In which I tenaciously chew on our name like a hungry dog on a bone, until there's nothing left.

On this page I split our last name into two—Kurland and ski—and take a close look at each piece in order to answer the question Where in the world do we come from? Then I try to work out where we Kurlandskis have lived, and where we're living now.

But first I must thank Wikipedia for its very existence. I quote extensively from this free, online encyclopedia. If something's well written, I figure why mess around with it? Also, I love the encyclopedic style, the way it has of compressing information into sentences dense with meaning... But I digress. If you, too, are a regular or even occasional user of Wikipedia, please keep it going by donating at https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Home .

A final note before we dig in: Don't be frustrated by the tiny maps! Most of the maps and other illustrations on this page have links in the title. Click on the link to see an enlarged view.

How to Pronounce Przasnysz

On this page I repeatedly refer to Ludwig Kurlandsky's home town of Przasnysz. (See Ludwig Kurlandsky, Immigrant, if you haven't already.) At first I was intimidated by its consonant-heavy spelling, especially by its P-r-z whammy of a start. Finally I did some googling and came upon the town's Wiktionary entry, which provides a button that lets you play its pronunciation in audio form. If you're not inclined to check out the link, here's my attempt to guide you in the town's pronunciation:

• pshas nesh (where the first vowel "a" follows the "a" in father, and the second vowel "e" follows the same in nest)
• The "r" is silent.
• Note that there is no vowel between the "p" and the "sh" sound following it. Try to make the "sh" follow the "p" so quickly that the "p" is hardly audible.)
• For those of you who can read IPA, it goes: /ˈpʂas.nɘʂ/

Kurland (aka Courland)

Courland is one of the Historical Latvian Lands in western Latvia. Courland's largest city is Liepāja, which is the third largest city in Latvia. The regions of Semigallia and Selonia are sometimes considered as part of Courland, as they were formerly held by the same duke.

The literal meaning of the name is "Land of Curonians". ("Courland," Wikipedia)

Kurland is an alternate, perhaps Germanic, spelling of Courland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurland). I'll be alternating between both spellings, as the mood takes me. There is also a village in Norway named Kurland, though we will not be discussing that here, as we are not Norwegian.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia altogether form the three Baltic States. They gained their independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the '90s. In the map above, the small light-green tract of land between Poland and Lithuania is the Russian province of Kaliningrad, disconnected from the rest of the country. It is Russia's only Baltic Sea port which remains ice-free in the winter. So you can imagine that, when the Russians invaded Ukraine a couple of years ago, they were possibly viewing it as a practice run for regaining their formerly easy access to the Baltic Sea—right through one or more of the Baltic States.

Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland—the borders in Eastern Europe have always shifted with the times. Those of Kurland have been no different. On the map at right above, Kurland forms most of that part of Latvia which lies west of the capital, Riga. (This will be easier to see if you click on the image's title to enlarge it.) To get a reference point on the maps below, start with that city. Kurland always lies to the west.

Some History

The Curonians or Kurs (Latvian: kurši; Lithuanian: kuršiai) were a medieval Baltic tribe living on the shores of the Baltic Sea in the 5th–16th centuries, in what are now western parts of Latvia and Lithuania. They eventually merged with other Baltic tribes, contributing to the ethnogenesis of present-day Latvians and Lithuanians. Curonians gave their name to the region of Courland (Kurzeme), and they spoke the Curonian language. ("Curonians," Wikipedia)

And if that little history lesson doesn't go back far enough for you:

Around 3000 BC, the proto-Baltic ancestors of the Latvian people settled on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. The Balts established trade routes to Rome and Byzantium, trading local amber for precious metals By 900 AD, four distinct Baltic tribes inhabited Latvia: Curonians, Latgalians, Selonians, Semigallians (in Latvian: kurši, latgaļi, sēļi and zemgaļi), as well as the Finnic tribe of Livonians (lībieši) speaking a Finnic language. ("Latvia," Wikipedia)

