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.

Exactly how Polish is my DNA?

My grandparents, and their parents before them, and their parents before them, all lived in Wilno. In their time, Wilno was one of the western provinces of the Russian Empire; earlier, Wilno was the eastern stronghold of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For hundreds of years, at least, the Wilno region was a melting pot of ethnicities—Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, Ruthenian, Tatar, German, Scot, and Italian (not to mention possible Swedish infusion from the devastating Great Northern Wars).

When my grandparents emigrated from Wilno before World War I, they settled in a sizable Polish community in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were members of its Roman Catholic parish of Our Lady of Częstochowa. My mother and her siblings were educated at the parish's St. Mary's School, whose bilingual curriculum steeped them in Polish literature, history, and music. Although the intensive half-day of Polish studies had been phased out by the 1950s, when I received my diploma from St. Mary's High School in the mid-1960s, I was graduated from New England's only coeducational Polish Catholic high school.

My family spoke Polish at home. We ate Polish food—my father's homemade kiełbasa, my mother's gołąbki. Daddy listened to Johnny Libera's polka program on the radio every weekend, and Mom prayed I would marry "a nice Polish boy." (Note: her prayers were not answered. Szkoda!)

It never occurred to me that I was anything less than 100 percent Polish. In 1996, I began researching and documenting my Polish ancestry. In 2002, I stepped off the paper trail to do my first mitochondrial DNA test; Oxford Ancestors identified me as mtDNA H, the most common European maternal haplogroup. Unfazed by the fact that H encompassed about 40 percent of the continent's female descendants, I ordered a "Polish DNA Inside" T-shirt from Café Press.

Lost in a maze of haplogroups

But I began reading books and more books about DNA. I lacked the scientific background to understand much, but the topic intrigued me. My mother had passed mtDNA H along to me, but what did my other ancestral lines contribute to my genetic makeup? What did I receive from my father and my grandfathers, whose Y-DNA I, as a woman, could not inherit? How did my paternal grandmother fit into the scheme of things? What did I share with my cousins? What did I hand down to my children?

Testing had grown increasingly sophisticated in the years since my Oxford Ancestors test. As a woman, I could hope for more detail about my mtDNA heritage through newer, more refined tests. As a woman, I could not be tested to learn my father's Y-DNA haplogroup. I could, however, gain some insight into my ancestry beyond direct male and direct female lines by means of autosomal testing—and perhaps discover some new cousins in the process.

After doing considerable research on genetic testing services, I decided to try Family Tree DNA. (Since then, I have also used 23andMe. I am equally satisfied with both companies, which are recognized leaders in the field.) What I particularly liked about Family Tree DNA was its plethora of projects—geographic, ethnic, haplogroup, surname—that seemed designed to facilitate exploring how and where any tester's ancestry might fit into the big picture of human evolution and migration.

Who to test, and why

I had a goal: to identify the Y-DNA haplogroups of my two grandfathers, and the mtDNA haplogroups of both of my grandmothers (of course, I already knew my maternal grandmother's). The Y-DNA results loomed especially large. Both my father and my mother were born into Prokopowicz families, as I mentioned in one of my early blog posts. My paternal grandfather, Julian Prokopowicz (1895-1951), hailed from Radun parish in the eastern Lida region. My maternal grandfather, Aleksandr Prokopowicz (1878-1939), was from Iszczolna parish, a scant 30 miles to the west. Did Julian and Aleksandr share a common male ancestor at some point in the distant past? No amount of paper-trail research could ascertain that. Only Y-DNA testing could answer the question.

My father and three of his four younger brothers had already died. Only his youngest brother, my one surviving uncle, could provide a genetic sample of my grandfather Julian's Y-DNA as well as my paternal grandmother Anna's mtDNA. (Men inherit their mother's mtDNA but do not pass it along to their children.) I was very apprehensive about asking my uncle to do the testing; he is a very private person. To my grateful delight and relief, he graciously agreed.

I should note that, had my uncle not been willing and available, other testing options were possible in my extended family: five male cousins (my paternal uncles' sons) and one aunt (my father's one surviving sister). One male cousin and one aunt could have provided the haplogroup information I sought, but testing one person instead of two seemed optimal (read: simpler and cheaper).

My mother's family also posed a challenge. Of my mom's three brothers, only one had fathered a son—my cousin and genealogy mentor, who died in 2000, survived by two daughters and one son. That son, my first cousin once removed, was the only living male Prokopowicz descendant of my grandfather Aleksandr, the only possible source of a Y-DNA sample. Without hesitation, and happy to further the family research his father had launched back in the 1980s, he too agreed to testing.

Even though I already knew my maternal grandmother Stefania was haplogroup H, I expected that more current mtDNA testing might augment the information I received in 2002.

With all four grandparents represented, I ordered our kits from Family Tree DNA in March 2010.

The Prokopowicz Question, answered at last

Four months later, the Prokopowicz question was unequivocally answered: Julian Prokopowicz and Aleksandr Prokopowicz did not share a common male ancestor. They did not even share a haplogroup. They were descended from two distinct tribes that migrated to Wilno from different parts of Eurasia sometime during the past few hundreds or thousands of years.

The same proved true of my two grandmothers, who descended from different "daughters of Eve," as human genetics professor Brian Sykes termed the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups in his groundbreaking 2001 book.

Over the past three years, additional tests on our family's DNA samples have added more specificity to the initial findings. For Y-DNA, we advanced from 12 to 67 markers and added on SNP tests. For mtDNA, as new tests became available, we progressed to FTDNA's mtDNAPlus and mtHVR2toMega. To explore our other ancestral lines, we used Family Finder autosomal tests; I have used 23andMe for that same purpose.

My grandparents' haplogroups

What were my grandparents' same-sex haplogroups? Here is what my family's DNA tests revealed:

Paternal grandfather Julian Prokopowicz (via my uncle's test) — N1c1, also described as N-M231 Y-DNA
Paternal grandmother Anna Blaszko (via my uncle's test) — T2b mtDNA
Maternal grandfather Aleksandr Prokopowicz (via my cousin's test) — R1a1, also described as R-SRY10831.2 Y-DNA
Maternal grandmother Stefania Ruscik (via my test) — H27 mtDNA

It's my hope to find appropriate long-lost cousins who might be tested for my grandparents' other ancestral lines: a female descendant of Julian's mother, Anna Bogdan; a male descendant of Anna's father, Adam Blaszko; a female descendant of Aleksandr's mother, Paulina Zubrzycki; and a male descendant of Stefania's father, Antoni Ruscik. I am curious about whether testing those family lines would reveal even more diversity in my heritage.

I need a new T-shirt!

That would be in line with the haplogroups observed to date in the Family Tree DNA Belarus-Lida Region project http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Belarus_Lida_Region/ that I founded a couple years ago. Y-DNA haplogroups represented there are E1b1b1, I1, J2, N1c1, R1a1a, and R1b1a2. Mitochondrial haplogroups are H, H23, H27, I, J1c1, K, N1b1e, R0a, T2, T2b, T2e, U, U7, and W6-C16192T. The project members' range of haplogroups—to some extent, at least—reflects the ethnic mix that characterized Wilno for so many centuries.

It has been eye-opening to me to consider that I am, in effect, a one-person melting pot—a genetic synthesis of at least a few of the disparate human tribes that found their way to Wilno over hundreds or thousands of years. DNA testing answered my first, rather simple question: yes, I am descended from two unrelated Prokopowicz families. But it has raised some other questions and issues, not the least of which is this: I need a new T-shirt, one that correctly proclaims "More than Polish DNA Inside."

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.

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.