gumishu
6 Feb 2012
Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]
Sobolewski means precisely - 'of Sobolew' where Sobolew is a place name ( -ew suffix is the counterpart of -ów ending in some areas of Poland and vast areas of the east (the suffix originally was just the marking of genetive (possesion) like English 's suffix does) - Sobolew was most probably somewhere in the east either Ukraine or Belarus - as stated before -ski ending surnames where typically born by nobility (but some 'common' people also in time got to bear this type of surnames as an indication of their place of origin) -
however Jewish families can also bear -ski type of names: they often adopted the surnames of the noble holders of lands in which they used to set up inns or were administrators (there are plenty of Jewish families with surnames Potocki, Czartoryski (i.e. the surnames of grand magnate families) - I personally knew one such person) - one can actually say the bigger the name was in Kresy (eastern part of Rzeczpospolita especiallly Ukraine) the more Jewish families will be there with the surname - (I am not saying there were definitely some Jewish families who adopted the Sobolewski surname because I simply don't know it - with lesser nobility one can say there were no Jewish families to adopt their surname with a great degree of certainty)
Do you know anything about the surname Sobolewski ?
Sobolewski means precisely - 'of Sobolew' where Sobolew is a place name ( -ew suffix is the counterpart of -ów ending in some areas of Poland and vast areas of the east (the suffix originally was just the marking of genetive (possesion) like English 's suffix does) - Sobolew was most probably somewhere in the east either Ukraine or Belarus - as stated before -ski ending surnames where typically born by nobility (but some 'common' people also in time got to bear this type of surnames as an indication of their place of origin) -
however Jewish families can also bear -ski type of names: they often adopted the surnames of the noble holders of lands in which they used to set up inns or were administrators (there are plenty of Jewish families with surnames Potocki, Czartoryski (i.e. the surnames of grand magnate families) - I personally knew one such person) - one can actually say the bigger the name was in Kresy (eastern part of Rzeczpospolita especiallly Ukraine) the more Jewish families will be there with the surname - (I am not saying there were definitely some Jewish families who adopted the Sobolewski surname because I simply don't know it - with lesser nobility one can say there were no Jewish families to adopt their surname with a great degree of certainty)