DERYNOWSKI, JOHN (June 24, 1882 -- ? )Coal miner. The search for Derynowski families in Poland and the United States yielded little results. According to his petition for naturalization (No. 10140, Vol. 41, p. 138), Federal Court, Scranton, Pa.), John Derynowski stated that he was born at Lubcilowi, in the Austrian partition of Poland, and boarded a ship at Trieste, Austria, May 1, 1903, and arrived at Boston, Massachusetts, May 8, 1903.
On its face, the petition has many errors. It lists Liverpool, England, without a reason, instead of the name of a ship; May 7, 1903, the day before he was supposed to be in Boston, is the day he mentioned his first child was born in Dupont, Pennsylvania. Altogether, his wife, Katie, who was born at Rymanow, Austria, October 25, 1888, bore him four children in Dupont, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. They were Mary, May, 7, 1903 (?); Michael, Oct. 25, 1910; Julia, March 11, 1912; and Maggie, July 2, 1917.
As his military draft card indicates, while his family lived at Dupont in 1918, John Derynowski worked at Butler Colliery in Pittston Township. Dupont, named after a Delaware company of the same name built a powder mill there, broke away from Pittston Township and was incorporated in 1917. At its peak the population of Dupont was 5,269. Today it is 2,719 and 47 percent of it is of Polish ancestry. The firs Polish R. C. church -- Sacred Heart of Jesus -- was built in 1902 during the six-month strike in the coal industry.
Part of the congregation later broke away to form Holy Mother of Sorrows Polish National Catholic Church.
No census of Dupont has ever listed the Derynowski name.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2012) [email protected]