The Many Facets of One Woman's Life

 

Nearly a Christmas baby, Agnes Laskowska entered her parents' life in Żerków on December 22, 1851. Baptism had to wait until after the beginning of the new year. That detail became only one of the many facets of the story of this third child of Mateusz Laskowski and Elżbieta Gramlewicz.

I'm tempted to read between the lines on this child's story, but perhaps such an attempt would be misleading. Still, I can't help but imagine a life filled with sorrows—or at least see a picture of challenges.

When Agnes was twenty two, she married Alexius Szumski. The wedding was followed soon afterwards with the arrival of daughter Victoria, then son Ludwig and, finally, their son Joseph. 

While that may portray a family well on their way to a full and happy life, that was not the case here. Not long after Ludwig's arrival in 1878, life began to unravel for the Szumski family. Before Alexius and Agnes could welcome their third child, they were struck with the death of their daughter Victoria in November 1880, barely a week before her sixth birthday.

There was more to come. The couple lost their third child, Joseph, at the start of 1882—a year in which Alexius himself was to die that following July, leaving thirty year old Agnes a widow.

As often happened during that era of history, Agnes then married again in 1887. Now the bride of Ignatz Giernatowski, the newlywed couple soon welcomed their daughter Pelagia on January 17, 1888.

Perhaps as a way to remove themselves from the site of so many sorrows, Ignatz and Agnes afterwards decided to make the move from their home of many generations in Żerków to the United States. By 1900, they were living in Brooklyn, the part of New York City where so many of my other Polish family members had moved. Agnes' sad report in the census that she had been the mother of four, of whom only one remained, leads me to suspect that perhaps the language barrier and tendency to attempt spelling phonetically yielded Pelagia's name in that record as "Blanch."

It is probably owing to that same language barrier that I've been unable to trace any further details on Ignatz Giernatowski, but the New York City Municipal Death Index revealed that Agnes died on April 23, 1926.

It is fairly clear, once reviewing the many facets of Agnes Laskowska's life, why she might have had a clear motivation to move so far from all that was familiar in her childhood hometown. As for her two siblings who also emigrated, the story might not appear so clearly—until we blend the three siblings' stories into one timeline, and add another possible factor. We'll take a look at the threads in that story tomorrow.