U.S Polish Immigration Patterns Before Wwi

U.S. Polish Immigration Patterns Before WWI

Millions of Emigrants Left Poland in the 1800s


Millions of people in North America today can trace their ancestors to Polish immigrants; in fact,they are one of the largest of the ethnic groups in the United States.
In 2000, the U.S. Census found that people who were either directly from Poland, or who identified Polish as their principalancestry, numbered about 9 million. These Polish-Americans live principally in Illinois, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, California, and Florida.

Whilethe greatest number of Polish immigrants came to North America in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, Poles have been in the new world since Colonial days. Polish craftsmen joined theJamestown colony in 1608, and during the American Revolution, a few Polish nobles joined the fray, including the well-known generals Casimir Pulaski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

Emigration from AustrianPoland
In Galicia, the territory controlled by Austria, manufacturing decline, land shortages and crop failures prompted people to start leaving around 1880. They emigrated to Germany, Austria,France, and the United States

The much larger exodus of Poles to various other countries, which occurred starting around 1850, was a result of a number of forces within what had been thePolish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The weakening of Poland, and the growing power of the Kingdom of Prussia, Habsburg Austrian Empire, and the Russian Empire led those three countries to reapportion much of the areastarting in 1772, in what is now called the First Partition. From 1795, when the Third Partition of Poland occurred, until Independence in 1918, there was no country named Poland.

Emigration fromGerman Poland
The first wave of Polish emigration, which started about 1850, was a result of domestic policies in the German part of partitioned Poland, where poverty, unemployment, and official...