More Recent History

The Brethren of the Sword, a German Catholic military order, subdued the Curonians and converted them to Christianity in the first quarter of the 13th century. Thus in 1230, the Curonian king Lammekinus (Latvian: Lamekins) made peace directly with the papal legate. He accepted baptism, and became a vassal of the pope. In 1237 the area passed into the rule of the Teutonic Order owing to the amalgamation of this order with that of the Brethren of the Sword. ("Teutonic Order," Wikipedia)

If you click on the link to expand the map at left you'll see a good two dozen or so geographical territories occupying the space where the three Baltic States are now situated. Very medieval. Naturally the most interesting part of the map is the Kurland Diocese. In the bay which is north of Riga the map reads, "Archbishopric of Riga ceded their Liv coast possessions to Bishopric of Kurland in 1439."

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and Russia struggled for supremacy in the eastern Baltic. After the Polish–Swedish War, northern Livonia (including Vidzeme) came under Swedish rule. Riga became the capital of Swedish Livonia and the largest city in the entire Swedish Empire. Fighting continued sporadically between Sweden and Poland until the Truce of Altmark in 1629. In Latvia, the Swedish period is generally remembered as positive; serfdom was eased, a network of schools was established for the peasantry, and the power of the regional barons was diminished. ("Latvia" on Wikipedia)

The map below is just part of the Wikipedia map which accompanies this extract. I like it for two reasons:

• Courland shows up as Ks. Kurlandzkie, which is darn close to Kurlandski. Notice how much larger it is than the Kurland Diocese in the previous map. (-zkie and -skie seem to be place name suffixes; I don't know what significance there is between the "z" and the "s." For the meaning of "Ks.," see below.)
• The map also shows Przasnysz (which I've circled in red). At least one of our ancestors must have migrated there from Courland, since this is the place Ludwig Kurlandsky indicated he was coming from when he made his journey to America.

With a little digging, the entries in Abbreviations in Słownik Geograficzny indirectly inform us that "Ks." stands for duchy (as in the land belonging to a duke).

• From their repetition on the map we can glean that both "Ks." and "woj." stand for geographic regions of some sort. (You'll see even more repetition by going to the Wikipedia article to view the complete map.)
• The abbreviations list has two entries for the first abbreviation: "ks. - książę, prince, duke" and "kś. - ksiądz, priest, Father."
• The entry for "woj" has "woj. - województwo, province."
• A nearby entry has "W. Ks. P. - Wielkie Księstwo Poznańskie, Grand Duchy of Poznań". This tells us that "Ks." can also mean duchy.

Latvian Independence

After centuries of Teutonic, Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian, and Russian rule, the independent Republic of Latvia was established on 18 November 1918 after breaking away from the German Empire in the aftermath of World War I. The country became increasingly autocratic after the coup in 1934 established the dictatorship of Kārlis Ulmanis. Latvia's de facto independence was interrupted at the outset of World War II, beginning with Latvia's forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union, followed by the invasion and occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941 [...]

[...] and the re-occupation by the Soviets in 1944, which formed the Latvian SSR [i.e. Soviet Socialist Republic] for the next 45 years. As a result of extensive immigration during the Soviet occupation, ethnic Russians became the most prominent minority in the country. The peaceful Singing Revolution started in 1987 among the Baltic Soviet republics and ended with the restoration of both de facto and officially independence on 21 August 1991. Latvia has since been a democratic unitary parliamentary republic. ("Latvia" on Wikipedia; stamp from "Courland," Wikipedia)

-ski

Wikipedia: "Polish name"

"Ski" (also "Sky" in other regions) is a formative adjective, from the Proto-Slavic "ьskъ", which defined affiliation to something. It was also used with names of territories and settlements to denote possession or place of origin. The suffix, -ski (feminine: -ska), has been restricted to the nobility in eastern Europe and some parts of central Europe since the High Middle Ages. It was the equivalent to nobiliary particles appearing in the names of nobility, such as in the Germanic von or zu. Almost all surnames borne by the nobility with the -ski (or -sky) suffix are preceded by a place name (toponymic) or other territorial designation derived from their main court, holdings, castle, manor or estate. For example, the Polish nobleman Jan of Tarnów, whose name in Polish is "Jan z Tarnowa," was equally known by the name "Jan Tarnowski"; this highlighted his nobility, unlike the preposition of "z" alone which could be construed as a regular prepositional particle.

