Valko family genealogy

It might come as a surprise to you that I was born and raised right in your back yard, in Whiting, Indiana.
Yes, that small town wedged in against the south-east Chicago city limits in the north-west corner of
Indiana at the Indiana-Illinois state line. That is where my parents settled down after leaving Bela, okres
[area] Sv. [St.] Martin, Turcianska Zupa [county], Slovensko [Slovakia] at the turn of the 19th century,
along with thousands of other Slavs, obviously because of the abundance of work at the oil refineries
and steel mills located there. That area had a large mixture of Slovaks, Czechs, Russians, Poles,
Hungarians, and other central European immigrants...