The Internet, Circa 1996

I remember the first night I went on the Internet back in the fall of 1996.  Before going to bed, I decided to do a search (probably AltaVista or Yahoo! or whatever was the most common engine or directory at the time) for my surname, Stuczynski.  I figured there would be no hits, as it is a very rare name, but instead I found around 80 hits, mostly for a man by the name of Steve Stuczynski.  To this day, he's all over the net, mostly because of his involvement with computers, back before people called it "IT".  But what I found was an explanation of what my last name meant.  Most books don't even list it, and various genealogy-types told me it was a corruption of Strucynski or other similar names.  And it may or may not be related to the Polish word for "strike" or "hit", but my family believed (apart from an amusing anecdote that was meant in jest) that it meant nothing in particular.

The Crusades?  Probably Not

So here I was, looking at the "Stuczynski Family Roots Page" of Steve's (whom I am not traceably related to) offering the following explanation, which can be found at Stuczynski.Com.  (I am reproducing it here without his permission as an informational quote, a dire necessity until recently due to the presence of evil midi polkas.)  Information given to Steve by a design engineer, Dan Stuczynski of Detroit, Michigan, USA paints a picture of the origin of the name:

The story starts at the end of the 13th century, about 1250 to 1270 A.D. when warriors from the Stuczynski clan joined forces to fight in the Holy Wars or Crusades. Upon returning from the Wars, the few Stuczynskis that survived, were granted a large parcel of land in Northeastern Poland (near the Russian border) known as "Stuczyn". Then Clan nobles managed this land and its people for hundreds of years.

However, upon a touch of research done online recently, I discovered that for a number of reasons, Poland did not participate in the Crusades.  In fact, they were pillaged by the crusaders (the Teutonic Knights) in an effort to convert the local Pagan populations.  I can find no record of any involvement by the Poles as crusaders, except to throw out the Teutonic Knights, and not having set foot in the Holy Land.  More specifically, in spite of having an extensive Christian population, they were on the other side, fighting for the rights and peaceful existence of Pagans and Jews.

I will research this more, looking for actual sources from historians and other accounts to verify or disprove the information given by Dan Stuczynski.  Perhaps the story is half-true, where the clan given the land were the people who played a part in casting out the Teutonic presence.  Dan, if you're out there, drop me a line and let me know your sources, or if it's just something passed down over the years.

Did you mean Jenn Stuczynski?

After a couple years of adding a not-so-small amount of content to the web, as well as owning my own web development company, I took up the lion's share of Google results, all the way to the top.  However, after the rise of Olympic pole vaulting star Jenn Stucyznski (my second cousin's daughter), I am nowhere to be found, or at least not anywhere on the first bunch of results pages.  I remember the first time I searched for my own name and it asked me "Did you mean Jenn Stuczynski?"  A very humbling moment.

The Jewish Connection - A Real Place

Among my  first search results over a decade ago, I recall a page somewhere listing people in Poland from the 1800s of Jewish descent, many with the last name Stuczynski.  It is likely that between the Czar and Hitler, that few family lines survived, but it stayed in my mind as a piece of the puzzle.

However, in 2007, I came across a spreadsheet on the Yad Vashem website listing people from the following places with date of death:

So there WAS a place called "Stuczyn" after all!  And Białystok was near the Russian border, now adjacent to Belarus.  One problem, though -- after all the maps I could find (few and far between, even in libraries and from acquaintances in Polonia who have connections in the Old Country) a place by that name was nowhere to be found.  In fact, apart from a reference to "Rabbi Boruch Szapiro of Stuczyn" (in the early 19th Century), and a detail-less newspaper note from WWII, there was little other reference to any such place.

Three Towns, Same Name