History, Heraldry, and Clan Names
Family names first appeared in Poland ca. 15th century and were only used by the nobility (szlachta). Originally the nobles belonged to chivalric clans whose names survived in the names of their coats of arms. Eventually, members of one clan would split into separate families with different surnames, usually derived from the name of the village they owned. Sometimes the family name and the clan name (associated with the arms) would be used together and form a double-barrelled name.
The most striking peculiarity of the Polish heraldic system is that a coat of arms does not belong to a single family. A number of families sharing male-line origin or sometimes even unrelated by blood but only by a formal adoption upon ennoblement (sometimes hundreds of them), usually with a number of different family names, may use a coat of arms, and each coat of arms has its own name, usually the name of the original blood-line the clan descends from. Thus the total number of coats of arms in this system was relatively low — ca. 200 in the late Middle Ages.
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/clan name. For example: Jan Zamoyski herbu Jelita means Jan Zamoyski of clan Jelita (though it is often quite incorrectly translated as ...of the clan Jelita coat-of-arms as if he were not a blood-member of the line).
From the 15th to 17th centuries, the formula seems to copy the ancient Roman naming convention with the classic tria nomina used by the Patricians: praenomen (or given name), nomen gentile (or gens/Clan name) and cognomen (surname), following the Renaissance fashion, thus: Jan Jelita Zamoyski, forming a double-barrelled name (nazwisko złożone). Later, the double-barrelled name would be joined with a hyphen: Jan Jelita-Zamoyski.
Gradually the use of family names spread to other social groups: the townsfolk by the end of the 17th century, then the peasantry, and finally the Jews. The process finally ended only in the mid-19th century.
After the First and Second World Wars some resistance fighters added their wartime noms de guerre to their original family names. This was yet another reason for creating double-barrelled names. Examples include Edward Rydz-Śmigły, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, and Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski. Some artists, such as Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, also added their noms de plume to their surnames.
Read more about this topic: Polish Name, Nazwisko (surname)
Famous quotes containing the words clan and/or names:
“We cannot think of a legitimate argument why ... whites and blacks need be affected by the knowledge that an aggregate difference in measured intelligence is genetic instead of environmental.... Given a chance, each clan ... will encounter the world with confidence in its own worth and, most importantly, will be unconcerned about comparing its accomplishments line-by-line with those of any other clan. This is wise ethnocentricism.”
—Richard Herrnstein (1930–1994)
“Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, “just in case” in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)