Check yours in the list: here are the surnames of Polish origin. Ukrainian surnames can tell a lot about our ancestors
Our ancestors believed that a family name had an extraordinary influence on its owner and could tell a lot about him or her and their family. In particular, some surnames indicate that there are Poles in your family. SSPDaily tells about it.
This was told by historian Valentyn Bendiuh. According to him, it is very easy to understand if a surname is of Polish origin. By the way, today such family names are most often found in those regions of Ukraine that used to be part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The most popular surnames among Poles are those with the endings "-ski" or "--cki". In particular, this list includes Kowalewski, Halicki, Walewski, Potocki, Wisniewski, and some others.
The historian is sure that at first only Polish aristocrats bore such surnames to show the boundaries of their possessions. Later, this way of forming family names spread to Ukrainian lands. Therefore, similar endings were added to various nicknames, which later formed surnames: Khmelnytskyi, Verbytskyi, Artemivskyi, Rudanskyi, Ivanivskyi, Zadnipryanskyi, Levytskyi, etc.
In addition, in the regions of Ukraine that used to be part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, patronymic names with the endings "-uk", "-yuk", "-ak", and "-chuk" are very popular. Initially, they were formed from the so-called baptismal names (names given during baptism so that the child would have a guardian angel), but later they became very common: Tkachuk, Vasyluk, Havryliuk, Levchuk, Popilniuk, Pohrebniuk, Kontratiuk, etc.
