Well, actually it was when Susanna met Johann, according to the Latin in their 1842 marriage record. She was nineteen and he was...ahem...thirty three, an age disparity which, in my in-laws' era, would prompt the local officials to alert the newspaper editor, "don't publish ages" in the legal notices.
But it wasn't even Susanna and Johann, I suspect, back in their home town of Lubichowo, where their native Polish tongue would likely have labeled them Zuzanna and Jan.
The two of them tied the knot on January 24, 1842, bringing together two families from the same village, the Radomskis on the bride's side and the Puchałas—whoever they were—from the groom's side of the aisle. The sixteen years of their marriage—no surprise here to learn that, with the age disparity, Jan died in 1858—yielded the births of at least five children, though the tragedy of the time was that most of those descendants died in infancy.
After the birth of the first and second of the Puchała children (at least that I can find), an age gap was followed by the birth and subsequent loss of three infants: Andrzej in 1851, Franciszek in 1855, and Katarzyna in 1857, after which their father, himself, followed suit. There may, of course, be other children, but none that I've been able to find so far.
Of the other two, daughter Marianna and son Thomas, Zuzanna would eventually live to see several grandchildren, with almost all of them—at least if they survived childhood—remaining in Lubichowo. While I have yet to find a death record for Zuzanna, an entry at the PTG website indicated an eighty six year old woman by that name died in 1909. If that was our Zuzanna—or Susanna—she lived a long but tragedy-ridden life in the rural north of what is now Poland. Whether we can learn anything more about what life was like in the region around Lubichowo, I can't yet say, but I'll be digging until I find something to paint a clearer picture of this couple and their family.
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