In other words, a thousand years ago "Jan z Tarnowa" meant Jan of Tarnow or Jan from Tarnow, and it could refer to either a nobleman or a commoner. But within a few hundred years the nobles started using -ski to distinguish themselves from the riff-raff. So now when someone referred to "Jan Tarnowski," you could be sure they meant the nobleman.

Regarding the -ska suffix, it seems that in some cases a woman would call herself, for example, Kurlandska rather than Kurlandski. In my Kurlandski Notes page, under Cousin Stan Piekarski, I quote an email from him that says, "[Ludwig Kurlandski] also had sister, Helena Piekarski (nee) Kurlandska, my grandmother." So it would seem that in Poland, to at least some extent, daughters of -ski fathers employed the feminine form.

In the 19th century, a wave of seemingly noble sounding surnames began to appear among the common population, where a significant number of the bourgeoisie class, and even the peasantry, began to adopt or bear the noble -ski suffix.

But then, in the 1800s, relatively poor men named Jan who were from Tarnow began calling themselves Tanowsky. And this happened with a lot of other places names as well, including Courland.

[Therefore,] contrary to a popular modern-day misconception, the fact of a person simply bearing the -ski suffix in their family surname or merely sharing the same toponymic surname as members of Poland's nobility, does not in itself denote that person too is a member of the nobility, of noble origin, or indeed connected to that particular family.

So are we originally from Courland? It seems we probably are, in some way. That's what our name says.

Do we come from Latvian nobility? Almost certainly not.

Perhaps our name is covered in some study on Polish or Latvian surnames. In searching for such a study, I've come across these resources.

• Personal Names of Livonian Origin in Latvia: Past and Present: A research paper of some sort, interesting in general but not touching upon our name.
• http://www.celmina.com/surnames/index.php?title=Main_Page: This website "is a constantly growing database of Latvian surnames. It is intended to serve as a resource for English speakers researching their Latvian ancestors. It also aims to provide an overview of Latvian surname trends in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." At the time I came across this website there was no mention of our name there. But that could change in the future.

-ski vs. -sky (and a little bit of -ska)

Above I quoted part of the Wikipedia article "Polish Names". The very first line tells us a little about the difference between -ski vs -sky: "Ski" (also "Sky" in other regions). This line tells us that -ski is specifically Polish, while -sky occurs in other countries, which personal experience tells me includes Russia.

Up until I began doing my genealogy research I had always thought that the suffix -sky belonged to Russian Jews, and -ski indicated a Polish Catholic. But the "Polish Names" article makes no mention of any Catholic/Jewish difference in naming. So it appears that my "-ski = Polish Catholic, -sky = Russian Jew" rule-of-thumb was only half right.

I first began to doubt this rule-of-thumb when I found the The Ellis Island Record for my ancestor, Ludwig ... Kurlandsky. When I came across the ship's manifest a little later, the first thing I checked was his last name. The -sky was confirmed.

Could it be that his name really was Kurlandski, but the ship manifest was in error? After all, the journey to America in those times is infamous for changing immigrants' names without their consent or even knowledge.

But I think a better explanation is that people just didn't much bother themselves with spelling back then: my great-grandfather arrived as Ludwig Kurlandsky; by the time of the 1910 Census he was Ludwik Kurlanski (changing the spelling of both his first and last name); and ten years later, in 1920, he finally adopted the Kurlandski spelling which we have retained since, in these more orthography-conscious times.

Therefore, for the remainder of this page I normally do not distinguish between the two spellings. And very often I'll be lumping -ska in there as well, since it too is part of the "Place + -ski/sky/ska" naming pattern. And as we'll soon see, some of the websites I cover do the same, even munging in other versions of the name, such as Kurlandzki.

Where are the Kurlandskis in Poland?

