THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME?

Welcome back Polonius :) hope you are well !

Iwno is a small village but was the seat of the aristocratic Mielzynski family - in fact I think they are in discussions to get some of the property back.

@kaprys and @DominicB Thank you for the information! I complete forgot I posted here until today.

Dominic, you mentioned that it was highly unlikely I was related to anyone in Poland with that name unless there was documentation proving it. Why do you say that? I've done some digging in my family tree an found the following: I have a few ancestors who were born in Dabrowka, Poland (4 to 6 generations above me), then an ancestor from Katholisch, Prussia (7 generations above), and then I've hit a dead end with what I've been able to find. Does this change anything?

@Taji34

Look at this map:

moikrewni.pl/mapa/kompletny/we%25C5%2582na.html

With a geographical distribution like that, that surname is certainly not unique to one family, but used by several totally unrelated families. And as by far most of them live very far from where your ancestors came from, near Lublin and Kraków, it is unlikely that you are related to by far most people with that surname. You would need solid documentation to determine whether you are related to anyone else with that surname.

There are about 75 places in Poland named Dąbrówka. It is one of the most common place names in the country. You're going to have to figure out which of these your ancestors came from.

"Katolisch" is not a place name. It is the German word for "Catholic", and refers to your ancestor's religious affiliation.

Seven generations takes you back to the early 1800s. Before then, records become very scarce indeed, and completely nonexistent for by far most people living at that time. Someone who had gone back that far should be quite an accomplished genealogist, but that is inconsistent with the level of questions you are asking. Are you sure you have solid documentation linking all of those generations together in an unbroken chain?

@DominicB

I'm sorry I acted over-confident in my information, it's likely not that accurate in hindsight, as I have no idea what I am doing. I am confident in my tree until it leaves the United States (4 generations above myself), then most of the information I have is from other people's tree's on Ancestry.com, but I do not know how accurate that is. I am planning to re-do that part of the tree anyway because I believe I made some mistakes. Thank you for the information you have provided me. Hopefully I can get some more accurate information about that part of my family tree.

You may perhaps add 'Przecieszyn pod Brzeszczami' to your list. The village is home to Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło.

My ancestors' surnames were Roj (I've also seen it as Rog), Lopata, Tombor & Supka. Can anyone tell me what any of these mean? I'm also curious if they were likely to have been spelled differently in Polish...they were all from Galicia (Lubasz specifically) and as I start diving in to old church records it would be really helpful to know if I should be looking for alternate spellings.

Thanks!

@crmondo

The first three would be spelled Róg, Łopata and Tambor in Polish, and all are found in the area around Lubasz. The last one is either very rare, or a misspelling that would take some work to sort out.

Róg/Rog are both used as surnames and derived from róg-horn.
Rój/Roj are derived from rój-swarm.
Łopata - shovel.
Tąbor (might have been misspelled as Tombor) probably derived from tabor - nomadic camp or Mount Tabor.
Supka might be misspelled Zupka -derived from zupa-soup or Supko also derived from zupa or customs house according to stankiewicze.pl though they don't say what language that comes from :s

@kaprys
@DominicB

thanks very much!

Here is what I currently know - unsure what my next step should be as I begin to look into Polish records.

John Roj: born about 1885 in Poland; died Oct 28, 1923 in Ware, MA. John married Mary Lopata on on January 30th, 1907 in Ware, MA (marriage record shows her name to be Mary Opata and his to be John Rog). They had 5 children - Edward, Katherine, Sophie, Isabelle & Stanley. (Katherine is my great grandmother). Mary Opata was born on May 8, 1889 in Laskunka, Poland. She died on Sept 7, 1956.

According to the marriage record, Mary Lopata/Opata's parents were Michal Opata and Agata Cub. John Roj/Rog's parents were Michal Rog and Anna Gumula. I know nothing else about the 4 parents, and cannot find any record of John or Mary's births in Poland. Were multiple name spellings like this common? How should I best go about finding them in Polish archives?

The other side are the Supkas. Joseph (Jozsef) Supka was born in Austria in 1868. He lived in Ware, MA and he died on January 17, 1929. Magdalena (his wife) was born in Lubasz, Galizia in 1877. She arrived at Ellis Island (already married at that point) on June 5, 1912 with her 4 kids - Peter (Pietr), Mary (Marganna), John (Jan) and Michael (Michal). She died in 1957 in Ware, MA. I believe her maiden name to be Tombor/Tambor.

I am really struggling with this side, as I can't find record of any of the 4 Supka kids' births prior to their emigration to the US, nor have I found Joseph & Magdalena's marriage record. I've seen the following similarly spelled surnames - do any of these sound more right? supka / csupka / tsupka / cupko / chupko / chupka / zupka

Thanks for any and all help & insights!

Rój is also a possibility, and probably a better guess than the unrelated surname Róg. It is especially common around Lubasz.

Tąbor is an exceedingly rare alternative spelling of Tambor. There are also a tiny number who spell it Tombor, but they don't live in the Lubasz are. There are only two people with the surname Tąbor in Poland. Coincidentally, both of them live near Lubasz. It certainly has nothing to do with "Tabor", with either meaning. That's phonetically impossible in Polish. It's derived from the name of the musical instrument (Tambourine in English).

