Fannie Glowska
Fannie Glowska was born in Austria, probably between 1870 and 1875. Her daughter Eva named her twice in Social Security filings, once as Fannie Glowska and once as Fannie Glowacka. Her gravestone calls her Fannie, and her cemetery memorial gives her name as Anna "Fannie" Glowski. Anna may have been her baptismal name, with Fannie the name she went by.
"Austria" in the American censuses of her day meant the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It took in Galicia, the province that is now split between southern Poland and western Ukraine, along with Bohemia and other lands. In 1910 the census taker wrote her birthplace as "Aust. Ruthenian". Ruthenians, also called Rusyns, were the East Slavic villagers of Galicia and the Carpathian foothills, who belonged to the Greek Catholic or Orthodox church. In 1920 she and her husband gave their mother tongue as Russian. Her home village is not known.
She married Theodore Kukolax about 1899, before either of them left Austria: in 1910 both said they had been married eleven years. She gave her arrival in America as 1904 in 1910 and as 1900 in 1920, the same years her husband gave. Neither of them had been naturalized by 1920, and neither could read or write, though both could speak English. They settled in Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Fannie was in Jersey City before her husband's last crossing. When Theodore landed at Ellis Island on 12 November 1903, coming back from Galicia on the steamship Pennsylvania, he gave the officers the name of the person he was going to: "wife Fanny Kukulak", at 141 Essex Street, Jersey City. Kukulak was the family's surname at home; Kukolax is the spelling it settled into in Jersey City. His last residence was Krosno, in the west of Galicia, so that district is very probably where the couple married about 1899.
In May 1910 Fannie, 35, was keeping house at 120 Dudley Street in Jersey City. Besides her husband and three small children she had eight Ruthenian boarders under her roof: five men who worked for an oil company and three young people who stripped tobacco. She told the census taker that she had borne six children and that three of them were living.
Fannie and Theodore had five children who lived, all born in Jersey City: Anna on 13 August 1906, Andrew about 1907, Daniel on 24 October 1909, John about 1912, and Eva in November 1914. On 1 January 1920 the family of seven was living together in the Sixth Ward of Jersey City. Fannie was 49. Theodore, 50, worked as a laborer in a factory. Anna, Andrew and Daniel were at school.
A Jersey City directory of 1923 lists Theodore with his wife Annie. In April 1930 the census found Fannie, 60, still in Jersey City with Theodore and all five children at home, the youngest, Eve, aged 15.
Her daughter Eva married Frank Lasky in 1932. Eva's first child, Frank Charles Lasky, was born on 1 January 1933. Fannie died in Jersey City eleven weeks later, on 22 March 1933.
She is buried in Bayview-New York Bay Cemetery in Jersey City. Her red granite stone is shared with Theodore, who was buried beside her in 1946. It reads "THEO. KUKOLAX" above "HIS WIFE FANNIE", and gives her years as 1858 to 1933. Carved across the top are a large Latin cross and, behind it, a smaller cross with a slanted lower bar, the form used by the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches of Eastern Europe.
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Cite: Heirology, "Fannie Glowska (d. 1933)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/fannie-glowska-1870-1933-fbebb1.