My father always told me he was Polish, but I was going through some of his old saved papers, and I found my grandfathers (his father) obituary and it said he was born in Hungary-Austria in the 1800’s.
I know they are separate countries, but were they always? Why is it called that?
Quick answer!
And here I thought I might be Austrian.
And about the southern third of present day Poland (Galicia, if you want to look it up, and don’t be confused by the region of the same name in Spain) was a part of Austria-Hungary (the way the name was usually rendered except in Hungary, where, understandably, Hungary came first).
Poland has kind of disappeared in and out of official existence in its history. When my great-grandparents were born, there was no Poland to speak of (in fact, there was no independent Poland at all in the 1800s), and the birth records say my great-granddad was born in Russia, and my great-grandma in Galicia (Austria-Hungary).
Poland was split up by Prussia, Austria and Russia in the late 1700s and not reconstituted until after WWI. Unfortunately it was the same for a lot of ethnicities. Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Lithuanians, and probably a dozen other ethnicities were under the rule of Russia, Prussia/Germany, or Austria-Hungary at various times.
This is why most central and eastern European countries have a mix of different ethnic peoples. Even tiny Slovenia (population 2million) has seizable Italian and Hungarian minorities, with their own newspapers and broadcasting stations.
Strange that, because of the waltzes and sacher tortes and the image of Franz Joseph as a grandfatherly old coot who suffered so many personal tragedies, there’s a nostalgia for the KUK that’s almost or entierly nonexistant for the Russian and Ottoman empires.
This despite the brutality with which the Austro-Hungarians enforced their rule
warning - link to disturbing images of empire-enforcement
Why is that especially brutal? Much worse was happening in 1916!
My Grandfather was a Pole born under Austro-Hungarian rule.n He said it beat the heck out of living in the Russian part of Poland.
Uh, KUK?
I’m not a European history buff, but I’m no slacker, either.
But I just can’t figure out KUK. Can you please elaborate?
I didn’t know this either, but it means kaiserlich und königlich.
Yeah, but have you had a sacher torte? Dude, even Stalin and Hitler would have much better reps these days if better desserts had been developed under them. 
Thanks, MikeS.
FWIW, Austria-Hungary, also known as the Dual Monarchy, was a partial union between the (former Archduchy) Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburg line of Kaisers (the Hohenzollerns did not have exclusive right to this term). It included today’s Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and portions of modern Poland, Romania (Transylvania), Italy, and Ukraine. Each of the above was either part of the Austrian Empire (Austria, Czech Rep., Bosnia, Slovenia, Italian lands) or the Kingdom of Hungary (Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Transylvania, Polish and Ukrainian territories). Separate governments in Vienna and Budapest handled interior affairs for the two countries, and a few unified ministries in Vienna handled foreign affairs, the Army, etc. (The Navy, based in Trieste, was Austrian.)
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The Polish and Ukrainian territories were mostly within Galicia, which from 1867 was part of Austria, not Hungary. Which, in the context of the OP and some of the other posts, is actually quite an important detail.
On this map, which shows the populations in 1910, the Poles are ‘lengyel’ and the Ukrainians ‘rutén’.
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Hungary, of course, had been connected to the Austrian state for centuries before the ausgleich, which occured in 1867. However, Hungarian autonomy within the joint state had had its shares of ups and downs, and rarely was the administration of the Hungarian portion of the Habsburg properties put on a level with the administration of the Austrian side of things.
The history of Central Europe is absolutely fascinating, in large part because, unlike Western Europe, with its small number of post-renaissance states, it continued to have this interesting jumbled mish-mash of governing units, all of which tended to intermarry, and which were at times subordinate to that most unusual of emperors, the Holy Roman Emperor.
There are some wonderful historical maps here, which are quite handy for understanding the genealogical issues.
(My grandmother had always told us her family was Austrian, which, given other bits of oral history, made absolutely no sense. But then I unearthed a document that said her family was from Labowa, a small town now in southern Poland, near Nowy Sacz, not far from the Slovak border. It would have been in Austro-Hungary. Aha! Thus the Austria connection. That was when Grandmom suddenly remembered that her mother spoke Yiddish and Polish, but not German. Then the pieces start to fall into place.)
Those maps were very interesting. My wife’s late father was born in 1916 in a small village due north of Posen. I see from the map that it would have been part of Prussia . I have been researching his genealogy, so I wonder where the original records of his parents and grand-parents would be stored . In present-day Germany or Poland?
Minor nitpick - Poland was restored to sort-of independence by Napoleon until 1815. After that it lingered for a decade and a half as Congress Poland, a possession of the Russian Crown.