Revisiting an Old Post – Solving a Problem and Gaining New Momentum

Hello,

Back in October of 2010, more specifically 10/10/2010, I had attempted a translation of the baptismal record of my 2x great grandmother Jozefa Deręgowska. The baptismal record was from the Piotrków Kujawski parish, which was a part of Russian Poland. The baptismal record was written Russian, using the Russian Cyrillic Alphabet. Sometimes, when translating/transliterating Russian baptismal church records, the father and mother names are also written in Polish besides Russian. Other times…not so much…the names were only listed in Russian. This was one of those  unfortunate times.

Here is the link to my post called: Baptism of Jozefa Derengowska (1879)

In the post, I stated that I was having trouble determining the surname of my 3x great grandmother Zuzanna. Here is an image of the surname from the baptismal record:

My initial transliteration attempts were decent, but not quite accurate. In the post, my first attempt yielded the following inaccurate surname rendering: Gochiecki. This spelling did not sit well with me as I stated in my original post. Since that time, I’ve tried multiple attempts. Here are some of the results: Gochicki, Gorzicki, and Gożicki. I gave a few more tries and came up with the following results: Jocziszczki, Goczicki, and Juchicki. I felt that I went backward in my results and put this task on hold again. But, then I decided to give the transliteration one more try.

Here is how and I arrived at the correct surname spelling:

First, I was almost certain that the beginning of the surname started with the Polish letters of “Go”. I’ve seen this combination in documents of my Jędrzejczak ancestors living in the village of Gosławice within the same region of Russian Poland. Here are the letters G and O in Russian Cyrillic:

The next character gave me a bit of trouble, because there were a few possibilities. The following Russian lower case characters are written above and below the line that were possibilities: ж or т or х. But, after thorough analysis on my part, I felt the character had to be the less commonly used form of the lower case ж. The letter would equal the Polish characters of rz or ż. I felt certain that before a vowel, the Polish character to use would be “rz”,instead of “ż”. So to keep a tally, the surname spelling is as follows: Gorz.

Up next, another character that initially sent me down the wrong path. In Polish records, I’ve seen that one vowel or phonetic sound (i) can have a few different character choices within names. For this example, the “i” sound could be spelled as an i or j or y. For all of my previous attempts to transliterate this surname, I used the “i” spelling for the Russian Cyrillic character below. Today, I went with the “y” spelling and I was accurate. Here is the character from the document:

So far, here is the spelling: Gorzy. The next letters were mostly straight forward, since many Polish names end similarly, “cki”. The characters in Russian are below. First the “c”, then the “k”, and finally the “i”.

My final and complete rendering of the surname is Go rz y c k i or “Gorzycki“. Afterward, I did a search on Moikrewni’s surname map for Poland and found that the Gorzycki surname was most concentrated to the areas near Bydgoszcz, Włocławek, Aleksandrów Kujawski, Inowrocław, and Radziejów. This helped to confirm my findings. Also, I was able to search and find the marriage record of Józefa’s parents on the Geneteka website. The marriage of Wincenty Deręgowski and Zuzanna Gorzycka took place in the Radziejów parish in 1871.

It looks like I have another lead to chase down 🙂

Best Regards,

Al