A family from KaschubiaThe family Polczynski was in its origin a kaschubian folks. Kashubia is an area on the baltic sea with an own laguage and culture. Today Kashubia is on the terriotory of the republic of Poland. Ethnically mixed from north vikings and slavian roots, are the kashubs an old eastern tribe older than the name Kashub it self.
The area is near "pomorsk" means near the sea.
Kaszuby or "Kashubian Switzerland" as it is is sometimes called in Poland, is not named because of any high mountains, it is jus becasue of a natural scenic beauty with its hundreds of lakes and rolling meadows.
The area is near "pomorsk" means near the sea.
Kaszuby or "Kashubian Switzerland" as it is is sometimes called in Poland, is not named because of any high mountains, it is jus becasue of a natural scenic beauty with its hundreds of lakes and rolling meadows.
An other explaination is because its a very good farming land used for milk production cheese making. At least my Grandfather Josef announced him self as "Schweizer"
which means dairyman if was asked from a german officer about his profession.)))
which means dairyman if was asked from a german officer about his profession.)))
To desrespec any kind of governance authority seems also to be an old heritage from my people.
Landscape
Except on its borders where you have the Carpathian Mountains, Poland is a very flat and agricultural country. Kaszuby is perhaps a little more rolling than most other parts of Poland and a delightful mixture of fields, meadows, forests, lakes, small rivers and canoe routes.
The soil is generally sandy, perfectly to ride horses, and, even though the annual rainfall is copious because of the proximity of the Baltic Sea, still most of the area for farming.
Between the river Oder and the Vistula and bordering on the Baltic Sea has always been called Pomerania (Pomorze in Polish; Pommern in German).
The Kashubs inhabited Eastern Pomerania, sometimes called Pomorze Gdañskie. The section of Pomerania inhabited by the Kashubs was larger three, four hundred years ago but, in our times, consists of a wedge perhaps the size of Renfrew County, Ontario, running southwest of Gdañsk down to the small city of Chojnice and then northwest close to the cities of Bytów and Slupsk and joining the Baltic Sea near the two lakes of £eba and Gardno.
Except on its borders where you have the Carpathian Mountains, Poland is a very flat and agricultural country. Kaszuby is perhaps a little more rolling than most other parts of Poland and a delightful mixture of fields, meadows, forests, lakes, small rivers and canoe routes.
The soil is generally sandy, perfectly to ride horses, and, even though the annual rainfall is copious because of the proximity of the Baltic Sea, still most of the area for farming.
Between the river Oder and the Vistula and bordering on the Baltic Sea has always been called Pomerania (Pomorze in Polish; Pommern in German).
The Kashubs inhabited Eastern Pomerania, sometimes called Pomorze Gdañskie. The section of Pomerania inhabited by the Kashubs was larger three, four hundred years ago but, in our times, consists of a wedge perhaps the size of Renfrew County, Ontario, running southwest of Gdañsk down to the small city of Chojnice and then northwest close to the cities of Bytów and Slupsk and joining the Baltic Sea near the two lakes of £eba and Gardno.
Kashub Population
In that little wedge there would be well over a million inhabitants .
The tri-cities today have a very cosmopolitan, even though thoroughly Polish character. The sailors, dock-workers and ship-builders come from all over Poland. What percentage of their inhabitants would be of Kashub parentage is hard to say, perhaps as low as ten percent. Some people feel sure that there were many "still stubborn" and independent-minded Kashubs among all restiances like the last strike of Kashub independcies accitvities as the first associates of Lech Walêsa in those port cities where Solidarity was born.
And beleive me if you ask any kind of family Memebers this family intended stubbornness can be annoying, and can stay over decades.
The ethnic Kashub population in the 17 th century o has been cited as totalling approx. 400,000persons.
Today upwards of two hundred thousand Kashubs who still preserve some of the old traditions and who may still understand or speak the old east viking dialect.
Meaning of the Name:
The maning of the Name Polczynski in Kashub means:
Pol (part/landmark) czyn (son) of
In addition of the main name the polish nobles took a second name to the family name:
egs.:
Janta ( means Amber)
Wolff (means Wulf)
Pioch (means Peter from holy St. Pete, the fisch as his symbol ) later in prussian nobility "von Pirch"
This "herbu" means heritage and its different meaning you can follow in the description of the coat of arms.
