Biography
Eugene (Joe) Romanowsky was born in Galicia on December 28, 1902. He was the son of Martin Bobowsky’s sister, Anna, and her husband Michael Romanowsky. In the late 1920s Eugene emigrated to Winnipeg where he lived with the Bobowsky family. He was employed as a farm labourer. In December 1928 he contracted tuberculosis. He died in King Edward Memorial Hospital on February 7, 1929.
Angela Bobowsky wrote briefly about Eugene in her memoirs:
My father’s nephew Eugene (our cousin) died in 1929 in his early twenties of tuberculosis about a year after arriving from Poland. He worked on a farm soon after he came to Winnipeg. I remember my mother making many, many sandwiches for him to eat on the way to the farm. When he came home, he told my mother he threw them out the train window because he didn’t feel comfortable eating in front of all the strangers. Maybe they had no food and he spoke no English. He must have been a very shy man.
Footnotes
According to Eugene’s death certificate he was from Horoskol, Gallicia. However there is no contemporary place by that name in Ukraine or Poland. Eugene may have been from Horodok, a town located 20 km west of Lviv.