How to check where a Polish surname comes from: a step-by-step guide with Name Atlas

For decades, people have written to the Institute of the Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IJP PAN) to ask where their surname comes from. Urszula Bijak of the Institute describes what the replies contained: the oldest records of the surname, its etymology, how its sound and form changed, and data on how many people bear it today and where.

You can find part of those answers on Name Atlas in a few minutes. This guide shows, step by step, where to find them on a surname's page and how to read them. At the end we list the sources where you can check more.

First: what are you actually asking?

"Where does my surname come from?" is two different questions. The first is about language: which word, given name or place the surname was formed from. The second is about family: where your ancestors lived. Dictionaries answer the first. Only records answer the second.

The description of the Internetowy słownik nazwisk w Polsce (Internet Dictionary of Surnames in Poland) points out that surnames that sound the same often arose at different times and for different reasons. The surname Kusz may come from a given name, as a short form of Jakub, or from the word kusz, a cup or tankard. The same spelling does not mean one beginning or one lineage.

Step 1: type in the surname

Type the surname on the home page, or in the "Look up your surname" box below this post, as it is spelled. It is free and needs no account.

Name Atlas opens a set of cards: each card answers one question and gives its date and source. The "Full page" button shows all the answers at once. At the bottom of the page, under "How do we know?", is the list of the sources the answers come from.

Step 2: check how many people bear it

The chapter "How many people have this surname?" gives the counts from the PESEL register. The register publishes two separate lists, one for men and one for women, so Name Atlas shows the two counts separately and never adds them up. Each carries the date of the list it comes from.

How to read it: a count tells you how common the surname is today, but nothing about where it began. Surnames borne by a single person are not published, so a surname missing from the list does not mean nobody bears it.

Step 3: see how rare it is

The chapter "How rare is this surname?" shows the surname's place on the list and a "1 in X" figure: roughly one in X people on that list bears the surname. Next to it are its neighbours on the list, two places above and two below. For surnames such as Kowalski you will also see the other grammatical form, Kowalska, from the other list. That is a form of the language, not proof of kinship.

How to use it: with a rare surname there will be fewer results in indexes and digital libraries, so they are easier to go through. With a common one, search by given names, dates and parish from the start, because the surname alone will not tell your ancestors apart from other families.

Step 4: look at the map of voivodeships

The chapter "Where is it most often registered?" shows, on a map and a list, the voivodeships where people with the surname have their permanent registered residence today.

How to read it: it is a map of today's registered residence, not of where a family came from. People moved, and the voivodeships' borders changed. A voivodeship missing from the list does not mean nobody there bears the surname, because the lists leave out single occurrences.

Step 5: check how the count changed

The chapter "How did this count change between editions of the list?" shows the number of people with the surname in each edition of the list since 2019, next to how the whole list changed. Name Atlas says what changed, not why.

Step 6: read the meaning, if we have one

The chapter "What does this surname mean?" shows a meaning only when a scholarly work stands behind it. The meaning comes with its source and a word for how certain it is, such as "Possible". Today that source is a 1933 book by Fr. Józef Buryan, and for now only some surnames have a meaning. Where we have no such work, the page says so plainly and guesses nothing.

How to read it: a meaning tells you which word or given name the surname was formed from, not where your family comes from. Compare it with the Internetowy słownik nazwisk w Polsce, which often gives several possible etymologies.

Step 7: look into old print

The chapter "Where does it appear in old print?" shows how many results a search for the word returns in Polona, the digital library of the National Library of Poland. The results are grouped by date and place of publication, with example pages in the public domain linked to Polona.

How to read it: these are results for the word in any of its forms, not a count of people or of mentions of your family. A surname can also be an ordinary word, so open an example page and see what it is about. If we have not searched Polona for the surname yet, the page says so.

Want to set two surnames side by side, say yours and your grandmother's? Use the Compare page.

Look up your surname on Name Atlas.

Next: sources beyond Name Atlas

Name Atlas is about the surname. These sources help you check more, and the last of them leads to your family.

The Internet Dictionary of Surnames in Poland

The Internetowy słownik nazwisk w Polsce was compiled by IJP PAN. It is free and has about 30,000 entries. An entry gives, among other things, possible etymologies (often several), old records of the surname with their date and source, spelling variants and women's forms, and data from the PESEL register as of 2014. If your surname is not in it, that means nothing: the dictionary covers frequent surnames, not every surname used in Poland.

Kazimierz Rymut's Nazwiska Polaków

Nazwiska Polaków (Surnames of Poles) is a two-volume historical and etymological dictionary published by IJP PAN in 1999-2001. The description of the online dictionary notes that it necessarily covers a small number of surnames.

Dictionaries of old personal names

The Słownik staropolskich nazw osobowych (Dictionary of Old Polish Personal Names), edited by Witold Taszycki, collects records from the 12th to the 15th century. Antroponimia Polski od XVI do końca XVIII wieku (Polish Personal Names from the 16th to the End of the 18th Century), edited by Aleksandra Cieślikowa, covers the next three centuries. They show when a name appears in the sources, and in what form. A record from several centuries ago, though, is about a person who bore the same name. It does not prove that this person was your ancestor.

The list of surnames from the PESEL register

The Ministry of Digital Affairs publishes on dane.gov.pl a list of the surnames of living people in the PESEL register, also by voivodeship of permanent registered residence. Name Atlas uses these lists. Older data has other dates: the online dictionary gives data from 2014, and the Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (Dictionary of Surnames in Current Use in Poland), edited by Rymut, data from 1990.

Polona

Polona also searches the text of scanned books and periodicals. Search for several spellings. The online dictionary gives examples of variants: nasal vowels written as they sound (Gemba), doubled letters (Kobiella), Polish letters left out (Jagla), or several Polish forms of one foreign surname (Keler, Kieler, Kielar, Kilar from the German Keller).

Parish and civil records: where your family begins

Dictionaries and data are about the surname. Records are about your family: parish registers and civil registration records. You will find indexes in Geneteka and scans on Szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl. Our post on finding your ancestors goes step by step from the papers at home to a record a hundred years old.

What a surname alone cannot tell you

• Kinship. Surnames arose independently in many families, so the same spelling does not join people into one lineage.
• Nobility. The description of the online dictionary says that a significant share of surnames in -ski were formed from the 16th century onwards from ordinary words, on the model of surnames from place names, which were seen as "better". There is more on endings in our post on -ski, -wicz and -ak.
• Where your family comes from. The map shows where people are registered today, not where their ancestors lived.
• One certain meaning. Dictionaries often give several possible etymologies, and the meanings of words changed over time.