Józef Piłsudski

The Polish landowner Józef Wincenty Piotr Piłsudski, the Piłsudski variety of the Kościesza coat of arms, was born on 22 February 1833 in Rapszany in the Wiłkomierz district as a son of Piotr Paweł Piłsudski and Teodora Urszula Otylia née Butler. Two days later, he was baptized. His godparents were Wincenty Butler with his wife, Tadeusz Butler with his wife, Waleria Butler, and Elżbieta Michałowska. He studied at the gymnasium in Kroże and at the school in Wiłkomierz. Later, he studied agronomy at the Agronomy Institute in Horyhorki in the Mogilev District. During the January Uprising, he was the commissioner of the insurgent government for the Kaunas District.
On 22 April 1863, in Teneniai (Tauragė district), he married Maria née Billewicz, the Mogiła coat of arms, who brought four estates (about 12,000 hectares) as her dowry, including Adamowo and Zułów, and several hundred thousand rubles. In 1874, the manor and buildings belonging to the Zułów estate completely burned down and the family had to move to Vilnius. They had twelve children. Due to their anti-tsarist activities and the arrest of their son Bronisław, the Piłsudskis had to sell all their ancestral property to pay for the commutation of their son’s death sentence to 15 years of hard labor and deportation to the island of Sakhalin.
Józef Wincenty Piłsudski died on 15 April 1902 in St. Petersburg, where he was buried in the Vyborskoye Cemetery.