Romanian Americans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 518,653 (declared) 1,100,000 (Romanian American census) (2009) |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
| New York City Metropolitan Area,Illinois, Southwest US, Ohio | |
| Languages | |
| English, Romanian | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Romanian Orthodoxy Catholicism, Romanian Greek Catholicism, Judaism and smaller Protestantism |
|
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Romanian Canadians, European Americans |
Romanian Americans (Romanian: român american) are Americans who have Romanian ancestry. According to the 2000 US Census, 367,310 Americans indicated Romanian as their first ancestry, while 518,653 persons declared to have Romanian ancestry. Other sources provide higher estimates for the numbers of Romanian Americans in the contemporary US; for example, the Romanian-American Network Inc. supplies a rough estimate of 1.1 million who are fully or partially of Romanian ethnicity. There is also a significant number of persons of Romanian Jewish ancestry, estimated at about 225,000.
The first Romanian known to have been to what is now the United States was Samuel Damian (also spelled Domien), a priest. Samuel Damian's name appears as far back as 1748, when he placed an advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette announcing the electrical demonstrations he planned to give and inviting the public to attend. Letters written in 1753 and 1755 by Benjamin Franklin attest to the fact that the two had met and had carried on discussions concerning electricity. Damian remained in the States some years living in South Carolina, then travelled on to Jamaica and disappeared from historical record.
There were several Romanian generals who became ranking officers in the Union Army during the Civil War, Brigadier general George Pomutz, Commander of the 15th Iowa Regiment, Captain Nicolae Dunca, who fought in the Battle of Cross Keys in Virginia. Another Romanian soldier, Eugen Teodoresco, fought in the Spanish–American War in 1898.
The first major wave of Romanian immigrants to the United States took place between 1895 and 1920, in which 145,000 Romanians entered the country. They came from various regions in Moldavia, Transylvania and neighboring countries such as Ukraine and Serbia with significant Romanian population. The majority of these immigrants particularly those from Transylvania and Banat that were under Austro-Hungarian rule left their native regions because of economic depression and forced assimilation, a policy practiced by Hungarian rulers.
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