All posts in Surname Origins

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…

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 —…

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…

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…