Belarus-Lida Region and Prokopowicz surname Family Tree DNA projects

One benefit of testing with Family Tree DNA is that it hosts thousands of projects—7,620 at last count, devoted to surnames and geographic areas large and small. Joining a project allows you to view your test results in relation to those of people with whom you may share some factor in common, such as ancestry in the same part of the globe. By putting your results in a bigger context, a DNA project can offer insight into your origins that you might not otherwise discover. Quite simply, it can help you figure out how and where you fit in.

A number of excellent Family Tree DNA projects focus on eastern European ancestry. Some broadly relate to countries of origin. Some concentrate on dynasties, nobility lines, or clans; others, on ethnicities. Some are quite large: the Polish project currently has 3,330 members. All projects are overseen by volunteer administrators. These projects are well worth joining. Through my own mtDNA test results, I joined the Cossack DNA, Lithuanian DNA, Lituania Propria, Polish, RussiaDNA, and Russia-Slavic DNA projects.

And because I have a particular interest in the Lida region and in the Prokopowicz surname, I submitted proposals to FTDNA to create projects focusing on those two themes.

About the Belarus-Lida Region geographic project

My justification for the Belarus-Lida Region project was that this area has had a complicated history, evident in the ever-changing national borders that have encompassed it; and that its population has similarly comprised several distinct ethnic groups. Belarus-Lida Region is a dual geographic project, meaning that it accommodates both Y-DNA and mtDNA test results. The goals are twofold:

To help members identify a common male ancestor and/or a common female ancestor in the Lida region.
To help identify relationships between family branches that in recent generations may have become separated or estranged due to emigration, war, deportation, resettlement, etc. These upheavals have scattered people with Lida roots throughout the world.

About the Prokopowicz project

My original rationale for the Prokopowicz surname project was that this was a common patronymic surname in my particular region of interest, the lands of the onetime Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—today's Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. It is also common in Ukraine, Russia, and other Slavic nations; variant spellings of Prokopowicz appear throughout eastern and central Europe. And emigration, war, deportation, and resettlement have carried it worldwide, far from its families' places of origin.

Because a primary goal of this project is to help determine which families bearing this surname may share a common male ancestor at some point in the past, Y-DNA testing is required for membership.

Both the Belarus-Lida Region and the Prokopowicz projects are small. I welcome and encourage anyone with relevant ancestry to join them.

75% Eastern European DNA? Sounds about right to me

I am 99.9% European. I would have guessed that, even if I had never spit into tiny vials for autosomal DNA analysis. Test results from 23andMe confirmed it, though, and took me a step further with its website's Ancestry Composition feature, presenting several different scenarios of what that 99.9% signifies.

Ancestry Composition basically enables you to consider your own DNA heritage in relation to the world's geographic/ethnic populations, which 23andMe has assigned to 22 different groupings. The data "includes DNA you received from all of your ancestors, on both sides of your family. The results reflect where your ancestors lived 500 years ago, before ocean-crossing ships and airplanes came on the scene," the website says.

The primary element is a table that tallies up the percentages of the various world populations reflected in your DNA. A resolution option allows you to see those percentages in three different breakdowns. Here are mine:

Global resolution: 99.9% European + 0.1%miscellaneous = 100% Barbara
Regional resolution: that 99.9% more specifically signifies 75.5% Eastern European, 4.2% Northern European, 0.2% Ashkenazi, 0.2% Southern European, and 19.8% nonspecific European
Subregional resolution: the 0.2% Southern European is more exactly described as representing the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas and Sardinia

How does 23andMe define these categories? Eastern Europe encompasses Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Hungary, and is "bordered on the east by the Ural Mountains." Northern Europe extends "as far west as Ireland, as far north as Norway, as far east as Finland, and as far south as France."

It is unclear to me where Lithuania and Belarus fit into the mix. As one of the Baltic countries, I'm guessing Lithuania falls into the Northern European classification. But what about Belarus? It is bordered by both Slavic countries (Poland, Ukraine, and Russia) and Baltic (Lithuania and Latvia). The population samples cited with these classifications do not include Belarus.

