The Polish and Hungarian record

STATED AT TRUE SIZE · THE SETTLING SOURCES NAMED

The Story of Mishawaka section of this history names the peoples of the factory-age town in one sentence — "the Belgian and German, Polish and Italian, and later Black and Mexican Mishawaka of the factory age" — and for the Polish and Hungarian communities that sentence is nearly the whole of what the record reached for this section can presently support. The city's commissioned history, searched whole, yields no Polish or Hungarian passage to set beside its Belgian and Italian chapters: no enclave bounds, no society, no hall, no count. South Bend's Polish west side is famous and is South Bend's; it is boundary-printed here as the reason a reader might expect a Mishawaka counterpart, and it is not evidence of one. Hungarians appear in the valley's industrial record through the Oliver and Studebaker workforces across the river; a Mishawaka Hungarian institution — a church, a hall, a society — is not carried by any source reached for this section.

The gap is printed as a gap, in the open, with its remedies named, because the alternatives are worse: the communities may have been present at real but smaller scale, folded into the Catholic parishes the religion record documents without ethnic naming, and neighborhood memory may hold what print does not. The settling sources are specific. The federal census country-of-birth and mother-tongue tabulations for Mishawaka's enumeration districts, 1900–1940, would fix the counts the narrative histories omit; the St. Joseph County parish registers and the diocesan archives would show whether Polish or Hungarian missions or societies were ever organized in the city; and the Mishawaka city directories' church and society listings, year by year, would catch a hall that stood for a decade and vanished. Until those are pulled, this entry stands at its true size: two of the peoples the Story of Mishawaka section names, whose cultural record in Mishawaka the sources reached leave unwritten.

Sources:

1. The Story of Mishawaka section of this record — the factory-age peoples sentence, quoted.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — searched whole; the absence of Polish and Hungarian treatment is the finding stated.