in 1961. There was also joy in her life. Piroska's obituary noted that she had borne ten children and, as of 1983, had seventeen grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. However, in one last example of fading identity, the obituary misspelled her maiden name and, calling her Pearl, omitted altogether the name her parents gave her at birth.⁴⁵

Interpreting a Love Story

The marriage of Piroska Kotroczó and Mihály Mallér represents one story from the experience of Habsburg Monarchy migrants to the United States. The New York Times reporter's insistence that fashion—American fashion—immediately transformed a migrant peasant girl into an American woman is both too flippant and too starry-eyed to accept as a story of cultural assimilation and integration. Nonetheless, the story of the arranged marriage of the two Habsburg Monarchy migrants to America helps guide us in asking a pair of big social history questions. First, how did the practice of arranged unions work in a new land where consent was the basis for marriage? Second, how did the migrants understand and explain themselves to new and different people?

Some of Mihály's motivation in seeking a bride from his homeland may be inferred, even if he left no record of his thinking. There were few single women of any nationality in Huerfano County in 1910, never mind single Hungarian-speaking women. Had he sought a Hungarian-speaker among the scattered Austro-Hungarian colonies in the United States, he would have similarly found great competition for single women. After all, his own Heves County sent four males to the United States for every one female. He might have sought a marriage partner from among non-Hungarian women, but in 1910, the social barriers to immigrants seeking an interethnic, interreligious marriage could be high.⁴⁶ The obvious place to look for a bride was in Hungary. More common, at least anecdotally, was the pattern of a male migrant returning to Austria-Hungary to find a mate and, with that task accomplished, holding the wedding in Europe. Yet Mihály, even with his amassed savings and the financial resources to go home and look himself, nonetheless left the choice to his mother Erzsébet.⁴⁷

Piroska was unusual in agreeing to a marriage match at age seventeen (her own mother had been in her late 20s). Seventeen was quite a bit younger than the average marrying age of 22.5 years for Hungarian women in 1900.⁴⁸ Further, Piroska married before her older sister Borbála. The arranged marriage to which Piroska agreed meant she did not experience a typical peasant courtship where she had some say in the union before giving her consent. Neither did she enjoy a typical country wedding. Instead, her city hall wedding in New York was nothing like anything she might have witnessed in Heves County.

This leads to a new set of questions about the representativeness of Mihály and Piroska. Was it typical for migrant men to work six years in the United States before marrying? Was it also typical for parents to send their seventeen-year-old daughter to the United States for marriage? Did migrant men typically marry at age twenty-five? Were their brides typically seventeen years of age? Did migrants marry only migrants from the same ethnic group? Was it the norm for single female migrants to marry immediately upon arrival in the United States?

Such questions about the typical or the usual among Hungarian migrants to the United States can now be answered by studying the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS). A subset of the 1910 Population Census, the IPUMS, selecting men from Austria-Hungary who arrived in the United States in calendar year 1903, captures Mihály's cohort or class of migrants coming to America. Mihály was unusual in that he left at nineteen, a somewhat younger age than was typical for that 1903 class, in which the average age of men from the dual monarchy was twenty-two. Piroska was also younger than was usual for women migrants from Austria-Hungary, who typically were nineteen years of age when coming to the United States. Mihály was also a bit unusual in that after six years residence in the United States, he was still unmarried. By the time the Census Bureau undertook the 1910 population headcount, 80 percent of the class of 1904 migrant men from Austria-Hungary residing in the United States were married. That group divided equally in halves, with one group having their wives present in the US household, and the second group having their wives absent, presumably back in Austria-Hungary. Mihály, counted as single in Colorado in April 1910, was married with spouse (Piroska) present in 1920. This made him more typical in that by 1920, two-thirds of the cohort of 1904 migrant men born in Austria-Hungary were married with spouses present in the household. That number only increased in the 1930 census.

The marriage of Piroska and Mihály on the same day as her arrival was highly unusual in the 1910 IPUMS subset of Austrian-Hungarian migrant men and women. Women who married in the United States tended to do so after at least a year living in America, and usually within the first four years. Marriage the same day upon landing in New York was improbable. More typical was the experience of Piroska's sister Borbála: she married after nine months residence in the United States.

Scholars of the history of US marriage over the past two decades have emphasized the importance of marriage as a contract between two consenting partners. In part, this grew out of reaction against antirepublican, “Oriental,” or “despotic” marriage customs, notably, polygamy as practiced among Mormons. Contractual monogamy based on romantic love between consenting adults was the American norm by 1910. The arranged marriage of Mihály and Piroska, on the face of it, flew in the face of American expectations of love and marriage. Fear of growing divorce and fear of supposed loose attachments to marriage by immigrants caused states like New York to tighten their marriage laws in the first decade of the twentieth century.⁴⁹ The marriage license application that Mihály and Piroska completed was one example of the different practice. The feelings of Mihály and Piroska for one another may or may not have been love at first sight, but by affixing her mark to the marriage license application, she indicated her understanding of consent without coercion.

In her long first day in the United States, Piroska must have come to terms with Mihály's absence at Ellis Island upon her arrival and nonetheless decided to keep her end of a more complicated family bargain, one she kept for more than four decades and ten children. Her marriage might not have been the romantic wedding that Americans of 1910 idealized, but it was consensual and the Manhattan shopping trip that followed was certainly something that few Austro-Hungarian peasant women ever experienced. The diamond ring, golden nugget, and fashionable attire that Mihály provided for a woman he had never seen before fit a very American narrative of love at first sight. Her date of birth reported to the US Social Security Administration—May 29, 1892—suggests she figured out a more important aspect of American life, establishing her independence in the eyes of American, or at least New York State, law. Perhaps on May 12, she realized how to navigate both the worlds of American fashion and of the American marriage law of consent. If so, that was a remarkable example of the transnational life of a young Hungarian woman, more than a century ago.

