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Talarczyk, Alexander
(March 15, 1883 - October 1964)

No records in Poland and Ellis Island, where most of the Polish immigrants entered the United States, match the name Talarchyk. No matter where it rises, the families of the same name owe the spelling for the most part to the people who incorrectly changed one letter in the suffix of Alexander Talarczyk's name. Like a lot of other samples, this one comes to us from the soft coal fields of Ohio and West Virginia. None of the first Polish coaldiggers remembered who persuaded them to leave their homeland for mining jobs in dark dungeons thousands of miles away.

Anyway, Talarczyk, who came from Poland in 1905, proceeded to look for work in the coal pits of Belmont, Ohio, and living quarters. He waited until 1911 to marry. In Ohio, his wife, Stella, who was ten years younger, had three sons and a daughter - John, Walter, Alex, and Antonio -- and some more when they moved to Triadelphia outside Wheeling, West Virginia, in the middle 1920s. Surrounded by mountains and hollows, Triadelphia, with unpaved and unnamed streets, where most of the coaldiggers were Negroes from Alabama and Georgia, was too small to have other industries. When the Talarchyk children and those of other mine workers grew up they left home to look for work and caused Triadelphia to empty. When President George W. Bush stopped there on July 31, 2004, in his campaign for reelection, Triadelphia had no more than 450 persons. The coal tipples were gone.

As public records show, the Talarchyk families were sparse in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)

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