Oftenly the writing of the name was differently spelled.
This was becasue always changing governemnts and different handwritings of the office.
Depite not all arstocrats could not write properly the Spelling variants are also becasue of differnt dialects from north east west and south of Poland, where ur folks lived.
To understand the history of the family Polczynski I think its needed to undertsnad the history of Kashubia.
The period between the early Middle Ages and th 20th century was marked by a gradual eastward process of voluntary and enforced Germanization of the Baltic Slavs , including the Kaszubs.
Only the Kaszubs succeeded in preserving their Slavic identity and language, a measure of their cultural distinctiveness, an awareness of their Kaszub identity and a lively sense of their connection with Polish nationality. my opinion: nobody was more stubborn.
At the same time, i.e. from as early as the early Middle Ages, similar Polonizing process took place from the south. Polish settlements originating from Kujavia, Mazovia and Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) hastened the process.
The mythical griffin, part eagle, part lion, has been the most important crest and emblem of the Kaszubs.
It was from this creature that the Gryfici, that dynasty of dukes ruling Western Pomerania until the seventeenth century, derived their name.
Historians have shown that the oldest tribal centres of the Kaszubs were precisely the walled towns of Western Pomerania: Szczecin, Wolin, Kamien, Stargard, Bialogard, Kolobrzeg, Slawno and Slupsk.
The name Kaszuby is contained in the princely title of Barmin I of Szczecin (1226-1278). The first undisputed record of the name Cassubia dates back to the year 1238.
It appeared in a papal document ratifying the possession of Stargard on the Ina by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
Prince Boguslaw I (d. 1187) had endowed it to the order half a century earlier. In subsequent papal documents concerning the Dominicans and Franciscans, the name Cassubia is used consistently to denote West Pomerania.
At times, however, the scope of the term is widened to include Meklenburg which is german now as well, also known as Slavia.
The Christianization of the Pomeranian Kaszubs took place between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Arriving in Gdansk in 997, Saint Adalbert (Wojciech) baptize das is written in his life a great many inhabitants of the city and surrounding countryside." Otto of Bamberg(german) went on to bring about the Christianization of Western Pomerania, after the region had been subjugated by Prince Boleslaw Wrymouth.
A significant turning point in the history of the Kaszubs, and Pomerania in general, was the Reformation. By the sixteenth century, Protestantism had become the state religion in West Pomerania. Some pastors tried to introduce the Polish language and a significant admixture of Kaszubism into their liturgy and sermons. This led to the appearance of the first translations of liturgical texts into Polish, complete with Kaszub glossaries. This, in turn, contributed not only to preserving the language but also to raising the ethnic awareness of its practitioners. The Protestant Church soon became an instrument of the state in advancing its policy of Germanization.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Kaszubs inhabiting the eastern province of West Pomerania,the so-called Slovince,resisted this Germanization, but the process advanced with relentless momentum. By the beginning of the twentieth century only a handful of Protestant Kaszubs were left in the vicinity of Slupsk, Leba and Smoldzino.
My grandfather didnt want to allow my father to merry my protestant mother. But at the end..... love surveyed...... and father ans son did not speak 5 years which each other.....;)))
The name kashub come from kaszeba von kożuch,means the fure, or from koża, means Skin, it was common to wear sheep fures, very traditionally to wear a long coat and a fuer hat.
The nobility was given from Bolelaw I . King of Poland.
He decided to send Knights in border parts of the country to defend the expanding territorial policy to stabilize the former bounderies of upcoming poland.
The parts where named by janter (janta), kujawi and others. Castles Like Polczyn Zdorij where founded.
We find Polczynskis in each corner of poland, east north, south, west as defenders, knights, politicians and officers of an upcoming state in east europe.
Only a small number of szlachta families or clans (Polish: Rody) can be traced all the way back to the traditional clan system. Most szlachta, since at least the 12th century, were not related and their unions were mostly voluntary and based on followership and brotherhood rather than kinship.
