If You Have One of These 15 "German" Surnames, Your Family Was Actually Polish

If You Have One of These 15 "German" Surnames, Your Family Was Actually Polish Some German surnames were never German. Bartsch. Schimanski. Grabow. Kotzur. Every one of them is a Polish name that was cut down, respelled or translated by a Prussian clerk, in a province where speaking Polish in a classroom could get a child beaten. They are on mailboxes in Chicago, Milwaukee, Buffalo and Texas right now, on families who have called themselves German for a hundred and forty years. They are not lying. Their passports said Prussia. The trouble is that Prussia was not a people. These are the 15 German surnames that came out of Poland, counting down to the one that explains all of them. So look for yours. Because number one is not a surname. One honest note before we begin. A surname preserves a word, not a bloodline. Clerks guessed, spellings drifted, and grandchildren simplified. So treat everything you hear tonight like a compass. It does not promise. It points. And one more thing. Polish is not the only answer here. Kashubian, Silesian and Masurian are separate peoples with separate languages, and all three got written down as German. We will come to each of them. Here are 15 names, ranked by what they actually prove.