Week 4 of the Robin Stewart Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: Ancestral Women 2026
Julia Dowling Sten – My Paternal Grandmother and Eva Marcisak Dubinsky – My Maternal Grandmother.
Strong Women
I have always called it the “strong women” photo. It was taken three days after I was born.
Four generations of women in one frame.
Even before I had the language for it, I understood what I was looking at. These were women who showed up.
This week’s prompt asks about inheritance. The values and patterns that travel through generations without a word being spoken.
I inherited something from two grandmothers. I am still figuring out exactly what to call it. But it starts with showing up.
Eva: Born Into Hard Times
Eva Marcisak was born on May 15, 1911, in Mount Braddock, a small coal mining town in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. She was a twin. Her brother Adam did not survive infancy. Her mother, Anna Hurkala, had crossed the Atlantic alone at thirteen, and her father Vasil had built a life in the Pennsylvania coalfields through sheer persistence.
Eva grew up in that world: close-knit, hard-working, immigrant Byzantine Catholic, shaped by the rhythm of the mines and the mutual dependence of families who had very little and shared it anyway.
By 1930 she was in New York, working. Through the Depression years she took whatever work was available: clerk, cleaner, waitress. Never stopping, never settling.
She married George Dubinsky in September 1945. She was thirty-four years old. Their daughter, my mother, arrived in 1947. Their son followed two years later. Eva was thirty-six and thirty-eight. She had built her family on the far side of a long road.
We called her Moms. The name fit. She was the anchor. Strong-willed is the word I reach for when I try to describe her. When I think about what I inherited from my grandmothers, Eva comes first.
She had spent her entire life doing exactly what I now recognize as inheritance: showing up, over and over, no matter what the circumstances required.
I am strong-willed too. I have been told this my entire life. I believe I came by it honestly.
Julia: Rooted in Brooklyn
Julia Elizabeth Dowling was born in 1907 in the Brooklyn house where she would spend her entire life. She grew up in a household that expanded and contracted around her: parents, siblings, aunts, a great-aunt who stayed for decades. (See: “Her Secret to Family Survival? Keep the Door Open” and “One Address, Eight Census Records, 45 Years of Family Survival.”) That house was never quiet and never simple. Managing life inside it required a particular kind of steadiness.
Julia developed her own kind of steadiness. She worked. In 1930, she was an addressographer in a broker’s office. By 1940, she was a typist. She built a professional life in an era when many women were expected not to. She married my grandfather David Sten, a Swedish immigrant and WWII veteran, and had her first child, my father, in 1944, when she was thirty-seven. Her daughter followed when Julia was nearly forty.
She filled her life the same way she filled that house: work, community, and a steady presence in everything she did. Before she married, she sang, and apparently did it with enough enthusiasm that a newspaper took notice.
I do not sing. This trait did not make the journey. 🤣
But this photograph did:
There she is: Julia Dowling Sten, crossing guard, standing her post. She died when I was seven. I do not remember her well. But I have this photo, and I have the stories.
She was born in 1907. The crossing guard photo is from the 1970s. That is sixty-plus years of showing up.
What I Inherited from My Grandmothers
Eva and her mother Anna were survivors in the most literal sense. They came from hard places: the Carpathian foothills, the Pennsylvania coalfields, the New York tenements during the Depression, and they built lives on the other side of each difficulty. Their strength was forged in displacement and scarcity.
Julia’s strength grew from a different soil. She had the Brooklyn house, the family network, the stability that Mary Plunkett Dowling had spent forty years building. Her strength was the strength of rootedness, of a woman who knew exactly where she came from and used that foundation to reach outward.
Two different lives, built on the same instinct: show up and keep going.
The Posture I Inherited
I think about what I inherited from my grandmothers and keep returning to the same answer. I did not inherit Julia’s singing voice. I did not inherit Eva’s china pattern preferences, though I treasure the china itself. What I inherited from my grandmothers is the posture: work hard, be present, show up, and find the joy in it.
Both grandmothers worked before motherhood and did not stop being fully themselves after it. Both married later than the convention of their era and raised their children with intention. Both lived in Brooklyn, loved their families, and left an impression on the people around them that outlasted them.
I have been a paralegal for thirty years. I am also a professional genealogist, a blogger, and a constant student of this work. I had my son at twenty-eight and kept my career while raising him. I show up for this work every week, even when the research is slow and the answers are elusive.
And when I watch my mother now, managing everything she manages with that particular quiet strength, I recognize it. She got it from Eva. Eva carried it from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania, through the tenements of New York, to a home and family she built on the far side of a long road.
I am fairly certain I know where I got it too.
They showed up.
That is what I carry forward.
YOUR TURN!
What did you inherit from your grandmothers? Not objects, but the way you move through the world. I would love to hear your stories in the comments.
- George Dubinsky, photographer, slide photograph of Anna Hurkala Marcisak, Eva Marcisak Dubinsky, and Kirsten M. Max-Douglas’s mother with newborn Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, Brooklyn, New York, 23 August 1969; Max-Douglas Family Papers, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Blue Ash, Ohio, 2026. ↩︎
- Thomas Sten, photographer, slide photograph of Julia Elizabeth Dowling Sten with Kirsten M. Max-Douglas in stroller, Brooklyn, New York, October 1970; Max-Douglas Family Papers, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Blue Ash, Ohio, 2026. ↩︎
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