In this post: Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski married in Leluchów, Poland in 1868 and had three daughters together. Andreas died in 1873, leaving Paraskevia a widow at roughly twenty-four with three small children. She survived. She rebuilt. And through their daughter Julia, something of them crossed an ocean and reached me.
@Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge
This is the eighth and final post for Robin Stewart’s Genealogy Matters Your Sixteens – Storyteller Tuesday Challenge.
Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski
My Mother’s Father’s Mother’s Father and Mother
Every genealogy story has a final frame. This is mine for the Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: two people born in a small mountain village in what is now southern Poland, who married there, raised their daughters there, and, as far as the records show, never left.
Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski matter. Not because their story is dramatic — though it is, once you look closely — and not because I know very much about them. They matter because without them, none of the rest of it exists.
Who They Were
Andreas Knysz was born on 13 August 1844, in Leluchów, Nowy Sącz County, in the region then known as Austrian Galicia. Paraskevia Kowalski was born four years later, on 15 November 1848, in the same village. On 2 November 1868, they married in Leluchów.
Within five years, they had three daughters. Maria arrived on 19 September 1869. Julia followed on 1 May 1871. Rosalia completed the family on 9 October 1873.
That last date matters more than it might appear. Rosalia was not yet ten months old when her father died.
Andreas Knysz died on 30 July 1873. He was twenty-eight years old. His youngest daughter had not yet learned to walk. His wife was twenty-four, in a region where widowed women with small children faced extremely limited options. The crushing economic realities of Austrian Galicia left little margin for loss. Losing a husband and father in that environment was not just grief. It was a survival crisis.
A Note on Village Names
Readers familiar with my earlier post on Julia Dubinsky (See: “The Mystery of Julia Dubinsky: Why Was She Overlooked?”) may notice that I described her birthplace as Dubne. I have since confirmed through the parish records that the family was actually from Leluchów. This kind of discrepancy is not unusual in Galician research. Leluchów is a very small village, and residents often identified themselves by a larger nearby town when speaking with people less familiar with the local geography. Someone who had never heard of Leluchów would likely know Muszyna or Nowy Sącz. The habit of citing the larger, more recognizable place traveled into family stories, ship manifests, and even official documents, leaving researchers like me to untangle the geography one record at a time.
A Widow’s Choice
Paraskevia did what survival required. In 1875, two years after Andreas died, she remarried. Her second husband was Joannes Krzysztofik, and they would go on to have several children together.
If this sounds familiar, it should. I have written before about another ancestor who faced almost the same circumstances in almost the same region. Anastasia Bosak was widowed in Dubne in 1873 — the same year Andreas Knysz died — and remarried within a year to provide security for herself and her young son. (See: “When Survival Required Remarriage: Anastasia Bosak’s Difficult Choice.”) Two women. The same harsh landscape. The same impossible arithmetic. The same pragmatic, courageous answer.
Paraskevia’s remarriage did not erase what she had built with Andreas. Her three Knysz daughters — Maria, Julia, and Rosalia — grew up in a household that had been reshaped by loss and rebuilt by necessity. What became of Maria and Rosalia I have not yet determined. That research remains ahead of me. But Julia, the middle daughter, eventually married Paul Dubinsky and crossed an ocean. That line runs directly to me.
I have not yet fully researched Paraskevia’s children with Joannes Krzysztofik either. Paraskevia did not simply become a footnote after 1875. She had a whole second chapter, and that chapter produced family I have not yet found.
The Daughter Who Left
Julia Knysz married Paul Dubinsky in Poland and followed him to Johnstown, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, where they settled into the tight-knit Carpatho-Rusyn community there. Paul had gone ahead in 1903 to establish himself. Julia arrived in 1906.6 She had grown up watching her mother rebuild a life from loss. She knew how to endure.
Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski do not appear in any American records I have found. They stayed in Leluchów while their daughter sailed for a world they would never see.
I think about that often — not as something sorrowful, necessarily, but as something worth sitting with. Julia left. Her mother did not. The reasons belong to a story I cannot yet tell because the records have not surfaced. What I know is that Julia took something of her parents with her. The faith she practiced in Johnstown, the survival instincts that carried her through the death of her own husband Paul in 1912 and through the hard years that followed, the capacity to endure — these were not things Julia invented for herself. They came from somewhere. They came from a house in Leluchów, from two people whose faces I will likely never see in a photograph.
What Traveled Forward
The most visible thread connecting this family to my life today runs through the Greek Catholic faith. Julia raised her son George as Greek Catholic in Johnstown, likely worshipping at St. Mary’s Byzantine Catholic Church, founded in 1895 to serve the Carpatho-Rusyn community there. George married my grandmother Eva Marcisak on 30 September 1945 at St. Mary’s Greek Catholic Church in Manhattan. My parents married in that same congregation. I attended services there as a child, fascinated by the incense and the distinctive liturgy, even when I could not follow the Slovak spoken in the service. (See: “Love Transcends Time: Three Wedding Stories, One Sacred Legacy“).
