Surname Saturday - Mapping Polish surnames

There are many resources that can help you get a handle on your ancestors' surnames. One helpful resource are tools that can be used to map the frequency and distribution of a particular surname. These can tell you whether the name is specific to a particular region or is common throughout the country. If the name is relatively uncommon, these tools can help you narrow your search considerably. There are tools like this for many countries, including Poland. The site where you can map your Polish surnames is in Polish, but you should be able to figure out a lot just by context. Enter your surname in the box and click szukaj, which means "search".

There are two different types of maps one that gives the total number of the surname (Podział kompletny) and one that gives relative frequencies (Podział relatywny). To switch between the two types of maps click on these phrase to the right of a blue arrow.

With more common surnames the relative frequency map will be more useful because the absolute number will be highest in big cities, so you won't get the proper picture of where the name is most popular.

Also, pay close attention to the key for the map. The magnitude for the numbers will be quite different for a very common name like Nowak and a less common one like Szeszycki. The construction od...do... means "from...to...." and więcej niż means "more than". For Nowak the red is for "more than 2000".

But for Szeszycki, it is for "more than 12". This is a big difference.

The subdivision shown on the map is that of the county, or powiat. You can identify the county by moving the cursor over the map. For Szeszycki, you will find that the name is most common in the counties of Gniezno, Słupca and Krotoszyn, three counties, all in the province of Wielkopolska, or Greater Poland. This provides a place to start in your search.

Surname Saturday: Szeszycki

Exploring your Polish roots can be intimidating. This is understandable; Polish presents a number of challenges, but these challenges are not insurmountable.

One difficulty is the writing system. For Europe, Polish and other Slavic languages have a relatively large number of consonants (see The World Atlas of Language Structures). When the Latin alphabet was adapted to fit the sounds of Slavic languages like Polish and Czech, new letters and combinations of letters have to be used. Words beginning with "szcz" are enough to send anyone running for the hills. This combination of sounds is similar to the English "sh" sound followed by the English "ch" sound. Think of the phrase "Irish cheese". However, unlike English, this combination can start a word.

Knowing even a little about how these combinations are pronounced can go a long way in demystifying the language. A name like "Szeszycki" is more manageable when you realize that the "sz" is not too different from English "sh".

"Daily", "Journal", "Dziennik" all mean genealogical gold

Newspapers are an often overlooked source of genealogical information. Obituaries are obvious, but newspapers may also include birth and marriage announcements or local news related to your ancestors. If your ancestor died under tragic circumstances, it is possible that the death will be mentioned in the news section. I was having trouble finding an obituary for my 3rd great grandfather, Daniel Foster, but I did find a brief account of his death in a newspaper from a neighboring county. He was a justice of the peace and died while trying a case.

When researching immigrant ancestors, make sure to search not only English language newspapers, but the newspapers published by the ethnic community to which your ancestors belonged. You may only be able to find your ancestors in their community newspaper. Even if there was an obituary or death notice in an English-language newspapers, there may also be an additional one in a foreign-language newspaper and, most importantly, the content may be different. Different cultures may have different conventions and traditions about what is included in the death notice.

The first step is locating the newspapers. A good place to start is the website for the NEH's United States Newspaper Program, which lists the state archives which are involved in the preservation of historical newspapers. Another good resource is the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Michigan, where you can browse newspapers by ethnic group (here). Some of these newspapers may be digitized alread, but many will have to be accessed on microfilm at the archive or through interlibrary loan.

You should also check genealogical societies and organizations dedicated to particular ethnic communities. The Polish Genealogical Society of America (PGSA) has searchable indexes for death notices in Polish-language newspapers in Chicago, Baltimore and Milwaukee, which will make the task of locating these records much easier. Be careful, because the given name used will probably be the Polish form of the name, not the English form which may be used in other records. My wife's great grandfather went by the name "Walter" Szeszycki in English, but in his death notice in Dziennik Chicagoski, a Polish language daily in Chicago, he is "Władysław". It may be helpful to use other sources like the Illinois Statewide Death Index to be sure you have the right person.

The PGSA also shows how to obtain the record and provides a valuable translation guide for Polish death notices. Although it is geared specifically to the death notices in Dziennik Chicagoski, it is also useful for translating other types of Polish records relevant to your genealogical research.

Dealing with synthetic structures in Latin

In a previous post, I talked about two different ways of organizing language and then in a later post showed how to deal with possessives in French. Today, I want to discuss another way that languages indicate the meaning of and relationships between words. In many languages, a word will change form depending on its function. In language like English or French, much of the work is accomplished by using separate words. In Latin, the same is achieved by changing the endings of the word. Let's see how this applies to possessives in Latin

Take the following church record:

Many of the names are no doubt very familiar looking, but have unfamiliar endings.

Ladislaum
Antoni
Mariae
Catharinam
Stanislai
Vincentius
Francisca

There are two different sets of endings, a masculine set (-us, -i and -um) and a feminine set (-a, -ae and -am). You are probably familiar with the ending -us and -a from famous Roman names like Julius, Octavius and Augustus or their feminine forms Julia, Octavia and Augusta. This form is called the nominative and is the form which you can look up in the dictionary. The two other forms have different funtions. The endings -um and -am are the accusative endings used to indicate the object of a verb.

