In This Post: This is a story about what it takes to build a new life — not the triumphant kind, not the fresh-start kind, but the kind that begins in a Carpathian village where you have already buried two of your children and have no choice but to keep going anyway.
Week 1 of the Robin Stewart Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: Ancestral Women 2026
Anastasia Hlinka – my maternal great-great grandmother.
Maria Hurkala was born on the third of January, 1885. She died on the twentieth. She was seventeen days old.
Her mother, Anastasia, was twenty-four. It was winter in Litmanova, a small Greek Catholic village tucked into the Carpathian foothills of what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, now northeastern Slovakia. The church register recorded the burial. The village moved on. So did Anastasia.
This is her story. Not the dramatic parts, though there are those, too. The steady parts. The daily parts. The part where you get up the next morning and do it again.
A Village, and What Was Left There
Litmanova in the 1880s was a world unto itself. Greek Catholic families like the Hurkalas had farmed and worshipped and buried their dead in this same valley for generations. The church was the center of everything: baptisms, marriages, deaths, all recorded in its registers. It is because of those registers that we know Maria at all.
Anastasia Hlinka and Constantinus Hurkala had six children. Two of them are buried in Litmanova.
Maria came first and barely stayed, seventeen days in January 1885. Then, one by one, the children who lived: Maria (Mary) in 1886, Anna in 1888, Katharine in 1890. Three daughters in four years, all healthy, all growing.
And then Petrus, born 2 February 1893. He lived long enough to be known, long enough to walk, perhaps, to say a word or two in that particular way small children do, before he died on 5 August 1894, seventeen months old.
Two children buried. Four children living. The years between those losses were ordinary years, which is another way of saying they were full: of bread and laundry and the particular exhaustion of raising three small girls in a mountain village while pregnant, or nursing, or both. Anastasia’s endurance didn’t look like anything remarkable from the outside. It looked like showing up.
The Interval
In June 1900, Constantinus left for Pennsylvania.
This was not unusual. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men from Litmanova and the surrounding villages crossed the Atlantic by the thousands, drawn by the coal and steel industries of western Pennsylvania. Many intended to work for a few years and return. Some sent for their families instead.
Constantinus arrived in June 1900. The records place him in Pennsylvania; they do not yet tell us exactly when Anastasia packed up the household and followed. What we know is this: their youngest child, Michael, was born in Pennsylvania, which means Anastasia made the crossing, with three children, sometime between 1900 and approximately 1902.
Sit with that for a moment. She had already buried a seventeen-day-old infant and a seventeen-month-old son in the soil of that village. She had raised three daughters to girlhood there. And now she closed the house, gathered the children, and left.
The ocean crossing in steerage would not have been a romantic journey. For most immigrants of that era, the passage was grueling: weeks below deck, crowded conditions, unfamiliar food, and the uncertainty of what waited on the other side. She arrived, as so many did, into a country whose language she did not speak. And she kept going.
Star Junction, Fayette County
The family settled in Star Junction, a coal company town in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. It was the kind of place that had sprung up fast around the mines: rows of company houses, a company store, men who went underground in the dark and came up in the dark. Many of the families around them would have been familiar: other Litmanova families, other Slovak Greek Catholics who had made the same crossing.
See: “The World Around Them: My 2x Great Grandparents from Litmanova“
Michael was born here. Pennsylvania-born, the last of her children, the one who came into the world after the ocean, after the loss of a country, after whatever it costs a woman to start over.
Anastasia ran her household in Star Junction for the better part of two decades. What did endurance look like in daily life there? It looked like coal dust on everything. It looked like cooking for a family on a miner’s wages. It looked like speaking Slovak at home and watching your children learn English faster than you. It looked like the ordinary Tuesday, the one that doesn’t make it into any record, the one where nothing notable happened except that you were still there.
What Remained
Anastasia Hlinka died on 18 January 1917. She was fifty-six years old. The mines were still running. The war was still on in Europe, the same part of Europe she had left fifteen years before.
She did not live to see her son Michael grow up. He died in 1934, at about thirty-one, the Pennsylvania-born child, the one who came after. She did not live to see that loss.
What she did leave: three daughters who lived into extraordinary old age. Mary died in 1972 at eighty-six. Anna, my great-grandmother, died in 1975 at eighty-seven. Katharine died in 1977 at eighty-six. Anna and Katharine would eventually make their way to New York City, carrying the family forward into a new borough, a new generation, a new century. Between the three of them, they spanned nearly a century of American life, rooted in a village in the Carpathians and transplanted far from the coal fields where it all began.
I cannot know what Anastasia felt when she buried Maria in January 1885, or Petrus in August 1894. I cannot know what she thought on the ship, or on the morning she first saw Star Junction. The records don’t give us that.
But they give us this: she was there. She kept arriving. Whatever she carried across that ocean, her daughters carried forward. Strong women, generation after generation. And here I am, because she kept going.
Anastasia Hlinka | b. 15 April 1860, Litmanova, Slovakia | d. 18 January 1917, Star Junction, Fayette County, Pennsylvania Maternal/Maternal line
YOUR TURN!
This post is part of my StoryTeller Tuesday March series — four weeks of stories about the women in my direct line. Did your ancestors survive devastating loss before they emigrated? I’d love to hear their stories in the comments.
- Litmanová, Stará Ľubovňa, Slovakia, Matricula Baptisatorum, 1885, pages 8–9, line 1, Maria, born 3 January 1885, baptized 4 January 1885, died 20 January 1885; imaged, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9R79-9WL1 : accessed 2 December 2025), image group number (IGN) 004948451 > images 11 and 12 of 175. ↩︎
- Litmanová, Stará Ľubovňa, Slovakia, Matricula Baptisatorum, 1893, pages 85–86, line 7, Petrus, born 2 February 1893, baptized 4 February 1893, died 5 August 1894; imaged, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9R79-9WZY : accessed 2 December 2025), image group number (IGN) 004948451 > image 46 of 175. ↩︎
- George Dubinsky, photographer, slide photograph of Anna Hurkala and Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, Brooklyn, New York, 1970; Max-Douglas Family Papers, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Cincinnati, Ohio, 2026. ↩︎
- George Dubinsky, photographer, slide photograph of Katharine Hurkala and Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, Brooklyn, New York, 1970; Max-Douglas Family Papers, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Cincinnati, Ohio, 2026. ↩︎
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