Polish Gypsy Roots & Roma ancestors in their families

She is very good looking!

Yes..i was instantly attracted...

I am sure you were!

If you had told me twenty years ago that i would be planning on marrying a Russian gypsy i would have laughed very loud , i knew very little about Gypsy culture , other than they do not have a very good reputation in my native UK , mind you , the people who cause a few problems in the UK , are not true Gypsies....Mind you , if you had told me twenty years ago i would be living on the wrong side of the Berlin wall i would also have found that rather amusing , but yet , here i am...!

No doubt i will learn much more about Gypsy culture from my lady , she is very proud of her roots , and if she is a typical example of a Gypsy , then they have had a pretty bad deal from the world in terms of how they are thought of...

My lady is kind , honest , inteligent , and is much loved by the children she teaches in Moscow , and it hasnt escaped my notice she is rather pretty too... Its certainly changed my idea,s of what a gypsy is...

I am sure there are the bad ones around the world , but to say they are all bad is very wrong.... I am still wondering if Polish and Russian gypsies are part of the same tribe in the days when borders moved around much more , or did not exist...?

Isn,t the internet a wonderfull thing...? after having a search on the internet i have discovered that the Ruska Roma , the Russian Gypsies are in fact decended from the Polska Roma , so it seems my Russian lady has a little Polish blood mixed in with the Russian..?

No one really cares about it.

Wait till you see the 1.5 million yugoslav gypsies.

Its ok...i already have one Gypsy...i think one is enough for my needs...

I am third-generation American but I believe that I come from Polish Gypsy family that immigrated to the U.S. They were 'runaway' Gypsies....never wanted anyone to know anything about them. They assimilated into the population. Since a small child, I always believed there were Gypsies in my family. I am not sure why I knew this, but perhaps my grandmother said something to me as a little girl. When I had an mtDNA test done, I discovered that I am U3b which is one of the predominant haplogroups of Polish, Lithuanian, and Spanish Roma. I believe there are a lot of us in the U.S. who descend from 'runaway' Gypsies. My people were small, dark-skinned, and dark-haired and they were somehow involved in circus business. They were Polish-speaking.

I am looking for any information on an order called the Golden Orb; the covenant of the ancient line of Seldeac(K ot t maybe). It has to do with a gypsy connection Madame Mojeska (famous Polish Acotr from the 19th-early 20th century) had when she was a child in Poland and then continued to practice in secret as an adult. Has anyone ever heard of this order or can point me in this direction. It has to do with the Ancient Goddess tradition I think. I am doing research so any help would be useful. Thanks.

i spent quite some time in poland ,in the NE,back in 05, having meet plenty of irish gypsies in passing and usualy feeling uncomfortable i can honestly say of the polish gypsies i met in passing i never felt so, i was told by my polish friends ,these are gypsies and so on but mmy first day in a town called elk I watch from a window the world go by ,and was pleased by the sight of a polish gypsy man and some boys from his family amble along a back street with a bucket of fish and some fishing poles stoping with a elderly (polish) man and giving him a couple of fish...... i dont care what country, colour, creed,race, whatever ,you will find very good and usually very bad aswell ,dont get me wrong there are plenty of very good irish gypsies but their overall apperance and fairly loud behaviour can be unsettling but i feel they have good reason

Hi there,

I have gypsy roots and I come from Poland. My dad was a half gypsy... I have olive skin, brown eyes and dark brown hair. My father looked more like gypsy, but still I am a little Gypsy :)

My father, of German descent yet born in Poland told me a story of his estate in Poland where the Gypsies would camp on his family's estate every year as they were doing their migration rounds. He never said anything bad about them, in fact he had more of a concern over their safety during the Nazi regime because the Gypsies were also targeted as a group of undesirables. It is estimated that quarter to a half a million gypsies were were killed in concentration camps. The upside of this story was that years later my father came home all excited. He had gone to a local country fair and there were "his Gypsies" as he liked to call them. Somehow they had managed to immigrate to Canada. As to the derogatory characteristic or stereotyping that some writers like to call Gypsies, every race/religions have bad people....please stop the stereotyping, that's what causes wars.

