Week 3 of the Robin Stewart Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: Ancestral Women 2026
Anna Hurkala My Mother’s Mother’s Mother
In August 1901, the SS Gera arrived in Baltimore carrying passengers from Bremen, Germany. One entry on the manifest recorded a thirteen-year-old girl making the journey that defined Litmanova immigration to Pennsylvania: leaving the Carpathian mountains behind and sailing toward coal country. Her name was Anna Hurkala. Her destination: her parents.
She was thirteen years old.
A Village Already Moving
Those of you following this series from the beginning have already met Anastasia Hlinka and heard what life in Litmanova demanded of a family. (See: She Lost Two Children, Then Crossed an Ocean to Build a New Life). The conditions pushing families out of the Kingdom of Hungary were relentless. By 1901, the wave of Litmanova immigration to Pennsylvania was already well underway. Neighbors were going. The Marcisak family was going. Friends were going.
The question for the Hurkala family was no longer whether to leave. It was how, and when, and in what order.
Her father Constantinus had left first, departing Bremen on June 28, 1900, on the H.H. Meier and arriving in Baltimore the following month. He was one of countless Litmanova men who immigrated to Pennsylvania ahead of their families to find work and establish a foothold. Then, in the summer of 1901, it was Anna’s turn. Her mother Anastasia’s timing remains less certain — she was in Pennsylvania by 1903, when the family’s son Michael was born there, but exactly when she crossed we don’t yet know.
(For more about Litmanova immigration, see “The World Around Them: My 2x Great Grandparents from Litmanova“).
Not Quite Alone
Anna did not cross entirely alone. Several people from Litmanova were on the SS Gera with her,2 likely bound for the same Pennsylvania coal towns that had drawn so many from their village. In the cramped steerage quarters, those familiar faces from home mattered more than the manifest could record. Chain migration worked this way: each crossing made the next one survivable because someone from your own village had already made the journey.
She was still thirteen, in a foreign port, without her parents on the ship. The manifest recorded her destination. It did not record what she felt.
Baltimore, Then Pennsylvania
Unlike the New York arrivals processed through Ellis Island, both Constantinus and Anna entered the United States through Baltimore. She arrived. She cleared the arrival process. She found her parents in Pennsylvania coal country.
The records carry her that far, and then go quiet for a few years.
Anna in America
Within two years of arriving in Baltimore, Anna married Vasil Marcisak — a young man from Litmanova who had made his own crossing just months before she did. She was approximately fifteen years old. They settled in Pennsylvania coal country, raised a large family, and eventually made their way to New York. Her younger sister Katharine eventually followed, arriving in 1908, and married Nicolaus Marcisak — the brother of Anna’s own husband. (See: “When Sisters Married Brothers: A Tale of Two Families Intertwined“).
She became Babi. My great-grandmother. I knew her briefly, early in my childhood, before she died when I was about six. I have impressions now, not clear memories. What I wish I had are the questions I didn’t know to ask when I was small.
Think about that span: the thirteen-year-old in steerage on the SS Gera, and the elderly woman who was Babi. The same person. A life stretching from the Carpathian foothills of the Kingdom of Hungary to a Brooklyn household full of grandchildren.
The Quiet Kind of Agency
This week’s prompt asks about a woman with agency. A woman who made a choice that altered her path.
I want to be honest about what the records show. Constantinus and Anastasia made the decisions that brought their family to America. They went first. They were waiting in Pennsylvania when Anna arrived. The manifest records her destination as her parents — their decision, at least in part.
And yet: she went. She crossed. She arrived. Two years later, she chose the man she would spend her life with — a man from home, a familiar face in an unfamiliar country. Anna Hurkala’s immigration story was shaped by forces larger than herself — the poverty of the Kingdom of Hungary, the pull of Litmanova immigration to Pennsylvania, the parents already waiting on the other side of the ocean. But within those forces, she made a life. Those choices, some constrained and some freer, built something that reached forward more than a century to reach me.
That is the quiet kind of agency the records almost never name. But it is agency just the same.
YOUR TURN!
Have you found immigrant ancestors whose choices, bold or quiet, shaped everything that came after? Leave a comment below.
- “Bremen, Germany, Passenger Lists, 1904–1914,” database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 13 July 2025), entry for Anna Hurkala, age 13, female, born 1888, residence Littmanova, arrived Baltimore, Maryland, August 1901, ship Gera; citing passenger list page 261, Bremen passenger departure records. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
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