Hi - After looking in a couple German naming dictionaries under S and Z to be sure your names were not in there - they weren't - I looked in William F. Hoffman's Polish Surnames, Origins and Meanings: Sawin (sawina) "savin"; Sawina, Sawinski (diacritical over the n), Szawinski (diacritical over the n). These last two would be pronounced pretty much the same, I think. Best you listen to the sounds of someone who speaks Polish, especially in the dialect for the area you're searching. The same family may have varying spellings according to where they settled and moved around. I think they did that just to drive us genealogists nuts. In German, many sounds overlap to our ears - D and DT and T and TH are all pronounced as a D in German (and are listed in dictionaries that way - no T or TH); C, K and G sound like K. And V and W are interchanged, often with F. In Polish, which I am not so conversant with, the c and z in a word are soft, not a K sound. Best description I've found so far is in Hanks & Hodges' A Dictionary of Surnames: Sawicki - Polish; from the given name Sawa (from Greek Subbas, the name of a saint who died in 532) with the addition of -ski, suffix of surnames. Diminutive: Polish : Sawczyk Patronymnics: Polish Sawicz, Croatian Savkovic (diacriticals over c) Patronymic from a diminutive: Sawer, see also Sayer. Cognitives: German Sager; Low German Sager. Flemish, Dutch Saeger, Saegaert; Jewish (Ashkenazic) Seger, Sager; Zegman from Yiddish seg saw. Patronymic English: Sawyers None of these spellings is exactly the same as yours, but the sound is close, and since there were no spelling rules until around 1875-1900 - and no one paid much attention when there were, the sound is probably your best guide. Bringing those names to North America brought more changes in spelling, but the accents lingered for awhile - hence a Polish name beginning with an S being pronounced as a Z (rather than the other way around, usually) which is true of German also. My father always referred to it as the kitchen zink - and he was born in Missouri of immigrant parents. What we hear is the Z sound and what the Germans and Poles and others hear is the S. I don't have anything indicating Kasubian names - yet - but I'm looking. You might well have ethnic Polish names in a Kasubian district - as there were many ethnic Germans in Polen/Poland and Pommern/Pomerania and Östpreussen/East Prussia and elsewhere. I hope the experts on Kasubian culture and research will add to this exploration. Most interesting! Maureen Schoenky ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.