The New York Times got Mihály and Piroska's names wrong, but so, too, did the census takers every decade from 1910 through 1940, most comically in 1920 when Piroska became “Madamcofos.” It became easier to anglicize their names: from Mihály to “Mike” and from Piroska to “Piros,” “Peri,” and eventually “Pearl.” Although Mihály never did give up writing his surname with a diacritical “é,” his children never used that spelling. Indeed, the Maller children could not correctly spell their mother's maiden name, never mind the diacritical “ó” when they had to provide it for their own documents and remembrances.⁵⁰

When Franz Joseph wrote his July 1914 imperial rescript declaring Austria-Hungary at war with Serbia, he had the document translated from German into sixteen other languages in use throughout the dual monarchy. The reality of the relocation of Mihály and Piroska from Austria-Hungary to the United States, and of the four million others from the Habsburg lands, was that they came from a multiethnic empire with multiple identities of language, nationality, religion, and social class at home. More than most migrants to the United States, those from Austria-Hungary were accustomed to dealing with strangers and differences.

It is fair to say that many migrants from Austria-Hungary knew more about the United States than old-line Americans knew about the empire. When Mihály left Heves County in 1903, he knew to find his way to the Hungarian migrant community in Toledo, settling on Genesee Street not far from what became “Magyar Street” on the Maumee River flats. He found his way to Huerfano County, the coal-mining region paying the highest wages in the United States, with high numbers of Hungarian and especially Austrian miners. During or after the Colorado Coal War, the Mallérs showed themselves quite capable of a domestic migration from Huerfano County to another mining settlement well populated with their countrymen in Saline County, Illinois. Mihály was the classic economic migrant willing to do difficult and dangerous work in return for wages unimaginable back home. In the years between his departure from Heves in late 1903 and Piroska's arrival in New York in 1910, Mihály likely earned money that he could send back to his family, either to make their lives more comfortable or possibly to purchase land and move from the ranks of landless laborers to peasant proprietors. As the oldest child from a family of five, his remittances likely made the difference between comfort and destitution for the Mallérs back home. By the time Piroska departed from Heves County in 1910, there had been more than a decade of intensive out-migration from the county, especially from the area around Sírok. She went to the United States aware that she would be a miner's wife for the immediate future.

It is not known if the new couple intended to stay just a few years in the United States and then return to Hungary, or if they planned to make their lives permanently in the United States. Mihály's declaration of intent to become a citizen was an in-between and ambiguous move: it allowed him the right to vote in the United States, but he did not follow up for some years by taking out citizenship. Most Austro-Hungarian-born men who arrived in the United States in 1904 completed their naturalization by 1918, under pressure to do so by the Americanization imperative of World War I. World War I certainly closed off remigration to Hungary; indeed, it made the sending of remittances quite difficult in wartime. The Mallérs decided by 1919 not to return to Hungary. Instead, they made their lives in Illinois. World War I made clear that the United States was the better country for a workingman and his family. Mihály waited until 1921 to become a US citizen. His brother-in-law Ferenc Kovács waited even longer—he and Borbála became US citizens in 1928, modifying their names to “Frank” and “Barbara” “Kovachs.”⁵¹

A newly published book on migrants from Austria-Hungary puts forward the proposition that migrants from the dual monarchy came to the United States with a set of identities: peasant, religious, linguistic, political, and those were reinforced in the United States by ethnic leaders (“identity managers”) pulling in different directions.⁵² The Mallérs, however, did not express their identity as joiners or members of associations. Piroska was a member of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church of Harrisburg, and she made sure that her daughters were confirmed in that church in the 1920s. Mihály belonged to the Modern Woodmen of America, a death benefit insurance association that began in southern Illinois and was largely limited to the Midwest. That appeared to be the extent of their joining voluntary associations. None of the Mallérs joined the “MVK” society, a Hungarian social club started in 1946 in Harrisburg that met monthly for Hungarian folk songs and csárdás dancing.⁵³

After the war, the members of the Harrisburg Historical Society produced a pageant celebrating one hundred years of Saline County history. The 1947 pageant emphasized the antebellum history of the county, and although Saline had voted 10 to 1 for Stephen Douglas over Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, the producers were justifiably proud of the part the men of the county played in the Civil War. Toward the end of the pageant, Act 9 celebrated the establishment of coal mining in Saline County after 1880. Act 10 was called “Freedom's Holy Light,” and the narrator intoned,

This is how mainstream America in 1947 made sense of the immigrant experience. Migrants fled “oppression and class regimentation” back home. They brought “new blood” and were “rapidly assimilated into the social structure” of Saline County. This description fit the lives and family of the people who became Mike and Pearl Maller. They came from the “common people” of Heves County. They found economic success in Saline County, at least until the Great Depression, and their children did well in getting an education and making their way out of the coal mines and into other, safer work in southern Illinois. In the end, the economic migration of Mihály and Piroska resulted in a strong transplanted and extended family and a better life than they might have had living through two world wars in Austria-Hungary. And despite the Times' and other bureaucratic errors, they left enough of a documentary trace to be able to retell their love story today.⁵⁵

Footnotes