The regional resolution resonates with me. The 75.5% Eastern European DNA makes sense, in terms of my paper-trail genealogical research. Since the 1790s at least, my ancestors are documented as Polish Roman Catholics. I'm comfortable basically attributing the 24% of Northern and nonspecific European DNA to my maternal grandmother's H27 mtDNA, my paternal grandmother's mother's T2b mtDNA, and my paternal grandfather's mystery-man father's unknown but very likely Lithuanian roots. If this doesn't seem completely logical or mathematically accurate, I'm okay with that.

The 0.2% Southern European DNA holds little interest for me. If a stray Sardinian ever shows up in one of my family's marriage records, I will rethink this.

The best-fitting estimate

Another approach to examining the population percentages is via three different estimates: conservative, standard, or speculative.

Personally, I don't feel a need to spend much time mulling the conservative option, which labels 56.5% of my DNA as Eastern European and 42% as nonspecific European with a smattering of other populations contributing 1.5%. All four of my grandparents came from the same small geographic area, an arc that sweeps across western Belarus up into southern Lithuania. I have done reasonably extensive genealogical research on their ancestors—or at least 7/8 of them, my paternal grandfather's paternal line being that one brick wall. And judging from that line's Y-DNA test results, even that great-grandfather fits comfortably into the ethnic populations of the Grodno-Lida-Vilnius region (probably closest to Vilnius).

The standard estimate mirrors the regional resolution detailed above.

The speculative estimate considers my DNA as 87.1% Eastern and Northern European; 1.3% British and Irish (ah, could that account for my love of Celtic music?), 1.2% French and German: 6.1% nonspecific Northern European; and 4.2% a mix of Southern European, Ashkenazi, and general nonspecific European. It is intriguing, and it seems possible, but I have no records to document such fine distinctions, so I'll stick with the standard estimate.

The graphic here displays my standard estimate/regional resolution autosomal DNA analysis, indicating my ancestry is at least 75% Eastern European. It also highlights one aspect of the 23andMe website that I particularly like: it has a visually appealing, colorful, user-friendly design that is accessible even to a nonscientist like me.

Finding 19th-Century Houses on 21st-Century Maps

Genealogy, like many fields, has its share of myths and misconceptions. A common misconception in eastern European genealogy is this: There is no hope of locating ancestral villages, much less ancestral homes, because so much was bombed, burned, and otherwise destroyed by the wars of the twentieth century. So why even try?

Why try? Because maybe your village was one of the many that survived. And maybe you will find it identified in a map that is so detailed, every building in the village—including your ancestral home—will be represented by a small black square (or similar symbol).

Finding such exquisitely detailed maps of eastern Europe takes some research.  They are not likely to be filling the shelves of Barnes & Noble.

In North America, they are more likely to be available through online retailers and societies that cater to the specific geographic areas in question.  In Europe, bookstores and travel and tourism agencies offer more material than you can fit in your backpack.

Maps of the Lida area

Belarus may not quite match its neighboring Poland or Lithuania in quantity of maps, but it holds its own in quality. The very best maps I’ve seen for the Lida area of western Belarus are contained in a 23-map booklet of Hrodna (Grodno) oblast, or province, published in Minsk in 2002. The scale is 1:200,000 (1 cm: 2 km).

In that booklet, maps numbered 4, 10, and 11 cover the western Lida area that is my ancestral homeland. I am including those maps here.

Map 10 displays the Szczuczyn (Scucin) area between Grodno and Lida. Map 11 shows the area to the east, including the city of Lida.

Map 4 pictures the Radun area to the north, its lower edge straddling both Maps 10 and 11, and its upper half occupied by Lithuania and the border town of Eisiskes (Ejszyszki).

The maps are printed in Cyrillic Belarusian. They may frustrate viewers who don’t know the language. The reality, though, is that anyone researching this area needs to familiarize themselves with at least enough Cyrillic to know their village name—and even more important, their surname—when they see it.

(If you think finding an obscure village on a map is exciting, imagine how cool it is to see that village name written in Belarusian or Russian and recognize it! It is well worth the effort to get acquainted with the Cyrillic alphabet.)

What I love most about these maps, not surprisingly, is their detail. I’ve enlarged one section of the Scucin map (about 6 miles north-south and 6 miles east-west), and drawn in a black rectangle to highlight the village of Staro Gierniki. The road leading north out of the small city of Scucin is the single road that passes through Staro Gierniki. Straddling the road are about six old houses on the left and eight on the right. Each is marked by a tiny black square. (My apologies if they blur together a bit in this JPG.)

