Polish surnames from place names: when does a surname really come from a place?

Dąbrowski, Wiśniewski, Krakowski. Each of these surnames sounds as if it points to one place on the map. Sometimes it does. More often it points to many places at once, and some -ski surnames come from no place at all. This post explains what Polish linguists call nazwiska odmiejscowe, surnames from place names: how to recognise them, and what they cannot tell you.

What a surname from a place name is

Medieval documents described a person in several words. Ewa Wolnicz-Pawłowska gives an example: instead of Nawój comes de Morawica, Nawój of Morawica, scribes in time wrote simply Nawój Morawica or Nawój Morawicki. A description of where someone was from became one word beside the first name.

Wolnicz-Pawłowska sorts the old ways of naming people into groups. The first are names that say a person came from a village or held an estate. She calls them place-name and ethnic surnames and gives Baranowski, "of Baranów", Węgrzyn (a Hungarian), Niemiec (a German), Szot (a Scot) and Grek (a Greek) as examples. The other groups come from a father's name, from a trait and from what a person did.

The Internet Dictionary of Surnames in Poland of the Institute of the Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences (IJP PAN) uses the same terms. It labels a surname from a place name odmiejscowe and one from the name of a people or of a region's inhabitants odetniczne. Its description says that surnames from place names are "mainly the surnames with the suffix -ski thought so characteristic of Polish".

Their forms

-ski, -cki, -dzki

The most common form is an adjective made from a place name. The IJP PAN dictionary derives Krakowski from Kraków. It adds a second possibility: Krakow, a place in Lusatia that no longer exists. With each such surname the dictionary repeats that the suffix -ski "originally indicated origin from a given place or its possession". What the ending means and how it came to sound noble is in our post on Polish surname endings.

-ak and the like

A surname from a place does not have to end in -ski. For Krakowiak the IJP PAN dictionary gives two routes. It may come from Kraków, with the suffix -ak. Or it may come from the ordinary word krakowiak, which the dictionary glosses as the name of a plant, the pelargonium.

From peoples and regions

A second group comes from the names of peoples and of the inhabitants of regions. The dictionary derives Litwin from the word Litwin, "a man born in Lithuania", and Ślęzak from an old form of Ślązak, "a native of Silesia". Mazur has two possible routes in the dictionary: from the ordinary word mazur, or from the name for an inhabitant, "a person from northern Mazovia", a newcomer from Mazovia or from Lesser Poland.

The word "newcomer" in the Mazur entry sums up this group: such a surname speaks of the country or region someone came from, not of one village.

When a -ski surname does not come from a place

From the sixteenth century a -ski surname was thought the better kind. Wolnicz-Pawłowska describes people remaking their own surnames on that pattern. Walerian Nekanda-Trepka listed over 2,500 such cases in his Liber chamorum. One is Jędrzej Ćwikły, a peasant's son from Czechów in the Sandomierz land, who called himself Ćwikliński. His brother called himself Czechowski: he took his surname from the village where he was a peasant, not its lord. Nekanda-Trepka complained that peasants' sons took -ski surnames "mostly from first names", such as Jakubowski or Piotrowski.

According to Wolnicz-Pawłowska, the many present-day -ski surnames "for which no place-name motivation can be found" show that the process went on. Linguists call such surnames model or pattern surnames: they have the form of a surname from a place, but were made from an ordinary word or a first name.

Lewandowski

Lewandowski is a good example. The IJP PAN dictionary derives it from the personal name Lewanda or Lawenda, and that from lavender, the plant. The suffix -owski, the dictionary says, has a "structural function" here: it only gives the surname a familiar shape. Wolnicz-Pawłowska notes that the dictionary of Old Polish personal names does not record Lewandowski, though place names can be found that might have motivated it. Ewa Nowak-Pasterska, studying the surnames of Poznań townspeople in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, counts it among the surnames from place names and notes that its etymology is unclear. Scholars do not agree on it.

Jakubowski

For Jakubowski the dictionary gives both routes at once. It may come from one of the many places in Poland called Jakubowice, Jakubowo or Jakubów. Or it may come from the first name Jakub, with the suffix -owski "in a structural or patronymic function". The sound alone cannot settle which route applies to a given family.

One surname, many places

Even when a surname certainly comes from a place name, it rarely points to one village. The IJP PAN dictionary derives Dąbrowski from Dąbrowa, the name of about 100 places across Poland, or from Dąbrówka, the name of about 90. For Wiśniewski it lists Wiśniewa, Wiśniowa, several places called Wiśniewo, Wiśniów, and Wisznia Sądowa and Wisznia Bieńkowa, now in Ukraine. For Kowalewski it lists many villages called Kowalewo in different parts of the country, as well as Kowalewice and Kowalewskie.

So a surname from a place name may have arisen many times, independently, in different families and in different parts of the country. Two families of Dąbrowskis may have taken their name from two different Dąbrowas. Why the same surname does not mean shared ancestors is in our post on whether people with the same surname are related.

What a surname from a place says about a family

At first it could say two different things. Wolnicz-Pawłowska writes that from the second half of the fifteenth century the nobility mostly used surnames from the estates, villages and towns they held, such as the Zamojskis, Koniecpolskis and Tarnowskis. Such a surname said whose village or town it was. The same kind of surname could, however, say only where someone came from, like Czechowski in the Liber chamorum. People outside the nobility bore it too: Nowak-Pasterska finds that surnames from place names were the second-largest group among Poznań's townspeople, with three times as many in the eighteenth-century tax lists as in the seventeenth-century ones.

The surname alone therefore does not tell you whether an ancestor owned a village, came from it, or simply took a fashionable surname. Nor does it tell you whether the family ever lived in a place of matching name. A -ski surname does not prove nobility or a right to a coat of arms either. What estate the ancestors belonged to is shown only by the records.

How to check

1. The dictionary entry. For many surnames the IJP PAN Internet Dictionary of Surnames in Poland says whether they come from a place name, from which places they may come, and whether another route is possible. When it gives two possibilities, take both seriously. 2. Your own family's oldest record. Only the history of one particular family tells you which place a surname came from. Reach the oldest records your ancestor appears in, and check where they lived and how they were written down. Our guide to finding Polish ancestors goes through it step by step. 3. Spelling variants. In old records the same surname is often written in different ways. The history of those changes is in our post on where Polish surnames came from.

What Name Atlas shows

On a surname's page Name Atlas shows a meaning only when a scholarly work we can cite stands behind it. When there is none, we say that we have no documented meaning, and we do not guess.

The chapter "Which localities have this name?" shows places in TERYT, the official register of localities, whose name is the same as the surname. It is a shared name in the register. It does not say where the surname began, or that the surname and these places are connected. The village a -ski surname may come from usually has a different name from the surname itself: Dąbrowa, not Dąbrowski. That chapter will not show such a village. The map of voivodeships, for its part, shows where people with the surname are registered as living today. Why that is not a map of a family's origins is in our post on reading a surname's map.