In a previous section we learned that we Kurlandskis (and Kurlandskys) most likely originated in Courland. Here we work out where in Poland they originally settled, and where in Poland they remain.

In the map above titled "Portion of 'The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth'," you can see both Courland (identified as "Kurlandzkie") and Przasnysz, which Ludwig Kurlandsky indicated as his "last residence" on the manifest of the ship taking him to Ellis Island. It's about 300 miles from the one to the other. Either he or one of his ancestors must have made the trip as a migrant, perhaps directly or via a multi-step series of smaller migrations. We can't say exactly when this migration occurred, but in the next section we get a likely range of a few decades.

JRI-Poland Website

After much Internet googling and binging I found a website pairing Polish cities with surnames called JRI-Poland.

The JRI-Poland website is aimed primarily, if not exclusively, at a Jewish audience—on the main page the website's subtitle reads "Sharing More than 250 Years of Jewish Life in Poland, One Record at a Time". For their mission statement, see the About Us page.

After signing up at the website (which is free), the first page I visited was the Surname Distribution Mapper. Searching on "Kurlandski" (in the search bar on the right) brings up a new page showing all the Kurlandski-like hits in the database, imposed on a map of Poland.

Before proceeding I should point out what I mean by a "Kurlandski-like name." On some websites, to find a surname similar to ours you end up searching through a list of names starting with the letter "K" and using your own judgement whether the name is similar or not. That is not what a Kurlandski-like name means on this website. At JRI-Poland, they use an algorithm—a carefully defined set of rules—to decide whether a name sounds like the one you are searching on (which for me was always "Kurlandski"). In practice, this algorithm seems to find some names that look a lot like ours, and other names that are spelled quite differently from ours.

So the first result for Kurlandski-like names at JRI-Poland was not terribly interesting. But a new search field has appeared—Time Period, with a default of "All." Change the Time Period to "Play Progression," and this is what you see:

The video shows appearances of names like Kurlandski (including Kurlandzki, etc.) which appear in Jewish records over the course of time, from before 1820 to after 1931.

• The first 9 seconds show all the hits for all time. After this the decades begin passing by.
• There are no hits prior to 1820.
• The first Kurlandski-like name appears in the north in 1821-1830.
• In the 1841-1850 time period, some hits begin to appear between Warsaw and the town of Olsztyn, to its north. That is Przasnysz, Ludwig Kurlandsky's place of origin according to the manifest of the ship that brought him to America.
• For all of Poland, the hits begin dropping dramatically in 1911.
• By 1921 there are no longer any Kurlandski-like surnames in the Jewish records. At first I thought this indicated that they had migrated out of Poland, but a more likely explanation is that after World War I the records got lost or were no longer kept. After all, the town was formerly in either Russia or Prussia, and then it suddenly found itself in the new nation of Poland.
• In the period "1931 and Later" some records begin once again to appear.

On the web page, when I zoom in on Przasnysz on the map (just above Warsaw), there is a link that says "Display 37 matching records".

The two lists on the page are both for Przasnysz PSA Births. (PSA stands for Polish State Archives, according to https://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/polandv.html.) It's not clear whether the people listed are all citizens in the town, or just the Jewish ones. In either case, alas, there is only one Ludwik amongst the 37 records, and he was born in 1857, about 20 years too early to be our Ludwig. The names of my great-grandfather's siblings (Helena and Ignatz) do not appear there at all.

Here are the Kurlandski-like names appearing on this page:

• Kurlandska
• Kurlandski
• Kurlandzki

After reviewing the page discussed above I wandered to other pages on the website and came up with this list of the Kurlandski-like names for all of Poland, not just Przasnysz.

• Names which I had also found in Przasnysz: Kurlandska, Kurlandski, Kurlandzki
• Names not found in Przasnysz, and following the Kurland + ski/sky/ska pattern: Kurljandski, Kurlyandski, Kurlancki, Kurlandcka—and also Kurlyantsky, if you consider that to follow the pattern.
• Not found in Przasnysz, and not like Kurland + ski/sky/ska, but considered Kurlandski-like by their algorithm: Kurlacki, Kurlecki, Karliński.

