Ziemowit
14 Feb 2020
Genealogy / Hypothetical cousin from America - genealogy and Poles [20]
There used to be so some time ago. Now it has become totally different.
Back in the 1970s, I think people were still genuinely proud if their ancestors were coming of gentry people, but these days such a feeling has vanished almost completely. This is because people have realised the nation today is a true mixture of different social classes. There have been a lot of articles in the press on it recently and one cover headline in the "Polityka" weekly of August 2018 summed it up very nicely by asking: "Ile chłopa, ile Pana w Polaku?" (How much of a peasant and how much of a gentleman in a Pole?].
All hereditary titles in Poland had been swept away by the Constitution of 1921. Then the nobilty had been deprived of their land and possesions by the communist regime which came to Poland in 1945. The final result is that Polish nobility has pratically vanished from the earth. In the 1990s there had been a little revival of this subject when it became popular on TV for a short span of time, so we could see impoverished aristocrats coming out of the closet and showing themselves as creatures living like ordinary people in blocks of flats in Warsaw or elewhere and telling us about their harsh life in the times of the People's Republic: "my father asked my mother regularly why I couldn't speak French yet". Absolutely hilarious, so to speak!
The "search for crests" has evolved these days into the "search for roots" as people in Poland are genuinely interested in their family's past irrespectively of who they were and what they did for a living. Times have changed.
amateur genealogists have hidden agendas. They won't admit it, but they are looking for "royal ancestors". And there is the eternal search for "family crests".
There used to be so some time ago. Now it has become totally different.
Back in the 1970s, I think people were still genuinely proud if their ancestors were coming of gentry people, but these days such a feeling has vanished almost completely. This is because people have realised the nation today is a true mixture of different social classes. There have been a lot of articles in the press on it recently and one cover headline in the "Polityka" weekly of August 2018 summed it up very nicely by asking: "Ile chłopa, ile Pana w Polaku?" (How much of a peasant and how much of a gentleman in a Pole?].
All hereditary titles in Poland had been swept away by the Constitution of 1921. Then the nobilty had been deprived of their land and possesions by the communist regime which came to Poland in 1945. The final result is that Polish nobility has pratically vanished from the earth. In the 1990s there had been a little revival of this subject when it became popular on TV for a short span of time, so we could see impoverished aristocrats coming out of the closet and showing themselves as creatures living like ordinary people in blocks of flats in Warsaw or elewhere and telling us about their harsh life in the times of the People's Republic: "my father asked my mother regularly why I couldn't speak French yet". Absolutely hilarious, so to speak!
The "search for crests" has evolved these days into the "search for roots" as people in Poland are genuinely interested in their family's past irrespectively of who they were and what they did for a living. Times have changed.