Even when all the family has reached this country the problems of
migration have not always ended. Many families do not establish a
permanent home in the first place in which they settle, but move from
place to place, and in each place there is a new set of conditions to
which to adjust themselves. Of the ninety families visited in Chicago
for this study, information on this point was obtained from only
forty-two. Nineteen of these came directly to Chicago, but
twenty-three had lived in other places. Five of them had been in the
Pennsylvania mining district around Pittsburgh, two had been in North
Dakota on a farm, two had been in a New Jersey manufacturing town, and
the others had been at widely different places in other cities--New
York, Philadelphia, Galveston, Texas, Boston--in small towns in the
Middle West, and on plantations in Louisiana.
Some had moved several times. A Polish family, for example, had lived
first in Boston, then in New York City, then somewhere in Canada,
before they finally settled in Chicago. Another Ukrainian family, from
Galicia, lived first in one mining town in Pennsylvania, then in
another in the same state, and later moved to Chicago. The mother, who
is a very intelligent woman, described her first impression of America
when she, with her four children, arrived in the little mining town.
She said that immigrants were living there, everything was dirty and
ugly, and she was shocked by the number of drunken men and women she
saw on the streets, "having not been accustomed to see them in the old
country." She wished to return immediately and did not even want to
unpack her belongings. For a whole year she lived amid these squalid
surroundings, until her husband got work in another town where
conditions seemed a little better.
Sometimes these changes mean family separations, as the man again goes
ahead, as he did in coming to this country. The experience of a Polish
family is typical. When the family first came to this country they
went to Iron Mountain, Michigan, where the father worked in the ore
mines until he lost his health. Then a sister of his wife, who was
living in South Chicago, invited him to visit her family, and offered
to get work for him in the steel mills. He came, living with his
sister-in-law, and after a few months obtained work in the mills. Then
the mother and children followed him.