Jan Stanislaus Kubary was born in Warsaw of Hungarian and German parents. After a brief career as a medical student and stucco worker, he was engaged by the Godeffroy Museum, Hamburg, to collect ethnological and natural history specimens in the Pacific Islands. He left for the Pacific in 1869 and visited Samoa, Ebon and Ponape on his way to the Palau islands. Most of his first collection of specimens was lost in 1874 when the ship Alfred was wrecked at Jaluit. After revisiting Europe, Kubary returned to Micronesia and remained in the employ
of the Godeffroy company until that firm crashed financially in 1879. Thereafter he led a precarious, vagabond existence until his death, but he never ceased collecting.