Babcia's house

My babcia Stefania Ruscik grew up on the second farm on the left. When I visited the village in 2001, her older brother’s son was living in the fourth house on the left (where the black latitude and longitude lines cross on the map).

It amazes me that I can point to a tiny black square on a current map of Belarus and say, “That’s my babcia’s house! That’s where she was born in 1882, and where her family lived for generations before that.”

It’s still there.

As you look at these maps, look at how very many little black squares they display. If your babcia or dziadek came from the Lida area, your ancestral home may be here too.

Polish maps from the interwar period

If maps printed in Cyrillic are a challenge to you, a vintage map in Polish can help orient you to the locations you seek. The Map Archive of Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny 1919 – 1939  offers a wealth of maps from the interwar period when Poland’s eastern borders encompassed lands that are now in Belarus and Lithuania.

Some of these maps are also available in hard copy, and may be purchased from Poland by Mail for about $10. The Nowogrodek map (#47) covers the Szczuczyn to Lida area; the Wilno map (#37) extends from Radun northward.

Serendipity and Staro Gierniki

This is a story about serendipity and a pink Post-it. Serendipity basically means making a fortunate discovery by accident—kind of like good luck sprinkled with magic dust. Every genealogist I know has a favorite anecdote or two about the role serendipity has played in their research. We love to share these stories because they represent some inexplicable source of help in our quests to learn about our ancestors. To me, serendipity is like some guardian angel dropping a gift in my path, or pointing me in some surprising new direction and whispering in my ear, “Here, look right here!”

Serendipity brought me the pink Post-it affixed to the Scucin/Szczuczyn area of the Belarusian “Grodno and Environs” map shown here. About 12 years ago, when I was looking for contemporary maps of Belarus, I found this one (along with the Welcome to Belarus map detailed on October 21) online at a now-defunct Canadian Web site that I think was called 411maps.com. I wanted to make a credit card purchase, and since there was no way to do a secure transaction online back then, I had to phone Ontario to provide my card number.

The young woman who answered the phone was quite personable, and I got the sense that this map store, whatever its size, was a warm and friendly operation. I took the opportunity to explain why I was buying these maps, and that I did not read Russian or Belarusian, so I didn’t know how well I would be able to understand this Grodno area map when it arrived.

“Do you know what villages you are looking for?” she asked.

“My grandmother’s village of Gierniki,” I said. “It’s near a small city called Szczuczyn.”

“Ah!” she replied. “No, no, not Gierniki. Your grandmother would have lived in Staro Gierniki. I will put a small label on the map for you, showing the name in the Cyrillic letters and in Polish. Now, are there other locations you would like identified?”

Stunned, I named a couple others, then asked, “But how do you know the village I’m looking for is called Staro Gierniki?” To distinguish when two neighboring and similarly named settlements were founded, Polish village names may be modified by staro (old) or nowo (new).

“That is where I am from, that area.  I know the village,” she said simply, as if it were an everyday occurrence for a young Belarusian expatriate in Canada to be handling a credit card transaction on the phone with a Polish American trying to locate a one-street village of 15 houses where her grandmother had been born in 1882.

Really, what are the odds of this happening?

I never learned that young woman’s name, but I think of her every time I see her carefully printed pink Post-its on my map.  Over the years, I have become familiar enough with the Cyrillic alphabet not to need these notes anymore, but I keep and treasure them as a testament to serendipity.

Maps

I love maps. Love them, love them, love them. For me, genealogy is the perfect blend of many things I love: playing detective to solve mysteries and find the truth of a situation, organizing information so that the big picture is as understandable as the small detail, making cold calls to third cousins who have never heard of me, translating text from foreign languages into English, and spending hours poring over maps. I enjoy genealogy the most when it’s a good balance of show-and-tell, rich with old photos, vintage postcards, maps, and other illustrations that make names and dates come alive.

A photograph captures a moment in time. A postcard preserves a landscape, a building, a passenger ship that may no longer exist. A map identifies exactly where on Planet Earth a family lived hundreds of years ago, thousands of miles away across an ocean. All these images carry enormous power. To me, they’re just plain magical. When I find a family village on a map and touch that place-name on that piece of paper (or stare at it on my computer screen), I feel like I am touching all the generations of my family who lived there. (In the interest of full personal disclosure here, I should note that if I could have one wish—excluding, of course, world peace—it would be time travel.)

