Home |
Family Tree |
Viewing the Tree |
Missing Ancestors & Descendents |
Add Your Family
Maps |
Ellis Island |
Pelczarski Origin? |
Privacy |
Polish Translation? |
Send e-mail to Mark
I do not know how far back the Pelczarski name goes. There aren't too many of us. All the Pelczarski's around Chicago when I was growing up were closely related. And that was when there were more people of Polish descent in Chicago than any city in Poland except Warsaw!
I know there were Pelczarski's in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and near Detroit, but not many more than that. One day long ago my father and I were curious, and we called directory assistance in almost every area code of the United States asking if there were any Pelczarski's! There were very few.
Around 1995, when the Internet was new, a nationwide phone directory search found only about 100 listings for Pelczarski across the entire U.S.
I am told that the Pelczarski name is not very common in Poland, either. My grandfather was born in Długie, a small village in the southeast corner of Poland, near Sanok. Most Pelczarski's trace their roots to that corner of Poland known as Galicia.
Several years ago a letter was passed along to me, containing a story that said the name originated after the Swedish-Polish wars in the 1600's, when a Swedish soldier named "Pelchar" married a Polish woman and settled in Poland. According to the letter, the name became "Pelczar" in the Polish spelling. Later, the couple's son or grandson was given the name "Pelczarski" because of service in the Polish army.
I do not know if the story is true. All I have is that secondhand letter without indication of the origin of the story. If even partly true, it may explain the scarcity of the name, since the name itself might be only a few hundred years old.
Whether the story is true or not, I feel we are all related and that our common ancestors don't go too far back.
Whether we've lost the knowledge of those links because of generations now gone or because of records now missing because of wars, I don't know. But this is my attempt to find some of those common threads before more generations disappear with their stories.
The records we compile here are for all of us. As we gather more information, I will gladly make copies of these records for any of you to have for yourself and to pass down to generations to come. Thank you all for your help and for the knowledge and research that you contribute.
Sincerely,
Mark Pelczarski, Geneva, Illinois, USA