Sioch, Peter
(Feb. 15, 1882 - )
Chief burgess

Until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided the dispute, the voters of Throop, a mining town of 8,027 in Lackwanna County, didn't know in 1926 that they elected a coal miner, Peter Sioch, their first Polish chief burgess. When I spoke with Sioch in the 1950s, he didn't mention what he did, if anything, while waiting for the decision from Harrisburg in March of 1928. Nevertheless, he was elected again In 1928 when he ran on the Republican ticket. In 1926 he ran on the American ticket. Before that he was a councilman for eight years. During his political career, Throop installed a sewer system, paved the streets, and bought fire trucks for the volunteer fire company.

Now, in 2008, I have found a lot of confusion about the family's last name. The younger families of the same name assume that Siock is correct. It is not. No person in Poland bears such a name. The origin of the name is probably from a Polish expression, ni to, ni sio, which means neither fish nor fowl. The suffix ch is more common in Polish and ck is more common in the English language. Bred for generations in Jasienowka, a small village surrounded by farms between Bialystok and Siemiatycze, Poland, the Sioch families sent at least four of their young men to work in the hard coal mines of Pennsylvania and two of them brought their wives.

Unlike Italian immigrants who were often brought to work in the United States in groups, the Siochs came one by one. In the chain migration, the first one I found in the records of Throop, which was laid out and named after a Scranton doctor who owned the land, was Peter Sioch, who would become the first Polish burgess. He was born Feb. 15, 1882, and arrived in New York on May 1, 1899. In our conversation, I didn't ask him, because of my inexperience or interest in his life, about his wife, Mary, and his first child, Chester, whom he left in Poland and brought to Throop in 1905. Despite discrepancies in the records, when he obtained his American citizenship on September 25, 1906, they were automatically naturalized. The children who were born in Throop - Henry C., Peter, Mary, Joseph, and Andrew - were free as were all native born children.

For two years he tried to get coal dust out of his system by taking his family in 1911 to Chicago, where he opened a saloon, and again in the 1940s, when he worked in New Jersey, but the American cradle of the Sioch family was deeply embedded in Throop. He remembered that Poles and Slovaks got together in 1903 to establish the first Catholic church in Throop. Later, in 1911, the Polish families broke away from St. John the Baptist's parish and formed St. Anthony's. The new Polish parish had about 500 families when I spoke with Sioch, compared to 100 in 1903, and each one had a different priest.

The second Sioch to go into the coal mines of Throop and learn the art of timbering was Joseph, four years older than Peter Sioch, who came from Jasienowka in 1904. Over the next twelve years, Joseph and Mary Sioch had three children - Anna and Sophia in Dickson City and Joseph in Throop - and by 1930 the Siochs - oops, spelled Siocks - filled 22 lines in the federal census of Throop.

The last two of the family to sail across the Atlantic were Alexander and Stanley Sioch, who were born three years apart. Unlike the others, Stanley Sioch sailed to Baltimore, where he and his wife Frances got off the SS Rhein on August 3, 1907, and obtained their citizenship at Scranton on August 1, 1913. Their witnesses were a hotel keeper and street commissioner of Throop, William Filipowicz, as he was for the others, and Peter Sioch, who had returned from Chicago and went back to work in the coal mines. Alexander Sioch did not apply for his papers and in the years to come, when Peter Sioch ran for councilman and chief burgess, he was ineligible to vote.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)