Croatia to America: Peter Novosel

by Sam Begg

While Mary Peris was hauling water in Sosice, Croatia, Peter Novosel was leaving his home in Prvic, Croatia.  He was going to America.  Peter sailed in early 1889, with a destination of Donora, Pennsylvania.  Here he worked in the steel mill and lived in a hut near the mill.

Peter lived a frugal life.  He worked, slept, and busied himself trying to learn English.  He was active in the church, but mainly he worked and saved.  His wife and two girls were living in Privinci waiting for him to send for them.    Peter saw the life that awaited his family in America.  A valley of smoke; a land where there might be some hope for his grandchildren, but little for him or his children. He wondered if two generations of sacrifice was worth the possibility of improvement for the third.  He decided it was not.

Peter lived even more frugally and in eleven months saved enough money to return to Croatia.

He held no sense of failure. He had worked with men who had spent three years trying to save enough money for their wives to join them in America. He knew men who had died in accidents in the mil, and he had seen men begging to get enough money for one more drink. He wasn't prepared to bring his family to this.  He knew what it meant to grow up in Privinci, but he had no idea how to raise a family in America.  So Peter returned home to a life he knew and lived out his life much as his father had lived his.