Anglicised Polish Surnames: Tracing a Name Change in the UK
Many Polish families in Britain carry a surname that has been shortened, respelled or replaced. Some changes were accidental, when a clerk wrote down what he heard. Others were deliberate: a new name taken by deed poll, at naturalisation or simply by use. To trace the family back to Poland you need the record that shows the change and a sound reconstruction of the original Polish spelling.
In England and Wales, formal changes of name appear in enrolled deed polls, held at The National Archives, and in notices in The London Gazette. Most changes were never enrolled, though, so you will often rely on indirect evidence: naturalisation lists, 1939 Register annotations and certificates that record an “otherwise” name.
Why Polish surnames changed in Britain
Spelling by ear
Registrars, enumerators, army clerks and employers wrote names as they heard them. Polish letters with no English equivalent were dropped or replaced, and a name spelled correctly on arrival could drift within a few documents.
Shortening and simplifying
Many people cut a long name to its first syllable or two, or dropped the ending, so Wiśniewski might become Wisniewski and then Wisney. Others kept the Polish name on paper but used a shorter form at work, which later turns up on a marriage or death certificate.
Translating the meaning
Some Polish surnames describe an occupation or an object, and a few families translated them. Kowalski contains kowal (smith), Krawczyk comes from krawiec (tailor) and Młynarczyk from młynarz (miller), so Smith, Taylor and Miller are possible English replacements. A translated name is the hardest to spot.
Taking a new English name
Some people chose an unrelated English name, often to make work, business or school easier for the family. Then only a document that states both names will link the two identities.
War service and naturalisation
Polish servicemen in Britain during and after the Second World War appear in British as well as Polish paperwork, and British forms often lost the diacritics or spelled the name phonetically. Naturalisation was another moment when a name could change, as the published lists show (see below).
The law also mattered. Under section 7 of the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919, a foreign national could not use a name other than the one by which they were ordinarily known on 4 August 1914 without an exemption from the Secretary of State. The National Archives notes that the restriction was only lifted in 1971, with exceptions for a name taken on marriage, a royal licence or special permission from the Home Secretary. So a Pole who was not yet a British subject usually could not change name formally, which is why many changes coincide with naturalisation.
Typical patterns in anglicised Polish surnames
Most changes follow predictable patterns based on how English speakers hear Polish sounds. The spellings below are illustrative.
| Polish spelling | Sound (roughly) | How it often appears in British records |
|---|---|---|
| ł (Michałowski) | English w | l or w: Michalowski, Mihawski |
| ó (Wójcik) | oo | o or u: Wojcik, Wujcik |
| w (Wójcik) | v | v: Voytchick, Vojcik |
| sz (Szymański) | sh | sh or s: Shymanski, Simanski |
| cz (Czarnecki) | ch | ch or tch: Charnecki, Tcharnecki |
| rz (Grzegorczyk) | zh, or sh after some consonants | r, z or sh: Gregorczyk, Gzegorczyk |
| szcz (Szczepański) | shch | Sh, Sch or Stch: Shepanski, Stchepanski |
| ą, ę, ś, ć, ż, ź, ń | nasal vowels and soft consonants | accents dropped: a, e, s, c, z, n |
| j (Jankowski) | y | usually kept, but sometimes written y |
Endings change too. The common -ski (and -cki, -dzki) is often written -sky or dropped, and -wicz (son of) appears as -wich, -vich, -witz or -vitch. Remember that Polish w sounds like English v, so a name written “Voytchick” was probably Wójcik.
Female surname forms and why they disappear
Polish surnames ending in -ski, -cki and -dzki change with gender: a man is Kowalski, his wife and daughters are Kowalska. In older Polish records, especially in villages, you may also see -owa for a married woman (Nowakowa, the wife of Nowak) and -ówna for an unmarried daughter (Nowakówna).
British records rarely use these forms. A Polish woman who married in Britain usually appears under the masculine form of her husband’s surname, so a Polish-born mother may be Kowalski on her child’s birth certificate. In Polish indexes, switch back to the feminine form: search for Kowalska, not Kowalski, and try -owa or -ówna for earlier records.
Records that document a change of name
Enrolled deed polls
A deed poll is a legal document in which a person declares that they have abandoned their old name and adopted a new one. It can be enrolled (formally registered) with the court for a fee, but The National Archives estimates that less than 1% of deed polls are, so absence from these records proves nothing.
Where enrolled deed polls are held:
- 1851 to 1903: indexes in C 275 (they show only the former name) lead to the deed itself, enrolled on the Close Rolls in C 54.
- 1904 to 2003: indexes and enrolment books in J 18. The indexes show both the former and the new name.
- 2004 onwards: held by the Royal Courts of Justice (King’s Bench Division), not The National Archives.
- None of these series is fully searchable online. The J 18 indexes can be consulted at Kew, or The National Archives will carry out a search if you send a request through its enquiry form.
