Fred, thank you for your wisdom (as always).
Ricardo, I hope that this helps with your research.
Stefan Wisniowski
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
From: "wfhoffman" <wfhoffman@...>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:25:07 -0500
To: "Stefan Wisniowski" <swisniowski@...>
Subject: Re: [Kresy-Siberia] Surname suffix
FW: [Kresy-Siberia] Surname suffixTo: Stefan Wisniowski
<swisniowski@...>
Hi, Stefan,
Can you help us out on this one?
----------
From: "Ricardo Villalobos" ricvilla@...
I always heard from my Mom that the suffix -wicz was
added to my surname at some point in history. According
to her, it was given to people who fought in wars and
returned as heroes (or something along the lines). Does
anybody has any information about this and how it worked?
Obviously there is no way to tell what special circumstances might apply to
a particular family or to names in a particular area. But this is highly
unlikely. The suffix Poles spell as -wicz is just a common Slavic way of
saying "son of" (the techical term for this kind of name is "patronymic").
It was very common among the Slavs to refer to someone as "son of
so-and-so." In Russian it still is -- the standard way of referring to, say,
Yuri Ivanov, son of Mikhail, is Yuri Mikhailovich Ivanov. Most other Slavs
don't still incorporate patronymics into everyday use; but surnames
ending -wicz or -vich or -vic are extremely common among all Slavs. The use
of the patronymic normally has nothing to do with heroism or fighting. It
was just a convenient way of identifying someone in terms of his older,
better-known father.
Of course, the ancient Slavs were very warlike, and men were expected to
fight enemies to save their own tribe or clan. So if you go back far enough
I suppose the use of a patronymic might infer something along these lines.
But that would be back more than a thousand years ago, long before there
were surnames (which didn't start developing until the 12th and 13th
centuries among nobles, and much later among peasants). In the time frame
when surname began to be used, patronymics were just a useful way of
identifying a person with a name that made sense and was easy to remember.
It's exactly the same way names such as Johnson and Jackson and Nixon (son
of Nick) came to be used in English.
Thus GRZYBOWICZ means "son of the mushroom"; most likely an ancestor was the
son of a man nicknamed Grzyb, "the mushroom," because of some perceived
connection with mushrooms. Maybe he collected and sold them, or loved to eat
with them, or loved to cook with them, or lived in an area where mushrooms
were especially common -- hard to say, since there are many possibilities
and this all happened centuries ago. About all we can say is that there must
have been some reason why this name struck people as appropriate, or it
never would have "stuck." And it indicated some kind of connection with
mushrooms.
An email from Bela made me wonder, since there is another Polish family
named Grzybowski (same prefix, different suffix) and according to my
research, the two families are not related (one comes from a Polish/
Catholic branch the other one comes from a Jewish branch).
This sort of thing is very common. You can't assume people with same
surname, or a similar one, have any blood connection to you; very often it
will turn out they don't. A family might have been called Grzybowski because
they came from a place called Grzybow or Grzybowo ("[place] of the
mushrooms") -- and there are lots of places by those names. There's no way
to tell which one a specific Grzybowski family came from, short of tracing
them back in the records. And it's highly unlikely all the families bearing
a specific name are related, unless the name is pretty rare.
Also, for a long time after surnames began to develop, they weren't all that
fixed and consistent. You might see the same family called Grzybowicz one
time, Grzybowski another, Grzybik another, and so on. Most folks lived in
small rural areas and everyone knew everyone else; so it didn't make much
practical difference what you called a family as long as you got that basic
"Grzyb-" in there somewhere. It's not until well into the 1700s and even the
1800s that you start seeing any great emphasis on consistent surnames. Even
then names can vary, if for no other reason than plain old human error.
The bottom line is, I often have to caution people not to draw too many
conclusions from surnames. Most aren't very specific, and over time they
have been subject to misspelling and change, partly because there was no
great pressure in Polish society to demand that they be used with utter
consistency. They can be useful in tracing lineage, but don't obsess over
changes in spelling and form, because such changes are normal.
Hope this helps a little.
William F. Hoffman
Author, _Polish Surnames: Origins & Meanings_