Studying these lists, it seems to me that the case can be made that the further one strays from Ludwig's hometown, the more divergent the spelling becomes. Which suggests, perhaps, a migration pattern. Przasnysz is in the northeast, closer to Kurland than most of Poland. It is possible that as people from Kurland moved further away from their home country, the more likely it was that the spelling would change, perhaps because they were only semi-literate, perhaps because of regional Polish pronunciation differences.

One way to test my theory would be to investigate the Kurlandski name variability in other towns close to Przasnysz, including those even closer to Kurland.

• According to the video above, the first two towns we Kurlandskis invaded were Suwalki and Bialystok (1821-1830); then the Suwalki kin packed up to stay with their cousins in Bialystok (1831-1840); then, not liking Bialystok, and perhaps feuding with one another, some of us left Bialystok to either head back to Suwalki or to lay down roots in Przasnysz (1841-1850).
• If my hypothesis is correct, the Kurlandski-like names in Suwalki and Bialystok will be the same three listed for Przasnysz above.

Another way to test my theory would be to see if other -ski names follow the same pattern—a simple "Place + -ski/-sky/-ska pattern" close to the place of origin, becoming more variable the further away you go.

I'll leave both of these as extra-credit homework assignments for you. Your first task would be to register at JRI-Poland.

One day I'll return to this website to see what else of interest might be here.

My Polish Ancestors Website

Unlike JRI-Poland, the My Polish Ancestors website is using contemporary rather than historical data. The link above takes you to a How-To page in English, which gives you instructions on how to use the search page, which is in Polish.

The screenshot below shows the result for Kurlandski. The typeface is a little faded, but you'll be able to see the image better if you click on the link embedded in the title. I have added the approximate location of Przasnysz in a black box.

In case you're wondering—yes, that's right, according to this website there are very few Kurlandskis remaining in Poland. "najwięcej osób o nazwisku Kurlandski mieszka w" means "most people with the surname Kurlandski live in". So Lublin, a town southeast of Warsaw, has more Kurlandskis than any other place in Poland: four of 'em.

Which brings me to a couple important points. I don't know how the My Polish Ancestors website obtained its data. When doing research, often it's very important to completely understand the source of your information. This is not one of those cases. For my purposes, here, it doesn't matter whether there are four or 14 Kurlandskis in all of Poland. What matters is that there are very few, when you consider that that's where we came from. Regarding My Polish Ancestors, I'm interested in the big picture... On the other hand, when it comes to the JRI-Poland information, I'd like a little more clarity regarding the provenance of their data. Specifically, does it concern only Jewish Poles, or does it include the Polish goyim as well? In the next several paragraphs I'll be drawing a few conclusion based on the assumption that the JRI-Poland data is mostly about Jews, not Christians.

On the My Polish Ancestors website, to find surnames that are similar to one another, you can see where all the surnames starting with a particular letter are located. The page for the letter "K" is at https://nazwiska-polskie.pl/lista/K.

The table below merges data from different pages to:

• Show the surnames at My Polish Ancestors starting with the letters in "Kurland".
• List the cities where people having each surname live.
• Provide the number of people in Poland having that name.

Now let's merge the information in this table with the information I obtained from the JRI-Poland website.

• I've added an "In JRI-Poland" column, with possible values of Yes or No, indicating whether the name is one of the JRI-Poland names I listed in that section of this webpage. If the name is in the JRI-Poland list but not in the My Polish Ancestors table above, I looked up the name on My Polish Ancestors to get the count of modern-day Poles having that surname.
• Another new column is "Kurland + ski/sky/ska," which concerns whether the name fits that specific pattern.
• Finally, I've sorted first by Number Persons, then by In JRI-Poland, then finally by Kurland + ski/sky/ska.

