Polish Surnames · Female surnames
In Polish records a woman rarely carries exactly the same surname as her husband or father. The ending changes with gender and, in older records, with marriage. Once you know the pattern, a name that looked like a stranger turns out to be your ancestor.
Adjective surnames: -ski becomes -ska
Surnames ending in -ski, -cki and -dzki are adjectives in Polish, and adjectives agree with gender. The wife and daughters of Jan Kowalski are Kowalska; the family of Piotr Nowicki are Nowicka; Zawadzki becomes Zawadzka. This is still the rule in Poland today.
| Man | Woman |
|---|---|
| Kowalski | Kowalska |
| Wiśniewski | Wiśniewska |
| Nowicki | Nowicka |
| Zawadzki | Zawadzka |
| Nowy | Nowa |
Noun surnames: -owa for a wife, -ówna for a daughter
Surnames that are nouns, such as Nowak, Mazur, Kowal or Wróbel, do not change in modern Polish. In records before the Second World War, and in village usage long after, they did. A married woman added -owa or -ina, and an unmarried daughter added -ówna or -anka.
| Husband or father | Wife | Unmarried daughter |
|---|---|---|
| Nowak | Nowakowa | Nowakówna |
| Mazur | Mazurowa | Mazurówna |
| Wróbel | Wróblowa | Wróblówna |
| Kowal | Kowalowa | Kowalówna |
| Sikora | Sikorzyna | Sikorzanka |
So the baptism of a girl may name her mother as Marianna Nowakowa, and her own marriage twenty years later may call her Katarzyna Nowakówna. Both are the Nowak family.
Maiden names in Polish records
Polish parish and civil records almost always give a married woman’s maiden name, which is one of their great advantages over American sources. Look for these phrases:
- z domu or z d., Polish for née: Marianna Kowalska z domu Nowak
- de domo or nata, the same in Latin records
- урождённая (urozhdennaya), the same in Russian-language records from 1868 to about 1917
- geborene or geb. in German-language records from the Prussian partition
How the endings look in Latin and Russian
Priests writing in Latin often kept the Polish form, so you will see Kowalska or Nowakowna in the middle of a Latin sentence. Russian-language records transliterate the Polish name into Cyrillic and add Russian endings, so Kowalska appears as Ковальская (Kovalskaya). When you search an index, try both the masculine and feminine forms and the version without Polish letters.
What happened in America
In the United States most families used one form for everyone, usually the masculine. Your great-grandmother may be Mary Kowalski on her death certificate and Marianna Kowalska in her baptism. Her maiden name, if it was a noun surname, may appear in American records in its Polish daughter’s form, which is why an SS-5 or death certificate can show a mother’s maiden name such as “Nowakowna” that does not look like any surname you know.
When a woman’s surname in a Polish index looks almost but not quite like your family’s name, check whether the difference is just the gender or marriage ending before you rule her out.
How we can help
Every record we find is delivered with a full translation that names each person in both the original and the modern form, so the changing endings never hide a relative.