ABSTRACT
IN LISTING THE NAMES of the dead and wounded at Lattimer, Konstantin Culen in his two-volume History of the Slovaks in America (1942) was obliged to add: “Some of the surnames were garbled to some extent; most likely they happened to be misread in the course of years that had passed since the massacre itself.” The insouciance of newspaper accounts from that period concerning Slavic names is now a formidable obstacle. Published spellings varied so wildly that at times one can scarcely tell if one, two, or three different persons are intended. Part of this difficulty lies in transliterating Slavic sounds into English letters. Part of it lies in the discretion used by priests, civil servants, officials, teachers, and others who kept public records. Even Slavs of the period, like Father Richard Aust of Hazleton or Dr. Theodorovich of the Austro-Hungarian Consulate in Philadelphia, used inconsistent spellings. In addition, there are significant orthographic variations in each of the dozen or more eastern European languages then and now spoken around Hazleton. To compound these difficulties, immigrants themselves, for multiple reasons, sometimes accepted irregular spellings of their own names. Thus, even their fellow immigrants might be uncertain of the desired spelling, and different branches of the same family might settle on different spellings.
