My family's original last name is roughly pronounced Yarrogojenski. Jargocinski/Jargosinski? Spelling guess.

My family's original last name is roughly pronounced Yarrogojenski. No one remembers the spelling except that it starts with a J. Any ideas how to spell it? What it means?

JAROGODZIEŃSKI ** DYCZKOWSKI ** ŚCIS£OWSKI ** DYCZKOWSKI

JAROGODZIEŃSKI(?) : Back-tracking froim yoru phonetic version would produce something like this. Unfortumately, such surname could be found. Could it have been Jarogniewicki? That is a topo nick from the locality of Jarogniewice. If you are basing your phoentic version on a handwritten document, maybe some of the letters got misread,

ZWOLIŃSKI: topop nick from Zwola or Zwoleń

ŚCIS£OWSKI: topo nick from Ścisłów or Ścisłowo.

DYCZKOWSKI: topo nick from Dyczków.

There is also a bunch of other possibilities if one takes seriously the double "r" in "Yarrogojenski". This could suggest a hyphenated name, such as:

Jar-Rogoziński or Jur-Rogoziński, as in Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Szolc-Rogoziński;
Jar/Jur-Ragoziński; Jar/Jur-Rogodziński; etc.

Database "Moi Krewni" reports 282 "Jur" and 38 "Jar" people in Poland.

Interesting point! With surnames nothing can be arbitrarily ruled out and every hypothesis should be considered..

There's probably no double R, I spelled it that way because it sounds rolled when I've heard the name pronounced. The J in "jenski" is pronounced soft like the Polish DZ in dzien so I'm guessing that part might be spelled dzienski, maybe?

Yes, we tried that with various variants: -dzieński, -cieński, -dziński, -ciński, -ziński. None of that worked because your version is just too long, as if it had some extraneous characters. Yes, it may sound funny, because most Polish names are long, but yours is extra, extra long. This is why I came with a hypothesis of a compound, hyphenated name.

So, no - there is no Jarogodziński in all possible endings listed above. Neither Jarpogodziński (but there is Pogodziński).

Since you insist on the strong single "r" then we have a structure that has a definite prefix "Jar" or "Jur" and the suffix, as listed above.

Jar ... dzieński, Jar ... dziński, Jar ... cieński, Jar ... ciński, Jar ... ziński ... and same for Jur.

There are many possibilities here, provided that the name is shortened somehow:

JUR:
Juraczyński
Jurdzyński - from a village of Jurga in Russia
Jurdziński - as above
Jurdzinski - as above
Juraszyński
Juraziński
Jurczyński

JAR:
Jarociński - from the town of Jarocin
Jarocieński - google, very rare
Jarodziński - extremely rare name, looks corrupted
Jarodzieński - zero hits
Jarczyński
Jardziński
Jaroszyński

Check against this list "Lista nawisk", "Wyszukiwarka nekrologów z Wielkopolskiej prasy".
wtg-gniazdo.org/nekrologi_all.php

(A search engine of obituaries from Wielkopolska press)

Thank you. Now I'm feeling a little hopeless that I'll learn the spelling. Huge bummer. I'm guessing the "go" part might have been included in the pronunciation in error. Probably because it was Americanized to Yargo.

Do not be discouraged. We could have been missing something as well. Continue trying around Jargo/Jurgo prefix. For example, I found these two extremely rare examples:

Jurgociński - 1 google ref
Jargosiński - 1 google ref

Oh wow, this looks hopeful! Thank you so much!

You are welcome. Here is a definite winner so far:
Jargociński, 572 google ref.
From dialectical "jargać się" => 'złościć się, gniewać się'. (to be angry) , stankiewicze.com/index.php?kat=44&sub=540

Oh wow. Awesome! Would that more or less be pronounced Yargoshinski?

1. Pretend that you want to translate Jargociński from Polish to English in translate.google.com . After typing the name, click on the speaker icon in the left (Polish) window. Never mind the right window, unless you want to have fun.

2. Use ivona.com
Select a Polish speaker, type Jargociński, press a key and listen.

Boletus,

Thank you so much.