Comments on: Anyone familiar with Polish surnames, and also able to read really sloppy handwriting?

Question: Anyone familiar with Polish surnames, and also able to read really sloppy handwriting?

Ashley801 — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:27:28 -0800

Is anyone familiar with Polish language/surnames, and also able to read really sloppy handwriting? I'm trying to make out this one name off a census form. It's the bottom name in this picture: http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/6120/tillieek2.png

By: gjc

gjc — Sat, 03 May 2008 11:26:20 -0800

I'll tell you what I see.

P k avprska Tillie

Pelchavprska?
Pehlavprska?

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:27:02 -0800

Those are not possible Polish names, and v is not used in Polish.

It looks like PVklaCVrska or possibly PVklaCVwska (using V for any vowel and C for any consonant), depending on what's behind that blotch in the middle, but I haven't been able to google up any Polish names that fit (it's clearly not Pokladowska or Pilarowska). You may have to check with an actual Pole.

By: katemonster

katemonster — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:29:16 -0800

I love a good mystery!
Did you get the image from Ancestry.com? Their transcription of the name is Peklavprska. What I'm seeing is Pekla__rska, and the letter right after the "A" does indeed look to me like a V.
However, it's not really relevant what a valid Polish name is/was; the census takers were notoriously bad at spelling names they were unfamiliar with, especially if the person being enumerated was not a native English speaker. In this same census, my Aunt Katie was listed as "Frankie", and her family's last name was garbled beyond recognition, into something impossible for their native language/ethnicity. We only found them because we knew the names of some nearby families and browsed the pages until we found the right family grouping.
You might try poking around this excellent website -- click on the "SBownika Nazwisk WspóBcze[nie w Polsce U|ywanych" link to get to a database of Polish surnames as discussed on this website. One of the names that came up when I searched for "p?kl" was Poklgowska, which seems closer than most of the other possibilities I've seen.
Depending on what else you know about her and what you're trying to find out, there are a bunch of things I can think of to try tracking her down. Feel free to mefimail me or post in-thread with more details if you want to follow some of the possible leads.

By: Helga-woo

Helga-woo — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:21:01 -0800

Is it Polish handwriting? Because the letter after the a, which others has suggested is a v is very much like how a Polish person would write an r.

If it's not a Polish person writing, then I'm with Katemonster, the spelling could be completely unrelated to the name.

By: ebellicosa

ebellicosa — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:08:59 -0800

Do you have more of that page available? With enough samples of that person's handwriting, you can make an "alphabet sampler" showing how he/she wrote each individual letter. That might help you decipher the entry in question.