This site began its existence as a page on the site, "rolandanderson.se", but after having reached a considerable volume, it was broken loose in order to become a site of its own.

The site owes its existence in part to Anastasia Yaremko of Hudson, Pennsylvania, who attested to the great popularity of these almanacs among the American Carpatho-Rusyn community. Her living recollection was able to rekindle interest in the almanacs even after many years.

Having all come from the same general area, the members of the various carpatho-Rusyn brotherhoods all spoke pretty close to the same language, but this is not reflected in the written articles, stories and poems in these almanacs. The written works are strongly influenced by the schooling, religious attitudes and political preferences of the authors. Not having the political strength to forge independent linguistic and literary positions, the Carpatho-Russian authors of the material in the almanacs followed alternately Russian, Slovakian, Ukrainian or vernacular styles, selecting the linguistic tools that best expressed their intentions. It is the vernacular language of the Carpathian villages that is used for the heartfelt subjects of fictional works and poetry. But this informal countryside language had a much too limited word supply to discuss advanced cultural, scientific and political matters. This forced writers of such topics into the folds of more mainstream languages with more highly-developed vocabularies — the choice of Russian, Slovakian or Ukrainian made most often on the basis of educational background, religious preference or political stance. So the writing in the almanacs shows a very great linguistic variation, and modern readers should not be mislead by epitets such as "Russian," "Ukrainian," "Rusyn," "Rusnak," "Ruthenian" — all these terms mean much the same thing in this context.

A good beginning for understanding how American Rusyns split into groups calling themselves Russians or Ukrainians can be found in the article "3 Початків Нашого Життя в Америці" published in the Ukrainian National Association's 1944 almanac.

English translations of many surnames and the names of towns appearing in the text of articles on this site have been invisibly linked to the title of that article. So if a search for an English name leads one to an article containing no English, it means that the article can contain a possible Russian variant of that name.

An English title in the content list can mean that the article is in English or it contains photographs that depict people or objects that may be recognizable, or otherwise of interest to English-speakers.

Generally, an attempt has been made to adhere to the distinctive character of the original typography, but some changes have been made — Some material has been reorganized to conform to modern standards of intelligibility — Interleafed material with one article on odd-numbered pages and another on even-numbered pages have been regrouped into separate, consecutive, articles. Multiple-column, newspaper-style pages have been converted to the single column format of most modern books. Sometimes in the original text an excess of photographic material associated with one article was distributed among following articles having completely different subject matter. In such cases, the material has been reorganized into one article composed of text and a second picture suite having a new appropriate title. "Fillers" used to fill blank areas at the end of articles have generally been grouped together under a unifying title. Items having a prominent typography and short factual content such as advertisements, have been photographed. Photographic reproduction has also been used for many titles in cases where the typography is a particularly distinctive feature. All footnotes have been moved to a position directly under the paragraph in which they are referenced.

Signed articles, included in compilations of otherwise anonymous material, have often been presented separately in order to give the author greater credit and to give their creations more prominence in the content list.

The author is particularly grateful to Robert John Klancko of the Lemko Association who has make available many of the almanacs shown here. Alice Southerland and John E. Leimone provided access to the 1942 RBO almanac.

Many of the longer articles have been proofread by Natalia Plavaiko, Victoriia Bogdanova and Lilia Karpenko.