Wow most of you people on this page are sooo ignorant and racist its unbelievable.... I'm full Polish Gypsy and I was brought up the gypsy way... and I go to college and want to get into design, and if you can't tell I can read and write... you ignorant arseholes dont know two fucks about how we live our lifes ssoo stop judging... We just tend to stay away from the government because our rules clash with theirs... and we sort out punishments for crimes in our community our selves... we don't need government and police and yet we have managed to keep our laws stable. Gypsies dont dare break the rules because of the shame it brings to their families...It doesn't even cross their mind to use weapons such as guns and knives, that's with out question, situations were gypsies actually used weapons were delt with accordingly, people like these were probably thrown out the family and looked at disgust for the rest of their lives. The media portrays Gypsies as ones who steal, rob etc but that's a small minority... In actual fact we are very intelligent people who don't have to blend in with society and idolise corrupted governments to fulfil our lives and live in peace! ..... oh ya and our traditional dancing, clothes, and food are fuckin great! I'm so hungry now !:D

I suspect that my ancestors may have been gypsy. Their name - Adamski - and their village of Cygany in southeast Poland was an area of gypsy camps. I'm just beginning my research by trying to determine if, indeed, my great-grandfather's first name was Ęrnie. If so, I need to know what its full name would have been. Any suggestions?

cyganysue
Adamski is a regular Polish surname, there are 13 000 people with this surname in Poland. The name of the village doesn't mean anything because villages in Poland are very often named after other countries, capitals and nationalities.

The name 'Ęrnie' is the only real hint that he might not have been ethnically Polish. I guess it depends whether your great-grandfather was born in Poland (in which case it's quite possible that he might have been a Gypsy) or in US (in which case it's most probably just a misspelling of the name Ernie)

I am originally from Ełk and I am half gypsy. I work hard for my living and I am not anything like what these people have written on here. It makes me very sad. There are good and bad people everywhere I don't understand why people have to pick on others.

I think it is high time people like you took a long hard look at your own community and then started working on improving it from the inside. I am sorry, but your fellow Roma do a lot to present themselves very negatively to the outside world... And I don't think anyone except the Roma themselves can change this situation in the long run. BTW, Ełk is really beautiful - I used to live there and I remember the Roma in the park, singing and playing the guitar by the fountain :-)

Gil is an Indian last name. People from the state of Punjab use it still.

Wow. Random but Half my family is from there.

First of all sirs of all ages, we Polish do not like being referred to as "Poles." It is rude and low mannered, and you guys are calling Gypsies filthy, pshhh. How would you like it if we called you guys "Ame", or Germans, "Germs", or Japanese, "Japs", I don't think you guys would like that to much....

Anyways, I personally don't mind Gypsies, they aren't as manipulative as they were hundreds of years ago. To me it personally looks like they try to make a change, but how can they make a change when society won't even except them without discrimination. I say it's time we forget the past and except Gypsies once and for all.

Huh?You are mistaken.

Rubbish.


What do you mean?

I found this thread after someone asked me this evening where my ancestors were from and as I was trying to explain the confusion of my ancestry (particularly the "Polish" side) he finished my sentence with the word gypsy. This got me thinking so I started an internet search, finding this thread. I'll explain, hopefully someone here may be able to give me a clue. My father's paternal grandparents came from Poland, my grandfather and great grandfather having light skin, blond hair and grey/blue eyes. My father's maternal grandparents, however, supposedly came from Czechoslovakia but my great grandfather's military records claim he was from Austria/Hungary, while their son Wasyl came from Walche, Poland and his military records say he immigrated here from Antwerp, Belgium. My father's mother was olive complected with dark eyes & hair (as are my father and myself). My grandmother's father was also dark but I must add was an abusive alcoholic, whereas my father's father was hard working and a family man. We were raised Roman Catholic but our traditions were an odd mix of Polish & Slovak, mostly Slovak with a mix up of the two languages. My curiosity is if my father's mother was a gypsy. That was the intent of my inquisitor earlier this evening as he claims I resemble a gypsy.