Over the past 13 years, I’ve collected a variety of maps that illustrate the geographic area my Prokopowicz families have called home for hundreds of years. It is the Lida region in today’s western Belarus, populated predominantly by ethnic Poles. This territory at various times in history has been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, part of the Russian Empire, part of the Second Polish Republic, part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Depending on the era, maps may label this region Bialorus, Wilno gubernia, wojewodztwo wilenskie, wojewodztwo nowogrodskie, Byelorussia, Belarus. Many Poles still refer to it as part of the kresy, Poland’s eastern borderlands. The most detailed maps of the Lida area—the ones that identify even the smallest villages and hamlets—were created in Polish, German, and Russian. Since this area today shares borders with Poland and Lithuania, villages along the “frontier” are sometimes included in Lithuanian maps as well.

Coming next: Some maps of the Lida area. (A current map of Belarus and a map of Partitioned Poland are among my August 17 posts.)

My Two Prokopowicz Families

Polish Worcester

I grew up in a culture that was uprooted from rural villages in partitioned Poland, packed into trunks, carried across the Atlantic in steerage, and re-created in the three-decker-lined streets of Worcester, Massachusetts. An industrial city, the second largest in New England, Worcester in 1920 was home to about 180,000 people, 72 percent of them either foreign-born or the children of foreigners. People of nearly 30 nationalities became U.S. citizens in Worcester in the early 1940s. Through the 1960s at least, the dominant ethnic groups—the Irish, Swedes, French Canadian, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks—all laid claim to their own fairly clearly demarcated neighborhoods, typically centered around churches and synagogues. To me, this multicultural city was a magical place, rich in exotic foods, traditions, and languages. I felt like I was growing up in Europe.

Close enough. I grew up in a bilingual household, all of us speaking Polish with my babcia (grandmother), who shared our home. My parents were the first members of their respective families to own property in America. In 1941, they bought a small home on Pakachoag Hill in Quinsigamond Village, a Swedish neighborhood (though in point of fact, 5 of the original 14 households on our street were Polish American) at the southern end of the city near Auburn and Millbury. The Polish neighborhood was a two-mile car or bus ride north. Its heart was Millbury Street and its soul, Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish, aka St. Mary's. Millbury Street was the hub of social, retail, and business life for the thousands of Poles and Polish Americans who lived in its two neighborhoods, The Island and Vernon Hill. My family has belonged to Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish and its various organizations for nearly a century. Several generations of us have graduated from St. Mary's Elementary and High Schools; we're proud to have been educated by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth at New England's only co-ed Polish secondary school.

I am descended from two apparently unrelated Prokopowicz clans. Hopefully, DNA someday will establish whether any blood ties link these two families, who for hundreds of years lived within 35 miles of each other in the Lida district of the kresy (Poland's eastern borderlands), then independently crossed an ocean to settle within 5 blocks of each other in Worcester. If they are related, I may be my own cousin. (This I hope would prompt a call from Oprah.)

While my father's and mother's Prokopowicz families shared the same surname, the circumstances of their lives bore little similarity to each other.

My Maternal Prokopowicz Family

My maternal grandparents, Aleksandr Prokopowicz and Stefania Ruscik, both born ca. 1880, were from small farming villages near Szczuczyn, about 35 miles east of Grodno and southwest of Wilno. They entered an arranged marriage at ages 20 and 16 or so, respectively. By all accounts (including that of my grandmother herself, who told me she had been in love with the village schoolteacher), they had an incompatible, unhappy marriage. Their first child was born ca. 1899. A daughter and son followed. In 1910/11, Aleksandr and his older brother, Jozef, sold the family farm to their two younger sisters and used the money for ship's passage to America. After brief stints in Maynard and New Braintree, Massachusetts, the brothers took factory jobs in Worcester. Their wives and children followed in 1913. More children were born here. My mother, baptized Josefa (but known as Josephine), was the youngest of five siblings. All were educated at the Polish parish school. Alek and Stefania worked steadily in Worcester's industries and resided in the same Meade Street three-decker for about 25 years. They never became American citizens. When Alek died unexpectedly in 1939, he was buried in his brother's family plot in a tree-shaded older section of Notre Dame Cemetery in Worcester. Stefania never remarried, and never wavered from her desire to be laid to rest in a single grave of her own there; her instructions were followed when she died in 1962.

