Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - my Lithuanian ancestry?

Did Poles and Lithuanians intermarry a lot during the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? I'm just wondering if a lot of Poles have Lithuanian ancestry.

There was flow of settler from Crown to the east, so quite possible that many Lithuanians have Polish ancestry and vise versa.

My friend is just learning about this... I will ask him about it.

Sure, im partly of Lithuanian nobility (Pacewicz or Pacevicius or how blimy they write it)

There had to be many! :)

My friend is learning about this and he says they didn't intermarry a lot, it was more of a political and economic union. The union between England and Scotland is a comparison. Although most Lithuanians did learn Polish but they retained their cultural values.

Unlike today’s highly truncated and ethnically homogenous Poland, prior to the late-18th-century partitions by Russia, Prussia and Austria, the sprawling Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had for centuries been one of Europe’s largest land empires. It bordered on Turkey, straddled the continent from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic up north and included today’s Ukraine, Belarus and parts of Russia. Besides Poles and Lithuanians, its population included Ruthenians (Ukrainians and Belarussians), Germans, Jews, Armenians, Moldavians, Latvians, Turks, Tartars, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and others. That had led to a fair amount of cultural cross-fertilization, intermarriage and linguistic sharing.

I read that most of the Lithuainian elite were "Polanized" in a linguistic-cultural sense. J. Pilsudski was example of this. Don't know how true this is since I've only come across it in secondary sources.

Pacan ?


Well, the best analogy is England and Scotland, I hope it does answer your blooming question :)

PACEWICZ: patronymic for 'son of Pac', a common name in the NE Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian borderlands. Naturally the Lithuanian version is Pacevièius and in Ruthenian it would have been Пацевич. It is often difficult to determine who traces his acnestry to Polonised Lithuanians or Lithuanianised Poles, as that corner of the Commonwealth was one of the most ethnically diversified.

Miłosz tells a funny story about his uncle who upon discovering that Lithuanian nationalism existed decided to support it, but he, like alot of other Lithuanian nationalists from the gentry, couldn't speak Lithuanian and so he set about learning "endless conjugations." The Lithuanian language having spent most of existence in extreme isolation maintained the ultra-complex verbal conjugations of the ancient Indo-European languages, so much so that once unversities in Europe began offering courses in Sanskrit they soon added classes in Lithuanian too, because studying the latter helped one to learn the former.