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Here’s some good news for the area’s genealogists. Anthracite Mining Heritage Month is coming up. The various programs scheduled for January could bring valuable insights for people researching their coal mining ancestors — and that’s a huge number of ancestors in these parts.
There are 16 informational programs scheduled throughout the region, nearly all of them in the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton areas. Numerous local history-oriented organizations sponsor them. Most are free. For a complete list, go to the Luzerne County Historical Society website www.luzernehistory.org.
The month’s observances open on Jan. 9 with “Classic Anthracite Photography” at the Luzerne County Historical Society Museum, Wilkes-Barre, and conclude Jan. 31, with a screening of the movie “The Knox Mine Disaster Documentary” at Misericordia University, Dallas Township. In between will be programs as varied as mining industry art and music, the story of the (mining related) deadly Good Friday bombings of 1936 and the growth of the region’s garment industry as mining declined.
There has never been a more important industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania than anthracite coal mining. Until the midpoint of the 20th century, it was economically dominant here, employing many thousands of miners and other mine workers and spawning a host of other businesses in the fields of railroading, hotels, manufacturing, construction, retailing, brewing and shipping.
The 1959 disaster at the Knox mine in Jenkins Township flooded many of the remaining mines and put an end to local deep mining.
Huge numbers of families in this area had mining ancestors. From time to time I note places where information about the industry and the individual miners may be found. So, pick and choose among this magnificent array of Anthracite Mining Heritage Month programs and see if you can fill out your knowledge of mining ancestors.
Fee hikes: Genealogists would have to pay more — a lot more — to get copies of certain federal immigration records if a plan for significant fee hikes goes into effect next year, national media sources have reported.
Because these particular immigration records have been considered sensitive for various reasons, they are held by federal agencies outside the National Archives and are already subject to higher fees for those who want them. Now, if the fee hike goes through, it appears that some of them could cost as much as $625 for a printed version.
They include “citizenship and alien registration files, visa applications and other records documenting the lives of deceased immigrants who arrived in the United States between the late-19th and early-20th centuries,” according to the Utah newspaper Deseret News.
They include some Ellis Island immigrants, people fleeing Nazi persecution, World War II-era guest farmworkers, Holocaust survivors and people fleeing postwar communist rule, the newspaper said.
Leading the opposition is U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who has contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — controllers of these records — and asked them to rescind the increases. The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, operator of the database FamilySearch, has expressed concern as well.
“Romney’s office has also encouraged family history enthusiasts through social media channels to let the agencies know their concerns during a public comment period on the proposed fees that ends Dec. 30,” said Deseret News.
News notes: Before traveling to local genealogy-related sites such as the Luzerne County Historical Society or the Northeast Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, check out their websites and Facebook pages for closures. These organizations and others that are genealogy-related close for longer stretches from mid-December through mid-January.