i am a polish gypsy... well in poland there are 4 kinds of gypsies so not all gypsies r the same... i am from bergitka roma...and the other 3 groups of gypsies dislike them because they are similar to poles. which means that the women study, work and can wear trousers even up to any age... where as in the other groups the women dont work they steal, they dont study and they only wear long stresses. I have lots of polish friends and they dont even mind i am gypsy because i act just like them.... bergitka roma yes they do have some rules for example the girls need to be virgins before marriage but thats it.they can marry who even they want.

It would be really interesting if you added some more information :-) Would you agree that some (or many) Gypsies do not want to integrate with mainstream society?

My father is polish and my mother is half gypsy. My mother escaped arranged marriage and such with my father, but my aunt was kidnapped and married to her current husband (basically enslaved). I was born in Poland but now live in the states, but my gyspy side of the family still lives in Poland..

Gypsy roots definitely do exist.

I have read only about half the comments here, and have found this discussion very informative. I live in the Greater Toronto Area, and have neighbors who are from Poland, but some of their behaviors are convincing me they maybe Gypsies. I did a Google search for "Polish Gypsies" and found this site, because I want to develop some empathy for these people, who are, frankly, driving me absolutely nuts (though I have to admit it does not help that I am half German, and have an extremely Protestant puritanical attitude toward life).

My neighbors do not care about the community around them, only about their own kind, and their own comforts, so their front and backyards are complete messes, covered in the junk the husband collects (he cannot throw anything away). They are lots of friends, usually their own kind, and seem to see their family relationships are the only important ones. They have not desire to assimilate or demonstrate consideration for anyone outside their group. They are incapable of accepting the rules or any admonishment from authority figures. Also, when someone does come to them with a complaint, that person usually gets the "I am a poor charming old foreign person" act. And if you do not fall for the act, then you are met with contempt, anger and verbal abuse and threats.

I know these people immigrated to Canada about 16 years ago, and came from a very small town in southern Poland. I also know that no one in the family is properly educated, and I have to say not one of them is all the bright.

I am first-generation Canadian myself, though my mother was from a commonwealth country, and mainly grew up, and was education in the U.K., so I am not typical of most first-generation Canadians in the Toronto area. However, because I am still the child of immigrants, and grew up in a very diverse community, I know what immigrants can be like, from the ones of my parents' generation to the newer ones. So, I am puzzled by my neighbors, because, their problems, bad attitudes, etc., are not anything I have ever seen before.

Could it be that my neighbors are gypsies? If so, how can I better deal with them to prevent from increasing the tension between us? I need to start communicating with them, or their sons, in order to prevent them from causing a major problem on my block (like burning down their house and mine), but I am finding it very difficult what with the serious problems they cause and my mounting intolerance, impatience and anger.

Any advice greatly appreciated. Sorry for such a long post.

So mAny stereotypes. Trashy people exist in ALL races. Good people exist in ALL races. In the question of bad neighbors often drugs or alcoholism = bad neighbors more than ethnicity. Is education to become a wage slave in the corpoate world so noble? Yes some romanies steal so do politicians & bankers who probably do more harm to human species than gypsies ever did!

My girlfriend's mother's family is Romany, they were forced to settle into houses in Poland, the mum married a Polish guy.There's a lot of stereotyping about Romany people, my girl's family are really nice people, hardworking and know loads about everything.My girl is really well educated and held down good jobs here and in Austrailia. It just depends on the person and you can't say all gypsies/romanies are bad, there are some really good ones too!

hello--

Question was asked some time ago ---nevertheless I found it to be an interesting one.
My grandfather (John Ostrowski) was said to have stated (by my father) to have had 'gipsy blood'.
I never met him as he died long before my birth,however,having seen pictures of him I suspect that
he did . He was gassed (mustard gas .my father said) and this weakened his lungs,resulting ,I was told
in his death some years later of TB.

paul ostrowski