Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026What It Means to Reclaim Your Polish Heritage
Something shifts when you find the record. It might be a baptism entry in a priest’s handwriting, or a ship manifest with your great-grandmother’s name in a column headed “last place of residence,” or a photograph in a yizkor book of a street that no…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026The Story of the Polish Diaspora: Why Millions Left Poland
Roughly 20 million people around the world identify as Polish by descent. The great-grandchildren of emigrants who left a century ago. Survivors of WWII who never went home. Children of Solidarity activists who fled martial law in the 1980s. And a new generation of economic…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026Discovering Your Ancestral Village in Poland: What to Expect
The village is usually smaller than you imagined. And quieter. And more ordinary — a church, a handful of streets, a few dozen houses. But standing there, knowing your great-great-grandmother was baptised in that church and walked that lane to market, the ordinary becomes something…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026How to Plan a Heritage Trip to Poland
There is a moment that every heritage traveller to Poland describes — standing in a church doorway, or at the edge of a village green, or in front of a grave marker — when the distance between the family story and the physical place collapses…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026Researching Your Polish Surname: A Step-by-Step Guide
Your Polish surname is a research tool as much as it is a name. Used correctly, it can narrow your search from all of Poland to a specific region, point you toward particular archive collections, and help you identify records you didn’t know to look…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026How Polish Surnames Changed After Immigration to America
Somewhere between the gangway of a ship and the desk of an immigration official, many Polish surnames underwent their first transformation. By the time a family had lived in America for a generation, the name their great-grandparents had carried for centuries might be unrecognisable —…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026Polish Surname Endings Explained: -ski, -ka, -czyk and More
The ending of a Polish surname is not decoration — it’s information. Whether a name ends in -ski, -wicz, -czyk, -iak, or something else entirely tells you something meaningful about the social class, geographic origin, or family relationship that generated the name in the first…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026The Most Common Polish Surnames and Their Meanings
The ten most common Polish surnames are carried by millions of people across Poland and the Polish diaspora — yet most of their bearers have no idea what those names originally meant or where they came from. Knowing the meaning and origin of your surname…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026Polish Surname Origins: How Polish Last Names Work
Your Polish surname is not just a label — it’s a compressed biography of the family that first carried it. Encoded in a handful of syllables are clues about where your ancestors lived, what they did for a living, what they looked like, or whose…
Written by: Polish Roots Project (Editorial Team)
Posted on: May 8, 2026How to Research Polish Ancestors from the Kresy (Eastern Borderlands)
The Kresy — Poland’s eastern borderlands — were once home to millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Jews living alongside each other in a landscape that changed political ownership multiple times within living memory. Today, the Kresy lie in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The…