Skoda85
29 Sep 2018
Genealogy / How can you tell if a surname is Polish or Polonized, and... what the heck am I, ethnically? [2]
Which country are you from? If you're from the U.S. you can obtain census records to see which language your immigrant ancestors claimed as their native tongue. Ship manifests and immigration records can sometimes assist with this as well. Alternatively, you can research your family tree to see which exact towns or villages they lived in. Once you've pinpointed them on the map, you can obtain an ethnographic map from a historical atlas (many of which are freely available online) to see which ethnicities lived in that area at that time. Some areas were multi-ethnic, sometimes making it difficult to determine which ethnicity your family belonged to...
To give you an example, I had ancestors who were ethnic Lithuanians living a few miles away from the modern day border with Poland, in a region that was historically occupied by both Poles and Lithuanians. I only know that they were Lithuanian because older generations in my family remember our immigrant forbearers identifying as Lithuanian and speaking Lithuanian (which is confirmed by their census and immigration records). Adding to this confusion is the fact that the language used to record vital records does not always reflect the ethnicity of the person documented. In the case of my Lithuanian ancestry, from circa 1800 to 1863 (or so) all the vital records were recorded in Polish, and the names were also Polonized! After 1863, all the records are in Russian, but the Polish equivalent of the names were still provided (likely because the region they were from had historically been part of the Kingdom of Poland).
I recommend reading up on the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--this territory included lands occupied by the ancestors of the Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians (to name a few). Having a sense of the "big picture" will help you understand the overlapping ethnicities of this part of the world.
For locating genealogical records from Poland (and other areas formerly part of the Polish state) I highly recommend the following sites:
szukajwarchiwach.pl
genealogiawarchiwach.pl
genealodzy.pl
poznan-project.psnc.pl
Good luck!
Which country are you from? If you're from the U.S. you can obtain census records to see which language your immigrant ancestors claimed as their native tongue. Ship manifests and immigration records can sometimes assist with this as well. Alternatively, you can research your family tree to see which exact towns or villages they lived in. Once you've pinpointed them on the map, you can obtain an ethnographic map from a historical atlas (many of which are freely available online) to see which ethnicities lived in that area at that time. Some areas were multi-ethnic, sometimes making it difficult to determine which ethnicity your family belonged to...
To give you an example, I had ancestors who were ethnic Lithuanians living a few miles away from the modern day border with Poland, in a region that was historically occupied by both Poles and Lithuanians. I only know that they were Lithuanian because older generations in my family remember our immigrant forbearers identifying as Lithuanian and speaking Lithuanian (which is confirmed by their census and immigration records). Adding to this confusion is the fact that the language used to record vital records does not always reflect the ethnicity of the person documented. In the case of my Lithuanian ancestry, from circa 1800 to 1863 (or so) all the vital records were recorded in Polish, and the names were also Polonized! After 1863, all the records are in Russian, but the Polish equivalent of the names were still provided (likely because the region they were from had historically been part of the Kingdom of Poland).
I recommend reading up on the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--this territory included lands occupied by the ancestors of the Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians (to name a few). Having a sense of the "big picture" will help you understand the overlapping ethnicities of this part of the world.
For locating genealogical records from Poland (and other areas formerly part of the Polish state) I highly recommend the following sites:
szukajwarchiwach.pl
genealogiawarchiwach.pl
genealodzy.pl
poznan-project.psnc.pl
Good luck!