[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Germanic Names

AlbertMuth at aol.com AlbertMuth at aol.com
Thu Jan 9 19:03:01 PST 2003


I am going to attempt to provide an answer for you.  The Polish 
surname Strzembski is a derivative of the common word strze~p 
or strze~b, meaning 'shred, fragment'.  See Fred Hoffman's 'Polish 
Surnames: Origins and Meanings", published by the Polish 
Genealogical Society of America, and probably still available at 
their website www.pgsa.org

I did a simple on-line lookup in an English-German dictionary at:

http://www.iee.et.tu-dresden.de/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/wernerr/search.sh/?string=shre

d&nocase=on&hits=50

Seeing the results, I can tell you that I know that I have seen the 
surname Koernchen (oe standing for umlauted O) in the Lutheran
records in Polish in Russian Poland.

HOWEVER, I do not recommend that you assume that this is the
exact German name that you want unless you have further evidence
to substantiate the equivalency, such as the presence of the name 
Koernchen at the same or later date of a parish that you are looking 
in.  Ideally, in fact, you want to have records for the same individual, 
once using the Polish name, once using the German form--actually, 
better with several examples of each.

As a rule of thumb, I would not use a dictionary (as I have) to "SOLVE"
a name equivalency such as this; I am only offering the suggestion as 
a possibility, which you should corroborate in primary records such
as the the civil transcripts of Lutheran church records.

Al Muth



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