“The Jankola Library Rescue Project”
by
Stephen Baluch
Saturday, November 2, 2024
2:00 pm ET
The Embassy of Slovakia
3523 International Court, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
Email rsvp@dcslovaks.org to RSVP
Newspapers! How badly we have treated them over the years, as something to be read and discarded. In fact, this faded text on discolored paper has recorded the story of our everyday lives. For our immigrant ancestors in Czech, Slovak, and Rusyn communities from 1880 into the 1930’s and beyond, these flimsy sheets were often the only source of family, local, national, and world news, and sometimes even serialized books and literature from that era. Steve’s experience with genealogy research brought him an even greater recognition of the historical value of newspapers in building the life story of our immigrant ancestors, and he set out to preserve as much of this resource as could be located. The Jankola Library was one of the greatest repositories of this Slovak history in print, and now we embark on efforts to catapult the printed page into the bits and bytes of our technological future.
Stephen Baluch is a graduate of the University of Maryland, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Civil Engineering. He worked 26 years as a highway engineer at the U.S. Department of Transportation, until retirement in 1999. Since then, he has been researching his Slovak (paternal side) and Bohemian (maternal side) heritage, and has visited the homeland villages in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He is a longtime member of CGSI, and volunteers to help with genealogy research at the Shell Point Genealogy Society (genatsp.net), Ft. Myers, FL, where he also serves as the society’s Webmaster.
Steve will have 20-30 of his own Czech and Slovak books available for sale.
