Wasyl Pelak (1887-1928) was the son of Stefan and Helena (or Julianna) Pelak. Handwritten family notes indicate that he was born in ""Peregrimka" although his immigration papers record his emigration from the smaller nearby village of Wola Cieklinska.

Sixteen year old Wasyl entered the United States through Ellis Island on November 10, 1903 after first journeying to Bremen, Germany. (It is estimated that two-thirds of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants emigrated from Bremen and Hamburg.) He crossed the Atlantic on the Kaiser Wilhelm II in its maiden year. The four-funneled star of the Norddeutscher (North German) Lloyd line offered its first class passengers richly marbled and paneled public areas of exceptional grandeur. It was a different story for its steerage passengers. A 1906 work, On the Trail of the Immigrant, by Edward Steiner, described steerage in the Kaiser Wilhelm II: "Packed like cattle匸t]here is neither breathing space below or deck room above匱he stenches become unbearable [with] pestilential air匲nsavory rations are not served, but doled out, with less courtesy than one would find in a charity soup kitchen." The description concludes, "steerage of the modern ship ought to be condemned as unfit for the transportation of human beings."

It is unlikely that the young Wasyl was daunted by the described conditions. Coming from a people known for their endurance, the six day trip was a means to an end-a new land and a new life. Once in the New York harbor, more than 900 Kaiser Wilhelm II steerage passengers were ferried to shore and lined up for required immigration procedures. The ship manifest presented to Ellis Island immigration officials records Wasyl's place of residence a Wolacieklinska. He was described as Ruthenian from Galicy. The young peasant was described as a [farm] laborer who could neither read nor write. His destination was Miners Mills, Pennsylvania, to his uncle Peter Glowacz.

In the same year of Wasyl's immigration, two decades after they were written, the famous lines of Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus, were included on a plaque at the main entrance of the Statue of Liberty pedestal: "Give me your tired, your poor, /Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Wasyl entered American's "golden door" with $14.

Numerous American industries -mines, mills, factories, and refineries-had a great need for cheap labor. The meager salaries offered by the industrialists were more money than immigrants could begin to make in the old county. In a pattern now called "chain migration," Wasyl came to the anthracite region of Pennsylvania to join other Rusyns from his Lemko village area who had preceded him. Rusyns and other Slavic immigrants had not received a warm welcome in America. Viewed by the Irish and other groups who had come earlier as strike breakers who would work for low wages, these unknown people with their strange customs, dress and language had to create their own places in the new world.

Concerns about the new immigrants were widespread. A 1907 editorial in the Wilkes Barre Record stated:
Their native tongue is far removed from ours, their illiteracy is great, their economic efficiency is low, and their religious and moral training is not up to the American standard. Hence the gap between these people and our people is great. The process of assimilation is difficult, and the task of changing from the old to the new is fraught with danger.

The Rusyn immigrants were to disprove these concerns and, over time, become strong supporters of the labor unions which fought the low wages and unsafe conditions of the mines. Their immediate need upon arrival, however, was economic survival. The newcomers to the Pennsylvania coal towns were soon to find that they had traded agrarian cycles of sunlight and seasons for long days and six day weeks underground. Our ancestors were no strangers to hardship and unafraid of work and danger. In great numbers, they descended into to the dark depths of the anthracite mines, Wasyl beginning as a runner.

In 1909, in Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Church in Wilkes Barre, Wasyl married American-born Eva Shaw whose father, Josaphat Szach had immigrated from Wola Cieklinska before 1890. They lived in the "Irishtown" section of Hudson, a small mining town outside of Wilkes Barre, near Eva's parents and siblings. Together they had eleven children-nine of whom-Mary (1910), Stephen (1911), Anna (1912), Helen (1913), John (1917), Walter (1919), Andrew (1921), Love (1922) and Nicholas (1925) lived to adulthood. Michael died in early childhood and Eva in infancy.

In 1913, four years after his marriage and the birth of his first three children, Wasyl, described as former subject of Austria, became an American citizen.

In the less than two decades Wasyl and Eva were to have together, their lives, and the lives all those around them, would be dominated by the mines-by shift whistles, closings, strikes, work stoppages, accidents and deaths. Mining had the worst safety record in American industry and the dangers and uncertainties of the mines would affect every aspect of mining families' lives. In 1908, the year before Wasyl and Eva's marriage, 708 men had died in Pennsylvania's mines. Two of Wasyl and Evas's brothers-in-law, their nephew and their firstborn son would die in mining accidents.

Their shared lives would involve almost unremitting labor-Wasyl underground in the mines and Eva in the home. This work would be broken by celebrations of the church and family-holy days, marriages, births and baptisms.

Wasyl died in 1928 from respiratory disease and is buried with Eva and their two children who died in infancy in the Plains Cemetery outside Wilkes Barre-the first parish cemetery of Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Church.

Although he did not live to see all his children grow to adulthood, Wasyl's emigration and health-destroying labor had started his family on the way to the better life he sought. While his first son was later to die tragically in a mining accident, the rest of the family escaped the dangerous underground work and grinding poverty of the anthracite region. Two of his sons, with GI Bill support, would obtain college educations and his youngest daughter would become a trained nurse. Succeeding family generations would go on to have educational, professional and personal opportunities which the brave young immigrant, a world away from his Carpathian homeland, could not possibly have begun to imagine.