Teodor & Fedory

Learning new Polish first names has been interesting. Katarzyna is known as Catherine. Andrzej is known as Andrew. There are some names like Salomea and Malgorzata which were not really familiar to me. Another interesting thing about names is that there seems to be many babies named the same thing in a given time period. So one couple may name a baby Jakub and a few months later their cousin or brother also names a baby Jakub. Then, the same name can show up more than once in a group of siblings. It was easy to figure out to look for a death record for the first one since they probably died and another child of the same sex was named with the same name. In this story of my 3x great grandfather and his two brothers, there is an example of this happening. One of them has two sons named Antoni. This re-use of a name is not the really perplexing part of this story though. Andrzej Kaszucki (my 3rd great grandfather) made his way from Ulanów,Galicia, Austria along with two of his brothers--one a furrier like him and the other a shoemaker. His two brothers were born ten to fifteen years apart. They seem to have the same or a similar name. The older one was called Teodor/Teodry/Fedory/Fedora in the records. The younger one was called Fedora/Teodor in the records. As you can imagine, it was very confusing determining if this was one person who had married twice or if it really was two different people. One reason for the confusion in the written records is that the translators are interpreting old style cursive letters so an F and a T could be confused. That can explain different variations of the name . . . So I am not really sure if they had the same name or one was Teodor (or some variant) and one was Fedory (or some variant.) Fedor is Ukrainian and is a form of the English name Theodore. They were both born in Ulanów, which at the time was in the Ukraine Province of Lwów. Based on how often records had one name or the other, I determined the older one was probably Teodor and the younger one was probably Fedory. TODAY IN HISTORY: I am telling this story today (December 13) because this is the day Teodor Kaszucki (my 4th great uncle) died in 1862, at 11pm. He was a 70 year old widower. He was listed as a laborer but he had been a furrier, the family business for generations. He resided in Tomaszow Lubelski but he was born in Ulanów,Galicia, Austria. The witnesses said his parents were unknown, but I know from other records that they were Lukasz Kaszucki and Agata Kraczk. (my 4x great grandparents.) He and his parents were Greek Catholic. One declarant was Szymon Zolkiewski, 53, a shoemaker. His younger brother’s wife Marianna Mirowska was first married to a Zolkiewski so he was possibly her former brother-in-law. The second witness was his nephew Jozef Kaszucki (my 2x great grandfather) who was 29 and a furrier. His brother Andzej (my 3x great grandfather) died in September 1861, fifteen months before Theodore died. HIS PAST: In 1816, Teodor Kaszucki had married Teodora (“Teska”) Czyszykiewicz when they were both 23 years old. Her father also was a furrier. (An interesting side note is that I discovered that Teodora/Teodozja, who was going by the nickname “Teska” also had a change of surname. Her father Stephan changed their name from Czyszykiewicz to Panczyszak.) In 1818, their first son Antoni was born in house 225. A year later in 1819, he and his wife had a second son Antoni who was born in house #219 on Krasnobrodzki Street. At 11 months old, the second Antoni died in the house (#213) of his grandfather, Stefan Panczyszak. In 1821, they had a daughter named Marianna., born in the house of Jan Zamalski #425. (An interesting side note about this daughter is that she would later in 1839 marry Jozef Wisniowski (son of Blazej & Agnes, different 4th great grandparents of mine. This is interesting since she is from Katarzyna Kaszucka’s father’s side and he is from her mother’s side). In 1824, Teodor and Teska had a son named Maxym who was born in house #204.