However, in regards to consanguinity, the matter is far from settled, and the question matters because of historiographical concern to discover the origins of the privileged status by membership in the knights' clan. In the year 1244, Bolesław, Duke of Masovia, identified members of the knights' clan as members of a genealogia:
"I received my good servitors [Raciborz and Albert] from the land of [Great] Poland, and from the clan [genealogia] called Jelito, with my well-disposed knowledge [i.e., consent and encouragement] and the cry [vocitatio], [that is], the godło, [by the name of] Nagody, and I established them in the said land of mine, Masovia, [on the military tenure described elsewhere in the charter]."
The documentation regarding Raciborz and Albert's tenure is the earliest surviving of the use of the clan name and cry defining the honorable status of Polish knights. The names of knightly genealogiae only came to be associated with heraldic devices later in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. The Polish clan name and cry ritualized the ius militare, i.e., the power to command an army; and they had been used some time before 1244 to define knightly status. (Górecki 1992, pp. 183-185).
According to Polish historian Tadeusz Manteuffel, the clans (ród) consisted of people related by blood and descending from a common ancestor, giving the ród/clan a highly developed sense of solidarity. (See gens.)
The starosta (or starszyna) had judicial and military power over the ród/clan, although this power was often exercised with an assembly of elders. Strongholds called gród were built where a unifying religious cult was powerful, where trials were conducted, and where clans gathered in the face of danger. Marceij Polczynski herbu Janta was starost in the region of czersk/tuchola.
One part of the family owned the coat of arms with a running horse, means herb Bochdanowicz.
The opole was the territory occupied by a single tribe. (Manteuffel 1982, p. 44).
Since Poland emerged almost at once as a relatively unified duchy in the 10th century, it was the prince or, later, the King who was considered the patron of all the clans. He granted privileges and land to clan members rather than to clans as such and was allowed, in theory to assign new knights to the clans of his choice. In practice, however, such a means of entering an existing noble clan would require a formal adoption from the bloodline members of a clan. In any event, this route to clan membership was later forbidden.
As a result, a stable system of strong and wealthy groups of relatives never developed in Poland, as in Scotland.
The Polish clans seems to were, like the Norse clans, with the result that they were much more unstable than their western counterparts. Historic evidence, however, shows clans even fighting wars one against the other like the famous domestic war between the Nalecz and the Grzymala in Greater Poland of the late XIVth century.
Heraldic symbols began to be used in Poland in the 13th century. The generic Polish term for a coat of arms, herb, dates from the early 15th century, originating as a translation of the Czech erb, which in turn came from the German Erbe - heritage.
Under the Union of Horodło (1413), the noble families of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, such as the Mielzynskis, were adopted en masse into the various Polish noble clans and began to use Polish coats of arms. Evidence shows however that the Mielzynski family are native Polish and simply the lords of Mielzyn near Gniezno.
[edit] Peculiarities
Although the Polish heraldic system evolved under the influence of French and German heraldry, there are many notable differences.
The most striking peculiarity of the system is that a coat of arms does not belong to a single family. A number of unrelated families (sometimes hundreds of them), usually with a number of different family names, may use the same, undifferented coat of arms, and each coat of arms has its own name. The total number of coats of arms in this system was relatively low – ca. 200 in the late Middle Ages. The same can be also seen in Western Europe, when families of different surnames but sharing clan origin would use similar coats-of-arms, the fleur-de-lis of the many Capetian families being perhaps the best known example.
One side-effect of this unique arrangement was that it became customary to refer to noblemen by both their family name and their coat of arms name (or clan name). For example: Jan Zamoyski herbu Jelita means Jan Zamoyski of the Jelita coat of arms (though it is often translated as ... of the clan Jelita ). From 15th to 17th centuries, the formula seems to have been to copy the ancient Roman naming convention: praenomen (or given name), nomen gentile (or Gens/Clan name) and cognomen (surname), following the Renaissence fashion. So we have: Jan Jelita Zamoyski, forming a double-barrelled name (nazwisko złożone, literally compound name). Later, the double-barrelled name began to be joined with a hyphen: Jan Jelita-Zamoyski. (See Polish names).
The Polish émigrés of 19th century sometimes used adaptations of their names according to the Western European (mainly French) style, becoming (to use the same example): Jan de Jelita-Zamoyski or Jan Zamoyski de Jelita.
Some would also keep the Latin forms of their surnames, as Latin was the official language of the Kingdom of Poland. Hence the popularity of Late-Medieval or Early-Modern forms such as "de Zamosc Zamoyski".