Whether the Greek Catholic faith traces back specifically to Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski in Leluchów, I cannot say with certainty. But the faith Julia carried to Pennsylvania came from somewhere in her upbringing, and Leluchów was where that upbringing began. A thread runs through five generations to a little girl sitting in a Manhattan church, wondering at the beauty of something she could not quite name.
Why Searching for Them Matters
I will be candid: I have not found very much about Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski. What I have are real documented facts — a marriage, three births, a death, a remarriage — and I will not speculate beyond what the records show. But the scarcity of documentation is itself part of why they matter.
For most of human history, people like Andreas and Paraskevia left no official footprint beyond church registers. They were village people in a province that Austria regarded with contempt, farming land under conditions designed to keep them poor and dependent. The fact that their marriage record and their daughters’ baptismal records survived at all is something close to a miracle of archival preservation.
My grandfather George grew up without knowing much about his mother Julia’s origins, let alone her parents. My mother knew even less. These ancestors were not passed down through family stories because the family was too busy surviving to look backward.
Searching for Andreas and Paraskevia now, a century and a half after their lives unfolded in that Galician village, is the only form of remembrance available to them. No gravestone with their names has reached me. No photograph. No letter. Just a few lines in a parish register that prove they existed, that they married, that they had daughters, that Andreas died young, and that Paraskevia kept going.
That is enough to build on. And building on it is the work I intend to keep doing.
A Final Word on the Challenge
Eight weeks. Eight couples. Eight windows into lives that were lived fully, painfully, and often invisibly, long before anyone in my family thought to write any of it down.
Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski were not the most dramatic couple in this series. They are not the Plunketts building an Irish immigrant household through illness and early death in Brooklyn. They are not Basilius and Maria Marcisak, watching their children leave for America one by one from a house that grew quieter every year. They are not William and Ellen Dowling, two teenagers from County Kerry who found each other again in New York and built a life neither could have imagined alone.
They were a village couple who married young, lost Andreas too soon, rebuilt around that loss, and raised daughters who carried that resilience forward. One of those daughters crossed an ocean. That daughter’s line reaches directly to me.
They matter because I exist. And I will keep looking for them until the records tell me more.
YOUR TURN:
Are you researching Knysz, Kowalski, or Krzysztofik families from the Nowy Sącz region of southern Poland? I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or connect with me on Facebook.
Note on the featured image: generated using Openart.ai.
- Roman Catholic Parish, Leluchów (Nowy Sącz, Małopolska, Poland), Dubne Liber Copulatorum 1786-1888, Natorium 1788-1840, Mortoreum 1785-1875, entry for Andreas Knysz, baptism 15 August 1844; imaged, “Poland, Church Books, 1568-1990,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6KS9-6LQT : accessed 10 March 2024), digital folder no. 008120491_004_M99W-Q4N, image 13 of 35. ↩︎
- Roman Catholic Parish, Leluchów (Nowy Sącz, Małopolska, Poland), Liber Natorium pagi Dubne 1840-1889, entry for Parasceva Kowalski, baptism 16 November 1848; imaged, “Poland, Church Books, 1568-1990,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6KS9-H4HX : accessed 10 March 2024), digital folder no. 008120491_004_M99W-Q4N, image 19 of 55. ↩︎
- Roman Catholic Parish, Leluchów (Nowy Sącz, Małopolska, Poland), Dubne Liber Copulatorum 1786-1888, Natorium 1788-1840, Mortoreum 1785-1875, entry for Andreas Knysz and Paraskevia Kowalski, marriage 2 November 1868; imaged, “Poland, Church Books, 1568-1990,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6KS7-MWY8 : accessed 21 February 2026), digital folder no. 008120491_003_M99W-Q4F, image 35 of 155. ↩︎
- Roman Catholic Parish, Leluchów (Nowy Sącz, Małopolska, Poland), Liber Natorium pagi Dubne 1840-1889, entry for Andreas Knysz, burial 1 August 1873; imaged, “Poland, Church Books, 1568-1990,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6KSS-Y7JV : accessed 9 March 2024), digital folder no. 008120491_003_M99W-Q4F, image 151 of 155. ↩︎
- Roman Catholic Parish, Leluchów (Nowy Sącz, Małopolska, Poland), Dubne Liber Copulatorum 1786-1888, Natorium 1788-1840, Mortoreum 1785-1875, entry for Joannes Krzysztofik and Paraskevia Kowalski, marriage 21 November 1875; imaged, “Poland, Church Books, 1568-1990,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6KS7-MYVS : accessed 21 February 2026), digital folder no. 008120491_003_M99W-Q4F, image 38 of 174. ↩︎
- Ship Bremen, passenger manifest, arrival New York, New York, 14 June 1906, line 7, Julianna Dubnianski; imaged, “New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7488/records/4010354327 : accessed 24 February 2026), image 121 of 128. ↩︎
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