From 1914 every enrolled deed poll had to be advertised in the London, Edinburgh or Belfast Gazette, so the Gazette is usually the quickest way in. A notice typically gives the old and new names, address and occupation, the dates of the deed and its enrolment, and the person’s status, for example “natural born British subject”.
Unenrolled deed polls and statutory declarations
Most people used an unenrolled deed poll or a statutory declaration made before a solicitor, Commissioner for Oaths or Justice of the Peace. These were legally valid, but there is no central register. The original stays with the person, so the only copy may be among family papers, in a solicitor’s files or attached to a later passport or naturalisation application. Some people also announced the change in a newspaper, most often The Times.
During the Second World War, The National Archives notes, anyone changing their name had to make a declaration and publish it in one of the Gazettes 21 days beforehand, so wartime changes are better covered than most.
Naturalisation records
The naturalisation lists published in The London Gazette give the name as “Surname, Forenames (known as …)” for people who used a different name. Polish entries from the 1950s show both anglicised spellings and entirely English names in brackets. The certificate and Home Office case file at The National Archives may explain when and why the new name was taken. Our guide to naturalisation records for Poles in the UK explains the series and how to order files.
The 1939 Register
The 1939 Register was used for National Registration and then for the NHS, and it was updated until 1991. Later surnames were written in or typed over the original entry. A change annotated “NR230” was, The National Archives explains, a change for a reason other than marriage. Polish servicemen arrived after 29 September 1939 and are not in the Register, but pre-war Polish families are, and so are many British-born women who later married Poles; their Polish married surname may be added to the entry. See our guide to UK census records and the 1939 Register.
Certificates, indexes and probate
Marriage and death certificates sometimes record both names, for example “John Kowal otherwise Jan Kowalski”. The same “otherwise” wording can appear in probate calendars and some civil registration indexes. Siblings’ birth certificates showing different surnames can date a change closely.
How to search The London Gazette for name changes
The Gazette archive at thegazette.co.uk is free to search. Its notice search has a “Changes of Name” category (notice code 2901), but this only covers name changes from 1998 onwards. For older notices, use the all-notices search, which reaches the scanned back issues.
- Search the old Polish surname first, without diacritics (Wisniewski, not Wiśniewski), and then the new name. Notices list both.
- Add phonetic variants, because the old name in the notice is the one used in Britain, which may already be anglicised.
- Narrow by date. Deed poll notices usually appeared within weeks of enrolment, so a range around the likely year saves time.
- Older issues are scanned pages read by OCR, so letters are sometimes misread. If a name does not appear, try a distinctive forename, the street or the town.
- Read the full page, not just the snippet. Notices from before 2009 refer to enrolment in the Supreme Court (the Senior Courts afterwards) and state whether the person was a natural born or naturalised British subject, which points you to the next record.
- For naturalisation, search the surname together with “known as” and “Poland” to find the naturalisation lists.
If the Gazette finds nothing, the change was probably made by unenrolled deed poll or statutory declaration, at naturalisation, or simply by use.
A worked example (illustrative)
Suppose a family knows their grandfather as “Stanley Wood”, a former Polish soldier who settled in the Midlands after the war. His death certificate in the 1980s reads “Stanley Wood otherwise Stanisław Wódkiewicz” (an invented example). A Gazette search for Wodkiewicz finds nothing, but the naturalisation list for the year he became British shows “Wodkiewicz, Stanislaw (known as Stanley Wood)” with the country Poland.
The naturalisation file gives his date and place of birth and his parents’ names. Now a Polish search can begin, using Wódkiewicz, the variants Wodkiewicz and Wutkiewicz, and his mother’s maiden name in the feminine form.
Working back to the original Polish name
Once you have the British spelling, rebuild the Polish original before searching Polish indexes such as Geneteka:
- Put back the lost letters. An English “l” may hide ł, an “o” may be ó, and a plain s, z or n may have carried an accent. Geneteka accepts spellings without diacritics, but you need the Polish form to recognise the name in the original entry.
- Reverse the phonetic changes. Turn sh back to sz, ch or tch to cz, v to w, and y to j. A name that looks Czech or Russian may simply be Polish written by ear.
- Restore the ending. Try -ski, -cki and -wicz on shortened names, and the feminine -ska for women.
- Allow for Russian records. In the former Russian partition, civil registers were kept in Russian from 1868 until 1918. Indexes compiled from them use Polish spellings, but the entry itself is in Cyrillic, and an English transliteration of the Russian form (Shchepanskiy for Szczepański) looks very different from the Polish one.
- Allow for German records. In the Prussian partition, names were often written in German style, so Szymański may appear as Schimanski and cz as tsch.
Our guides to Polish surnames explained and how to search Geneteka cover the Polish side in more detail. The key clue from the British record is usually the place of birth, because a nationwide search for a common surname returns too many matches. Once you have a parish or town, the next record is the Polish birth or baptism entry, which names the parents and gives the mother’s maiden surname.