Family
Gabriel Narutowicz was born into a Polish-Lithuanian noble family in Telšiai, in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire (earlier partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). His father, Jan Narutowicz, was a local district judge and also a landholder in the Samogitian village of Brėvikiai. As a result of his participation in the January 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, he was sentenced to a year of imprisonment; he died when Gabriel was only one year old.
Gabriel’s mother, Wiktoria Szczepkowska, was Jan's third wife. Following her husband's death she raised her sons herself. An educated woman, intrigued by the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment, she had a great influence on the development of Gabriel and his siblings' world view. In 1873 she moved to Liepāja, Latvia, so that her children would not have to attend a Russian school, since after the Uprising of 1863, Russification was less strongly enforced there.
After Lithuania regained independence in 1918, Gabriel Narutowicz’s brother, Stanisław Narutowicz, became a Lithuanian citizen. Earier towards the end of World War I, Stanisław became a member of the Council of Lithuania, the provisional Lithuanian parliament. He signed the Lithuanian Act of Independence of 16 February 1918.
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Famous quotes containing the word family:
“... a family I know ... bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The touchstone for family life is still the legendary “and so they were married and lived happily ever after.” It is no wonder that any family falls short of this ideal.”
—Salvador Minuchin (20th century)