Sunday, April 28, 2019

Gruszecki Surname, Peerage, List of Noble Families


Gruszecki Surname, Peerage, List of Noble Families



Having been born with a Polish surname like Gruszecki, it has been interesting through the years to hear American English speakers murder the pronunciation.  It’s groo-zek-eee in English, and groo-zshets-eee in Polish or Russian.  Since Polish was the first language that I heard from my mother, who was born there, the Slavic combined consonants that twist American English speakers’ tongues come somewhat naturally to me.



I’ve always looked the name up when I travelled in the past, but I could never find it in the phone books of any large cities like New York City, London, Paris, Rome or various other large western cities.  Until about the 1980’s when suddenly there were Gruszeckis all over this and other countries.  Someone, somewhere, “went and multiplied”.



I joined Ancestry.com several years back, and traced my paternal and maternal lines back as far as I could, which meant as far back as this country (Ellis Island, etc.), would allow.  The trail ended in Europe, at least as far as normal research was concerned.  There was no way without accessing records from Poland without going there, and even then, there were no guarantees, since Nazis and Russians had both occupied that part of Poland, and it was dubious as to what records still existed.



All of the above was several years ago.  A recent dive into Ancestry.com revealed that now, a raft of genealogical records were available in Poland in digital form, online, since the Roman Catholic church had made available their birth, marriage and death records going back for several centuries.  The Gruszecki surname has primarily Catholic, but also some Jewish roots.  I was able to trace the family lines in Poland back to the early 1800’s.



Another thing I recently found was that the Gruszecki name Is rooted in Polish peerage, and derives from the knight Maciej – Chorąży, or flag bearer, of the King of Poland Jogaila.   The King had given him the village Gruszka Duża, in eastern Poland, in favor of knightly merit, in 1411, presumably after the definitive battle of Grunwald, or Tannenberg, which defeated and drove back the Teutonic Knights.



The Gruszecki name appears in lists of both noble Polish and Russian families.  The Gruszecki coat of arms: 
















Ray Gruszecki

April 28, 2019

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