What is in a Name?

Hricko isn’t a common name in America and I have always known that due to the countless times someone curiously asked about it after reading or hearing it. My father’s side of the family is Slovak and for that reason I always thought the name Hricko was too. However, technically the roots of my name are Ukrainian. I spoke with my father about this course and he gave me a physical book on the history of the Hricko name from ancestry.com. All the information in this assignment is from this book.

Hricko is a variant of Hritsko, which is also a pet form of the personal name Hrehor. This is the Ukrainian form of Latin Gregorius. The name originated between 1891 and 1920 in the USA and the UK. The most found Hricko names were found in America in 1920. In the same year, Pennsylvania had the highest population of Hricko families. In fact, my grandparents were born and raised in Pennsylvania. In the 1940’s, laborer and housework were the top reported jobs for males and females respectively. For males, other common jobs were miner, farmer, and painter. For women, others included maid and saleslady (acestry.com).

My father told me a story about a conversation he had with a linguist who said the name Hricko means, or can be translated to singer. I didn’t look into this deeply but i didn’t find much on the internet.

The most common port for the arrival of immigrants was New York, New York at eighty ports. The most common months of arrival for Hricko immigrants was April, June, and December. Thursday, Monday, and Tuesday were the most common days for arrival. The top three places of origin for Hricko immigrants are Czechoslovakia, Galicia, and Hungary. Hungary is high on the list because when the economy declined in the late 1800’s, many Hungarians immigrated to the United States looking for better work. By WWI, north of 450,000 Hungarians had immigrated to the United States. Most Hricko immigrants in this group were younger than thirty. Almost all of them were literate but they lacked industrial skills. This is all interesting because I have Hungarian roots on my mothers side and Slovak roots on my father’s side. Out of 3,385,693, there were nine Hricko WWII U.S draft registrants. Five of them were born in America, the other four in Czechoslovakia and Austria (ancestry.com).