Anna Bienias collection

Collection

Identifier: IHRC316

Staff Only

Abstract

Collection consists of handwritten autobiography manuscript, as well as family photographs and documents, and photocopied excerpts from magazine and newspaper articles.

Dates

1910-1995

Language of Materials

English, Polish

ACCESS RESTRICTIONS

Open for use in the Elmer L. Andersen Library reading room.

OWNERSHIP & LITERARY RIGHTS

This collection may be protected by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code). It is the user's responsibility to verify copyright ownership and to obtain all necessary permissions prior to the reproduction, publication, or other use of any portion of these materials. Researchers may quote from the collection under the fair use provision of the copyright law.

For further information regarding the copyright, please contact the IHRCA.

HISTORICAL SKETCH

Anna Bienias (nee Bednarz) was born in 1910 in Vorochovo near Perecin, then Hungary, during 1918-1938 in the Podkarpatska Rus, Czechoslovakia, after 1945 in the USSR's Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, since 1991 Perechyn, Zakarpatska Oblast in Ukraine. Perecin was the Carpatho Rusyn hometown of her mother Irene (nee Bednarik). Anna Bednarz immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1912. Her autobiography covers her parents’ early lives, her childhood in Northeast Minneapolis, and her later life as a businesswoman in the Minneapolis suburbs. Anna Bednarz married Matthew Bienias in 1931. She vividly recounts life in the Eastern European immigrant communities from 1912 to 1940, and gives accounts of her travels to her father’s homeland in Poland (Michael Bednarz was born in Ujsoly) in the 1970s and 1980s.