Anastasia Dudra's father

Anastasia Dudra's father

The only documentation we have for Anastasia [4316], the wife of Demetrius Dudra [4240], is in the birth records of her children, where she is identified as the daughter of Joannes Tylawski.

Since Tylawski (along with its variants Telosky, Tilawsky, etc.) is one of the most common surnames in the Męcina Wielka parish, and since Anastasia was married before the record-keeping began in 1785, I had low hopes of discovering which of the many Joannes Tylawskis in the parish was her father. But as it happens, it was not all that difficult to do so. Here is the methodology I used.

First I needed to find her earliest child. Her first documented birth was that of Michael [113] in 1785, but there is evidence of an earlier child: Anna [4090], whose marriage record, tells us that she was born about 1780. While the record only lists Anna's father, we can assume that Anastasia is Anna's mother since there is no evidence of an earlier wife in the household.

If there were earlier children of Demetrius and Anastasia, they are not known to us, so I assume 1780 to be the beginning of Anastasia's child-bearing years. That would put her likely year of birth around 1760.

That means that in order to find her father, we are looking for a Joannes Tylawski who would be capable of fathering children around 1760.

This query gives us a list of all the Joannes Tylawskis whose deaths were recorded in the parish. By examining the age of death of each one we can discard the children and come with a list of likely candidates:

Only Joannes #2 and #3 are capable of being Anastasia's father, given the assumptions I have made. #2 is the natural choice because he would have been a newlywed of 19 or 20 at the time Anastasia was born. #3 is possible, but I am inclined to believe he is too old to be her father.

It is possible that there is another Joannes who died before record-keeping started, but for the sake of simplicity I will grant Joannes #2 [4004] the honor of being Anastasia's father.

So far Anastasia's death record has not been found, but it would help validate some of these assumptions.