My Paternal Prokopowicz Family

My paternal grandparents, Julian Prokopowicz and Anna Blaszko, both born ca. 1895, were from small farming villages a few miles outside Radun, which in turn is 18 miles northwest of Lida and approximately 40 miles south of Wilno (today Vilnius, Lithuania). It is likely that Julian and Anna knew each other, since they grew up in the same parish. Both were single when they left their parents and siblings behind and immigrated in 1913/14. Julian's destination was Worcester, where he reconnected with the Linga family of Kiwance; Anna's was Lowell, where her Kulikowski cousins had settled. Julian and Anna were married in Lowell in 1916 and established in Worcester before their first child's birth a year later. My father, Alphonse, was the oldest of their nine children; he was 18 when his youngest sister was born in 1935. Julian, his name Americanized to Julius, was a wire drawer at American Steel & Wire South Works for his entire adult life. The family's first home was on Millbury Street, within easy walking distance of the wire mill. They moved three more times over the years, but always stayed on Millbury Street, by 1940 settling into the first floor of a three-decker near Crompton Park. The children attended Millbury Street School and Boys' and Girls' Trade and Commerce High Schools. Julius and Anna became U.S. citizens in the early 1940s. Julius died suddenly in 1951, and Anna remarried within months. She died in 1976. Julius, Anna, and some of their descendants are buried in a family plot at Notre Dame Cemetery.

Relationships, Memories, & the Lack Thereof

My babcia Stefania (also known as Stella) was the only grandparent I was close to. Aleksandr died before I was born, and Julius when I was 4 years old. Though I probably passed Anna's home nearly every day of my life, I never knew her. Perhaps it is not unusual that relationships sometimes get skewed in favor of one side of a family. Whatever the reasons, it is painfully sad. Stefania, a force of nature by any standards, played a major role in my life. I knew Alek and Julius only second-hand, from older family members' stories, and Anna only from occasional phone calls in which I never knew what to say. I have no photos of Stefania before she was in her 50s, and only one of Alek, taken in his coffin. I am grateful to have several photos of Julius and Anna, including their wedding photo, which I treasure.

As a child, I spent a great deal of time with my babcia Stefania. I begged her to tell me stories about her life, especially the farm where she grew up. In retrospect, of course, I wish I had asked more about wedding and baptismal dates and village names and siblings and ancestors, and less about gardens and animals. I did ask better questions as a teenager: Why didn't she wear a wedding ring? Why didn't she ever learn English? I deeply regret never having forged a relationship with Anna. Unlike Stefania, who was given to tearing up photographs and documents, Anna valued hers: the trunk she carried from Poland and an old suitcase held an abundance of photos, greeting cards, letters, notebooks, and other memorabilia. I could have learned so much from her. I could have been as close to Grandma as I was to Babcia.

And so my curiosity about my family's past was fed by the stories Stefania told me, and the stories I never had a chance to hear from Alek and Julius, and the stories I failed to seek from Anna. I was fortunate to have grown up in the midst of a huge extended family (my astrological birth chart has Jupiter in the fourth house—essentially, an abundance of family and blessings related to family; that really resonates with me). My dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins shared many memories and details that augmented what I learned from my parents. A maternal cousin, A. John Prokopowicz, began working on our shared roots in the early 1980s; he became my mentor in genealogy in 1997, encouraging me to research my paternal family lines. Since his death only too soon thereafter, I have often felt his spirit guiding and encouraging me in this quest.

Thanks to LDS microfilms, the resources of countless archives and libraries, helpful listserv "gen-pals," and serendipity, I have traced Alek and Stefania's families to the 1700s and Anna's to the early 1800s. I have visited my ancestral villages, which today lie within the borders of western Belarus, and met long-lost cousins who live there still. But I remain challenged by two major goals: to trace Julian's family roots (his father's family does not appear in the Radun parish records), and to find a photograph of Aleksandr actually taken during his lifetime. The search continues.