Some observations on the table's appearance:

• Because we first sorted by Number Persons, the list is primarily ordered by the number of people having that name in current-day Poland.
• The secondary sort is based on whether or not the name appears in JRI-Poland: first No, then Yes. Now I'm going to make an assumption that I think is correct but could prove to be wrong. I'm going to assume that the names I found in JRI-Poland belong to Jewish Poles rather than Poles of all faiths. What this means is that the secondary sort is essentially sorting by "Jewishness," from less Jewish to more Jewish. Note that this criterion is used only when the Number Persons is tied, which for this data occurs only when that number is zero.
• Finally, if Number Persons and In JRI-Poland are the same for any particular name, then we order by whether or not the name fits the "Kurland + ski/sky/ska" pattern.

Now that we know what we're looking at, some observations on what the data reveal:

• Names which appear in JRI-Poland—in other words, those which belong to at least some Polish Jews—tend to appear at the bottom of the list (because there are fewer people having that name in Poland today). I think we can safely assume that this is because, if they were Jewish, they either emigrated out of Poland or were killed during the Holocaust.
• Broadly speaking, names generally following the "Kurland + ski/sky/ska" pattern also tend to appear towards the bottom of the list, though this tendency is not as pronounced as the JRI-Poland names.
• The name Kurlandski appears roughly in the middle of the list, but if you look at the Number Persons column it is much closer to the bottom than the top. The column's median value is 29 (Kurlandzka). (Median is more useful here than average because of the "Karliński Persons > 1,000" outlier, which increases the average value far too much for it to be helpfu here.) Another way to put all this is that the Kurlandski count of 4 is far, far closer to the lowest value of 0 than to the highest value of greater than 1,000.
• Przasnysz does not appear here. Nor do Suwalki and Bialystok, the other two Polish towns where Jewish Kurlandskis first showed up, according to the JRI-Poland website.

The first and second points, if put together, seem to say that the Polish population pattern of people with the "Kurland + ski/sky/ska" name pattern matches the population pattern of Jewish people in Poland. The third item indicates that the name Kurlandski follows the Jewish population pattern even more closely than the "Kurland + ski/sky/ska" pattern. And the last point, regarding Ludwig Kurlandsky's hometown as well as the surrounding region, indicates that that region is similarly devoid of Kurlandskis today, however much they flourished there in the mid-19th Century—just as if they had all been Jewish and either emigrated or were decimated in the Holocaust.

In other words, the population pattern of our name—which is Kurlandski, in case you're getting lost in all this—closely mirrors that of Polish Jewry.

Kurlandskis in the World

In the previous section we explored the distribution of Kurlandski-like surnames in Poland today. Here we explore our distribution in the world, based on data at the Forebears website, which lets you look up a family name and shows you which countries it is found in.

To reiterate a caveat stated above: I am sure that the counts and distribution in this website's database are not accurate today; in fact, I doubt they ever exactly reflected reality. But they are close enough for our purposes—to get a general sense of the situation.

To keep things simple, we'll focus on just Kurlandski and the name's two closest variations: Kurlandsky and Kurlandska.

When I saw this, my first thought was, "Wow!" An overwhelming majority of Kurlandskis seem to be living in Israel. I had no idea.

My second thought was the observation that the data at this website conflicts with the data at My Polish Ancestors, which had four Kurlandskis living in Lublin, Poland. Please remember that, as I've mentioned a couple of times now, we're not interested in exact figures here. Only in broad tendencies.

Let's conflate the three variations of the name, considering them as synonyms, so to speak, and see what we get.

Since we can be pretty sure that all of the Kurlandski-like people living in Israel are Jewish, this means that, if you randomly picked one of us out of a hat, the odds would be almost 60% that he or she was Jewish (i.e., probably more than 56%, since some of those in the U.S., Canada and so on might also be Jewish).

Which lets us segue very nicely to the next section.

Jewish Kurlandskis

Since moving to the New York City area, I've often encountered people who, when they hear my name, think I am possibly, or even probably, Jewish. If you have read the previous one or two sections of this page, you can see how I'm beginning to understand why.

Some googling on our surname resulted in a hit from a Jewish newspaper published in Indiana in the '90s. I've broken it up into paragraphs to make it a little more digestible.

Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 12 February 1992

Back to Latvia In installment 57 of this column, we looked at the Northeastern Ashkenazic family name Skaist, which I said came from the Latvian word for "beautiful." It's also possible that the name is from Lithuanian, which is closely related to Latvian. A rare Northeastern Ashkenazic family name is Lifflander, which comes from the German word Livlander, meaning "native or resident of Livonia." Livonia was a province of the Russian Empire and is now divided between the Latvia and Estonia.

More frequent than Lifflander is a Northeastern Ashkenazic family name Kurland, which is taken from the name of a region that is now part of the Latvia. This name occurs in several variants: Curland, Korland, Kurlander, Kurlender, Korlander, Kurlandski, Kurlansky, Korlandsky, Kurliandschick and Kurliandcik. See also installment 59 on the problematic name Gurland.

Interesting: So Kurlandski is a fairly common name among the Ashkenazi Jews.

In many installments of this column we've noted the principle of frequency; normally, the frequency of a family name and the frequency of what it designates should be correlated (for example, names meaning "tailor" are frequent among Ashkenazic Jews because many of them were tailors at the time family names were acquired). May it therefore be inferred from the rarity of Lifflander and the relative frequency of Kurland and variants that at the time of family-name acquisition more Jews were living in Kurland then in Latvia? If so, the study of Jewish family names is an aid to Jewish demography.

Some follow-up questions for the last paragraph:

• When in history did Ashkenazic Jews acquire their family names? Did non-Jewish peoples in the Baltic region acquire theirs at roughly the same time?
• Is Kurlandski a Jewish name? In other words, was it originally Jewish, and only later came to be used by non-Jews such as my family?

Pincus Kurlandski and Gustave Kurlandsky

We can't end this topic without remembering Pincus Kurlandski, who died in the Holocaust. He's been briefly mentioned on another page of this website for a long time. Until now, Gustave Kurlandsky, another Holocaust victim, has not been mentioned here.

See Find A Grave Memorials for more.

Et Alia

I thought I was done with this little requiem, but—while proofreading another section—I did a search on "Kurlandski" at one website, clicked on a link, and found myself redirected to a page at the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. At right is a copy of the page (click on the title to enlarge it), but if you want to go to the site to view it you'll find it here. Warning! The page takes quite a while to load.

Some Thoughts

On this page we've tried to look at the name Kurlandski from a historical perspective. As we should have expected, the history is a little murky.

All that we can say with a reasonable amount of certainty is that somewhere in our Kurlandski line is someone, probably a man, who came from Courland. And since we know so little, it's easy to imagine any number of scenarios about Ludwig Kurlandsky and his forebears. Let's consider a few.

1. There is a good chance that the first Kurlandski in our line was Jewish.

• Most documented Kurlandskis/Kurlandskys are Jewish. Googling the name Kurlandski frequently leads to pages where the name is presented in a Jewish context (as documented in Jewish Kurlandskis by the Jewish Post article as well as by Pincus and Gustave, who died in the Holocaust). The majority of Kurlandskis today are living in Israel and hence are probably Jewish.

2. But it's also possible that this first Kurlandski was not Jewish. There's no reason to think that all Kurlandskis descend from a single person who left Courland.

• It's easy to imagine any number of Courland immigrants in Poland who decided to take on the surname "from-Kurland," whatever their religion.

3. Our first Kurlandski was probably an ancestor of Ludwig Kurlandsky's, rather than Ludwig himself.

• In other words, Ludwig is unlikely to have left Courland without a surname, moved to Przasnysz in Poland, acquired the surname Kurlandsky, and left Poland for America. Since most Kurlandskis appear in Poland before his birthdate of 1875 (as we saw in JRI-Poland Website), and their number actually starts to drop at around that date, we can guess that it was his parents who migrated to Przasnysz—either with the name Kurlandski or just before having adopted it.
• Of course, since the JRI-Poland data comes from mostly Jewish records, the argument above assumes either that the family was Jewish or that the non-Jewish migration pattern mirrored the Jewish one.