Julius amat Octaviam.
Octaviam amat Julius.
Julius Octaviam amat.

These three sentences all mean the same thing; the word order isn't important, the endings are everything. The final pair of endings (-i and -ae) are the most important for identifying possessives. These forms are called genitive and are used to mark the possessor.

We can now return to the marriage document. Let's take a single line.


We have an ampersand (&), which is a special form of the conjunction et "and". We have two names, Stanislai and Antoninae. Both are in the genitive and should be translated as "of Stanislaus" and "of Antonina". The final puzzle is the word filiam. Now you should be able to recognize this as an accusative form and look up the form filia in a Latin dictionary. You will discover that it means "daughter". The line above means "daughter of Stanislaus and Antonina"

You should now be able to identify and translate these types of structures providing family relationships in Latin documents.

In the company of saints

It is useful to learn the words for "saint" in the languages of your ancestors. Saint names occur in surnames, church names and many place names. Knowing these words can help you make sense of records by letting you identify the names of people and places. In English, these terms are fairly simple; we use the same form for both male and female saints and have a single abbreviation St. In many European languages, there are different forms for different genders, and sometimes abbreviations and other special forms before names.

Saint in Spanish
In Spanish, the masculine form for "saint" is santo and the feminine form is santa. However, when followed by a name, the masculine form is usually the reduced form San, as in San Francisco (Saint Francis). Some exceptions with the full form include Santo Domingo and Santo Tómas.

Saint in French
In French, the masculine form is written the same as in English, saint, and the feminine form has an extra "e", sainte. In saints names, these are typically abbreviate to St. and Ste., respectively. These abbreviated forms are very common in French Canadian place names and even in the US, such as St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve in Missouri. Labels on records in the Drouin Collection ($ Ancestry) point to the towns of St.-Evariste-de-Forsyth (Pope Evaristus) and Ste.-Marie (St. Mary).

Saint in Polish
While the words for "saint" in French, Spanish and many other languages are quite similar to English, in other languages they are unrecognizable. Take German Heilige (hl.), Albanian shenjtori (Sh.), Czech Svatý (Sv.), Finnish Pyhä or Polish Święta (św.).

Let's look at an obituary from a Polish newspaper in Chicago. We know that names of saints will be preceded by the abbreviation św. We can also guess that an obituary might mention a church or a cemetery. Looking up "church" and "cemetery" in a Polish dictionary gives us kościół and cmentarz.

We can identify four separate "saints". Having looked up the words for church and cemetery, we can make out a Church of "św. Jana Bożego" and a cemetery of "św. Marii". Using an educated guess and confirming it, we find that the church is St. John of God and the cemetery is St. Mary, a cemetery on the South Side of Chicago. The other "saints" are not as clear, but a little more digging reveals the first saint to be St. Casimir, which is related to a society he belonged to, and the fourth saint is not really a saint, but refers to the "blessed" sacraments. This points to the original meaning of "saint" which is "holy". English is actually unusual in the fact that it distinguishes between holy people (saints) and other holy things (Holy Family, Holy Trinity, etc.).

One Nation, One Language, Not Necessarily

The connection between one's country and one's language is taken for granted by most of us. We assume that someone in France speaks French, someone in Germany speaks German, someone in Poland speaks Polish, and so on. While not always foolproof, this is now a fairly safe statement for many countries. However, when dealing with our ancestors, one must be careful about making assumptions about the languages they spoke. Empires like Prussia, Russia and Austria encompassed many different ethnic groups speaking as many different languages. For those researching Polish ancestors, it is not uncommon to find the country of origin listed as Prussia (or Germany), Russia or Austria, since all three empires controlled parts of what is now Poland from 1815 to the end of World War I. A map of Europe in 1815 shows how the current territory of Poland was divided between these three powers. Warsaw was in the Russian Empire, Krakow (Cracow) in the Austrian Empire, and Gdansk (Danzig) and Wrocław (Breslau) in the Prussian/German Empire. Borders change over time and thus depending on the. time period you may get different answers to questions of origin.

Take Walter Barney Szeszycki. Based solely on citizenship documents, you might assume that as a former subject of Germany he may have primarily been a speaker of German.

However, other evidence shows that this was not the case. The above document is no reason to discount family traditions which have always ascribed Barney with a Polish identity. The surname is decidedly Polish and not German (note that names can be tricky and may not always match with identities and languages). Finally, other documents provide clear support for Barney as a speaker of Polish. His church marriage record is much more specific about his place of origin, giving a village and the province of Posen.

The Province of Posen, although a part of Prussia and later the German Empire, had a Polish ethnic majority. Any doubt about Barney's language can be eliminated by examining census records. Some later censuses provide information not only about the place of birth but also about mother tongue. Documents after WWI show a shift from Germany to Poland as the place of birth and clear mention of Polish as Barney's mother tongue, as can be seen in the 1920 census.


The question of what languages our ancestors spoke can be a complicated one. We should always be careful about the assumptions we make about them. Clues about your ancestors' languages can be uncovered by doing research about the places they lived and about the origin of their surnames in addition to an exhaustive examination of the available documents. Special care needs to be taken when dealing with ancestors from certain parts of the world, such as Central and Eastern Europe.