Zupka is not a possibility. It is a Polish surname, but is it exceeding rare and does not occur anywhere near Lubasz. By far most of the 52 people with that name live close to Sokołów Podlaski, and none at all in what was Galicia.

@DominicB
But Tąbor and Tombor would be pronounced pretty much the same and the op first wrote the name Tombor. As for Tąbor derived from Tabor, I found this explanation at stankiewicze.pl - perhaps some sort of vowel shift or misspelling - who knows.

@crmondo
Opata is also used as a surname - derived either from a regional variant of łopata-shovel or opat-abbot.
I have to say that the variations of spellings of your family's surnames are quite impressing - no wonder you have trouble finding records. As for first names, Joseph - Józef, Peter - Piotr, John - Jan, Michael - Michał and Mary - Marianna or Marjanna (old-fashioned) - the English version is Maryann. Marganna doesn't make sense. But since Marianna/Marjanna was spelled Marganna, perhaps it was Roj/Rój not Rog/Róg. Someone might have had a problem with telling the difference between j and g - just guessing ...

I don't know ... perhaps the names were originally written in the cyrillic and then someone made a mistake translating them into the Latin alphabet?

Tąbor and Tombor are both rare spelling variants of Tambor, which is the far more common spelling of both. As I said above, there are only two people with the spelling "Tąbor" registered in Poland.



Stankiewicz made a mistake. It is impossible for a non-nasal "a" to become a nasal "ą" or "am" in Polish. That just doesn't happen. Ever. I have noticed that he often tries to find a modern Polish etymology for names even when it is clear that the etymology is not Polish, even when his guesses are pretty far-fetched and violate the phonetic rules of Polish. This is a good example of that.


Definitely not in this part of Poland.

@kaprys

By the way, do you know about this site:

moikrewni.pl/mapa/kompletny/.html

You can type in a surname, and it shows you a map with the distribution of registered people with that name by powiat. With gender-specific names, you have to either search twice (under Kowalski and Kowalska), or just double the result for either of them.

That's how I eliminated Zupka.

Ok, I checked Lubasz - definitely under the Prussian partition. Still the variations of the spellings are incredible.
As for the changes in the original names - I wouldn't be so sure.
But then again, I'm just a laywoman trying to help.

@kaprys

Wrong Lubasz. Check the other one in Galicia, the Austrian partition.

@DominicB
I quoted moikrewni.pl several times here. Again not sure how reliable the information there is. I have a friend whose dad is not Polish. So is her last name. Still she was born here. She went to school, studied here and works here. Her surname doesn't appear in the search. So we can be as sure of the information there as we're sure of what stankiewicze.pl says.

@kaprys
@DominicB

this has been hugely helpful, so first a big thank you to you both.

I know that Peter Supka (or Pietr Supka according to his Ellis Island file; possibly a variation of the Supka last name) was born in February of 1899 in Lubasz, Galizia. I just went through this collection of scans, and no luck: szukajwarchiwach.pl/55/555/0/1/75?q=lubasz+XDSTARTz:[1898+TO+1901]+XSKANro:t&wynik=4&rpp=15&page=1#tabSkany

Any ideas as to where else I should be looking for a birth record from 1899 in Galicia?

The name Węgorek occurs predominantly in the eastern border of Małopolska. Were eels abundant in this region?

«węgorek» according to the standard Polish dictionary is


"a nematode [worm] parasite ..."
Thus I had asked why the name would be associated with eels necessarily.

The worm is named such because it looks and wiggles like a little eel. If you ever saw nematodes under the microscope. you would agree that that is a good description.

And,,,,, no $hit, I just looked for a Youtube video of nematodes, and the very first thing it says is "These microscopic worms look like tiny little eels". Here's the link:

youtube.com/watch?v=qc9CMLNfrHc

I see. That explains it.

@Gość1952
It's more possible for a nickname than the name of a parasite to have become a surname. Not sure when the parasites were called węgorek and if local populations were aware of the existance of such parasites to give somebody such a nickname. Eels are known, traded and eaten Poland for centuries.

Unfortunatelly, I have no idea how abundant in eels were in Wielkopolska when Węgorek was first used as a surname.

Very abundant. They made up a significant part of the diet just about all over Poland, until the 1970s, when the eel population began to crash.

They're called 'wegorze.' The older generations (like those in their late 40's 50's and beyond) love that stuff! It's not as popular as it use to be. In the Polish markets in US they're always in stock though. My dad buys them every so often. Idk that stuff always grossed me out. Same with that galareta stuff - its like a weird jello with meat

@kaprys
@DominicB

Hi again - could Supka have been Czub in their homeland? I've been digging around, and it looks like there were a lot of Czub's in Szczucin and Delastowice. Both locations in vicinity of Lubasz, which is where their Ellis Island paperwork has them coming from. Does that sound right to you, or is it there too much of a difference between the two?

That seems very farfetched. Sorry, but guessing isn't going to help much here. You'll need documentation.

Czub is more possible to have been misspelled as Cub as in Agata Cub. But that's a wild guess.
Have you got any photos of the original records we could look at?

@kaprys


Thank you, Kaprys
I was referring to Małopolska.
The name is concentrated in the area near and around Lublin.
Are eels abundant in this area?

Not now. They are extinct in this area every since they built the dam over the Wisław in Włocławek. But they were until recently (1970s), and even more so a century before that.

Very interesting, Dominic. Thank you.