A single coat of arms could appear in slightly different versions, typically in different colours, depending on the custom of the family using it. Such modifications ( odmiany ) are still considered to represent the same coat of arms.
One of the most visually striking characteristics of Polish heraldry is the abundance of gules (red) fields. Among the oldest coats of arms in Poland, nearly half use a red background, with blue (azure) coming in a distant second. Nowhere else in Europe shows such a strong bias towards a particular color scheme. It follows however the well known heraldic custom of all Europe that the vassals would follow the colour-scheme of their overlord. It had even a practical meaning in the battlefield.
Other typical features used in Polish heraldry include horseshoes, arrows, Maltese crosses, scythes, stars and crescents. There are also many purely geometrical shapes for which a separate set of heraldic terms was invented. It has been suggested that originally all Polish coats of arms were based on such abstract geometrical shapes, but most were gradually "rationalized" into horseshoes, arrows and so on. If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests in turn that Polish heraldry, also unlike western European heraldry, may be at least partly derived from a kind of rune-like symbols: the Tamgas used by nomadic peoples of the Steppe, such as the Sarmatians or the Avars, to mark property. However, the evidence about the origins of the system is scanty, and this hypothesis has been criticized as being part of the Polish noble tradition of romanticizing their supposed Sarmatian ancestry. On this matter, research and controversy continue.
A single coat of arms could appear in slightly different versions, typically in different colours, depending on the custom of the family using it. Such modifications ( odmiany ) are still considered to represent the same coat of arms.
One of the most visually striking characteristics of Polish heraldry is the abundance of gules (red) fields. Among the oldest coats of arms in Poland, nearly half use a red background, with blue (azure) coming in a distant second. Nowhere else in Europe shows such a strong bias towards a particular color scheme. It follows however the well known heraldic custom of all Europe that the vassals would follow the colour-scheme of their overlord. It had even a practical meaning in the battlefield.
Other typical features used in Polish heraldry include horseshoes, arrows, Maltese crosses, scythes, stars and crescents. There are also many purely geometrical shapes for which a separate set of heraldic terms was invented. It has been suggested that originally all Polish coats of arms were based on such abstract geometrical shapes, but most were gradually "rationalized" into horseshoes, arrows and so on. If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests in turn that Polish heraldry, also unlike western European heraldry, may be at least partly derived from a kind of rune-like symbols: the Tamgas used by nomadic peoples of the Steppe, such as the Sarmatians or the Avars, to mark property. However, the evidence about the origins of the system is scanty, and this hypothesis has been criticized as being part of the Polish noble tradition of romanticizing their supposed Sarmatian ancestry. On this matter, research and controversy continue.
A Polish coat of arms consists of: shield, crest, helm and crown. The 18th and 19th centuries fashion includes the mantling. Supporters, mottos and compartments normally do not appear, although certain individuals used them, especially in the final stages of the system's development, partly in response to French and German influence. Preserved medieval evidence shows Polish coats-of-arms with mantling and supporters.
[edit] Shield
Polish coats of arms are divided in the same way as their western counterparts. However, since coats of arms were originally granted to clans rather than to separate families, there was no need to join coats of arms into one when a new branch of a family was formed. Thus Polish escutcheons are rarely parted. There is however a lot of preserved quartered coats-of-arms. These would most often show the arms of the four grandparents of the bearer. Or also the paternal-paternal great-grandmother in the 5th field if the male-line coat-of-arms goes in the heart field.
The tradition of differentiating between the coat of arms proper and a lozenge granted to women did not develop in Poland.
Usually men inherited a coat of arms from their fathers (or a member of a clan who had adopted them), while women either inherited a coat from their mothers or adopted the arms of their husbands. The brisure was rarely used. All children would inherit the coat-of-arms of their father.
Heart-shaped shields were mostly used in representations of the coats of arms of royalty. Following the union between Poland and Lithuania, and the creation of the elective monarchy, it became customary to place the coats of Poland and Lithuania diagonally, with the coat of arms of the specific monarch placed centrally on top.
Heart-shaped shields were mostly used in representations of the coats of arms of royalty. Following the union between Poland and Lithuania, and the creation of the elective monarchy, it became customary to place the coats of Poland and Lithuania diagonally, with the coat of arms of the specific monarch placed centrally on top.
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