>> >Just curious of any meaning if name ends in 'ski', >> >'cki', or other. > My father has always insisted that names that ended in 'cki' or 'ski' > are from the nobility. For example: Potocki, Czartoryski, etc. > As Mr Kaszubik said above, many names are taken from the place of > origin. But the reverse is also true. The noble family of > Zamojski/Zamoyski owned the town of Zamosc. I am fairly that the town > was named after the noble. On the other hand, some people not from the > nobility adopted or adjusted their names so as to sound noble. This is right. The -ski ending is a an adjectival ending that turns a noun into an adjective. When nobles began to adopt surnames, they generally named themselves after their estates, using the French style (for example, Piotr who owned the estate Baranow would call himself Piotr de Baranow), or the Latin style (Piotr ex Baranow), but quickly the native Polish style became the norm (Piotr Baranowski). A surname ending in -ski did once indicate a noble origin, but over the years the usage spread from the nobility to townsmen and then even to the peasantry (now indicating not that they owned a place, but that they came from a place), so it's not a reliable indicator of nobility today. The town of Zamosc was founded in 1580 by Jan Zamoyski, and built on top of the village of his birth (Skokowka). The town was named Zamoscie after its founder, later it was reinterpreted as masculine and became Zamosc. But the Zamoyski surname itself derived from their estate in a separate village called Zamoscie, today it's the village of Stary Zamosc a little ways north of the town of Zamosc. Joe Armata [email protected]