When Survival Required Remarriage: Anastasia Bosak’s Difficult Choice

In this post: Exploring genealogy Austrian Galicia through the story of Anastasia Bosak, a widowed woman who faced an impossible choice in 1874.

@Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge

This post is the third for Robin Stewart’s Genealogy Matters Your Sixteens – Storyteller Tuesday Challenge.

A Choice They Had to Make: Basilius Dubnianski & Anastasia Bosak
My Mother’s Father’s Father’s Father and Mother

In the winter of 1874, twenty-eight-year-old Anastasia Bosak faced a choice that thousands of widowed women in Austrian Galicia confronted: remarry quickly or face near-certain destitution. Her first husband, Stephanus Dubnianski, had died the previous year, leaving her with at least one young child—Jacobus, born in 1871—in one of the poorest provinces in all of Europe.

A Land Called “Naked and Hungry”

Anastasia had been born on December 26, 1845, in Dubne, a small village in Nowy Sącz County, Poland. Her entire life unfolded within Austrian Galicia, a province so notorious for its crushing poverty that locals mockingly called it “Golicja i Głodomeria”—wordplay incorporating the Polish words for “naked” and “hungry.”¹ Researching genealogy Austrian Galicia requires understanding these brutal conditions that shaped every family decision.

The statistics were devastating. Female life expectancy in rural Galicia was just 28.5 years.³ Regular famines killed an average of 50,000 people annually. The Austrian government deliberately prevented industrialization, maintaining Galicia as an agricultural supplier while extracting wealth for the empire’s benefit.

This was the world in which Anastasia had to make her choice.

The Crisis

In 1868, at age twenty-two, Anastasia married Stephanus Dubnianski, who lived at house number 33 in their community. Their son Jacobus arrived in 1871. Then, in 1873, Stephanus died. Anastasia was twenty-seven years old with a young child to feed and no means of support in a society that offered widowed women virtually no economic options.

Widowed women in 1870s Austrian Galicia couldn’t own property, couldn’t access most employment, and faced systematic barriers to economic survival. For a young widow with a child, the choices were stark: remarry quickly, rely on extended family charity, or face destitution.

The Strategic Alliance

In 1874, just one year after Stephanus’s death, Anastasia married Basilius Dubnianski. The surname match is striking—both husbands shared the Dubnianski family history, suggesting some connection within their small community. Basilius lived at house number 40, not far from Stephanus’s former home. For researchers tracing genealogy Austrian Galicia, these remarriages within the same community or family network were common survival strategies.

Basilius himself had recently experienced loss. He appears to have been previously married to Matrona Slota, who died in 1873—the same year as Stephanus. Like Anastasia, Basilius faced the challenge of continuing life after devastating loss. Whether the arrangement represented family obligation or practical necessity, it offered both a chance at survival.

This remarriage gave Anastasia and young Jacobus what they desperately needed. The union also created new life: Paul and Anna, born to Anastasia and Basilius together.

Paul would become my great-grandfather, the link connecting Anastasia’s difficult choice in 1874 to my existence today. Tracing Bosak surname genealogy through these Polish genealogy records reveals how one woman’s constrained choice created an entire American family line.

A Life Cut Short

Tragically, Anastasia’s time was brief. She died in 1879 at age thirty-three, having lived only five years past the average female life expectancy for her region. We don’t yet know the cause of her death, though it seems more than coincidental that her daughter Anna may have died the same year.

She never lived to see the great wave of emigration that would bring millions of Eastern Europeans to America. But her descendants—including Paul—would eventually emigrate, carrying forward the family line she had struggled to maintain in those difficult years in Dubne.

What the Choice Meant

For Anastasia Bosak in 1874, remarrying Basilius Dubnianski wasn’t a choice between equally viable paths. It was necessity disguised as decision. Understanding genealogy Austrian Galicia means recognizing these constraints our ancestors faced. Anastasia’s choice in 1874 created ripples that extended far beyond her brief lifetime, creating a future that reached across an ocean and spanned more than a century to touch my life today.

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Your turn! Are you researching ancestors from Austrian Galicia? I’d love to hear about the survival strategies and difficult choices you’ve discovered in your own family tree. Leave a comment below or connect with me on Facebook.

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1. “Poverty in Austrian Galicia,” Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Austrian_Galicia: accessed 28 June 2025). ↩︎
2. “Dubne (HB2).jpg,” digital image, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dubne_%28HB2%29.jpg : accessed 19 January 2026). ↩︎
3. “Scholderer Surname Study: Chronicles of the Scholderer Family Lineage, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austro-Hungarian Empire,” Scholderer.org (https://scholderer.org/web_data/: accessed 26 June 2025). ↩︎

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