Zieliński

Polish record-keeping has Zieliński from 1424, formed on the place names Zieleń and Zieleniec, of which there were several villages. That is the whole of it: an adjectival territorial name, built with the suffix that turned a settlement into a description of a man. Zieliński never meant a green man. It meant the man of the green place, and the place had to exist before anyone could be named for it.

The closest matches are settlements called Zielin, Zielińsk and Zieliniec, with Zieleniec and Zielona among the others that give the same result. The root is zieleń, the colour green, carrying a sense of vibrancy and youth; some bearers may instead owe it to zioło, a herb. Jewish families from Poland took the name on the same principle, from places called Zielona or Zielonka. There is no founding village and no founding family: the name was made independently in dozens of places at once.

The density that made that possible was sharply regional. In the 16th century the highest proportion of nobles in the country lived in the Płock Voivodeship, at 24.6 per cent, and in Podlachia at 26.7, against 1.7 per cent in the Kraków Voivodeship and 3 in Royal Prussia. In districts such as Wizna and Łomża the szlachta made up nearly half of everyone living there. Beside nobilities of around 1 per cent in Italy and France, that is not a variation on a European norm but a different arrangement of society.

This is why Zieliński became one of the most numerous names in Poland. Where a village was the seat of one lord it produced one family entitled to call itself after the place. Where a village held twenty small noble households, every one of them could take the locative name, so a settlement called Zieleń or Zielona sent out not a family of Zielińscy but a whole neighbourhood of unrelated ones. The name has no common ancestor because the pattern that made it was never going to produce one.

A Polish coat of arms does not belong to one family, and the herb Świnka, under which Zielińscy are recorded, was shared with families of other surnames who had come into it by agreement rather than blood. The arms mark a fellowship, not a pedigree.

The most consequential man to carry both the name and those arms was Konstanty Józef Zieliński (1646-1709), archbishop of Lwów. It fell to him to place the crown on Stanisław Leszczyński as king of Poland, putting an archbishop's authority behind a throne that was being fought over.

When the Kościuszko Insurrection called out the levy, two men of the name and the Świnka arms held the same commission in the same country. Aleksander Zieliński (1755-1823), a general of the landed sort, served as major of the Ziemia Łomżyńska, the Łomża land, and Norbert Zieliński, whose life straddles the 18th and 19th centuries, is recorded in exactly the same office for the same district. The sources set them side by side and claim no kinship between them, which is the point.

Łomża is the district where the szlachta had numbered close to half the population, so a levy raised there was raised from smallholders: men who ploughed, sat in the sejmik, and turned out under arms because the charter that gave them a vote gave them the obligation with it. The Zielińscy of the Łomża land were not commanding tenants. They were commanding their equals.

Karol Zieliński (1787-1835), also of the Świnka arms, went into the Napoleonic armies and rose to colonel, then served as a brigade general in the November Uprising. Gustaw Zieliński (1809-1881) fought in the same rising and was sent to Siberia for it. He returned a sybirak and became one of the outstanding poets of the late Polish romanticism, remembered above all for the narrative poem Kirgiz, which came out of the exile.

The empire then went after the class that had made the risings, and by 1864 four in five of the szlachta had been declassed. The name survived that. The standing did not.

Juliusz Zieliński was born on 6 May 1881 at Komorsko in Świecie county, son of the Polish farmers Jakub Zieliński and Weronika née Oszwałdowska. He matriculated in 1901 from the German teachers' seminary at Tuchola and went into elementary teaching, at Kozłowo, then Buk Pomorski, and from 1912 at Białochowo, where he married Maria Domańska and took the school over from his retiring father-in-law. As a subject of the King of Prussia he was called up in January 1915, served as a medical orderly on the eastern front, was wounded on the Narew that August, and after a posting to the Somme and the Oise was discharged an Unteroffizier in August 1916.

When Poland came back he set about building it in Pomerania, as commandant of the Citizens' Guard and then, from January 1920, as acting wójt for the Dusocin district. In 1929 he was given leave from Polish schools and sent to teach Poles outside Poland. On 1 July he reached Złotów, then inside Germany and called Flatow, and directed its new Polish school: trips home to Wieliczka, Poznań, Częstochowa and Kraków, nativity plays, talks for parents over coffee and doughnuts that he sometimes paid for himself.

The war caught him at Grudziądz. He and his wife evacuated eastward and so missed the executions of teachers summoned to a bogus conference in the first days of the occupation, but he returned after Warsaw fell and was arrested in October 1939 with the rest of the town's intelligentsia. Interrogated on a charge of Polonising German children in Złotów, he was released that December and taken again by the Gestapo in March 1940. Sachsenhausen came first; that September he was moved to Dachau as prisoner 17519, and he died there in January 1944. Złotów has not let go of him: a memorial tablet went up in 1959 and was replaced in 2014, the year a roundabout in the town was named for its first Polish headmaster.

Genia Zielinska was born Genevieve C. Zielinski in Kansas City, Kansas, on 3 January 1891, to Teodor Zielinski and Karolina Chrupowicz Zielinski, both Polish immigrants; her father died while she was an infant. She trained at the Chicago Musical College and in New York under Estelle Liebling and Josef Pasternack, and came out of it a coloratura soprano. Radio made her name: Filina in a broadcast Mignon in 1926, the title role in a broadcast Manon in 1927, Zerline in Fra Diavolo. The critic Minna Littmann wrote in 1928 that no more delightful artist had come that way that season.

The other half of the career was Polish America hearing itself sung back. In 1929 she was soloist at an Illinois concert marking the sesquicentennial of Casimir Pulaski's death; in 1930 she sang the title role in Halka with the Polish Opera Company in New York; in 1933 she was soloist at a concert of Polish folk song in Buffalo. She lived with her unmarried older sisters Josephine and Angeline for most of her life, worked in a department store in her later years, and died in Kansas City in January 1966.

The PESEL register counted 85,988 Zielińscy at the start of the 1990s; in 2009 it was 91,522 and the name ranked eighth in Poland; by 2015 it was 116,376 people. Women carry it as Zielińska; stripped of its diacritics abroad it becomes Zielinski, and in Silesia it settled into German as Zelinsky. Zygmunt Zieliński (1858-1925) was a Polish general; Marian Zieliński (1929-2005) took a world title and an Olympic medal in weightlifting; Henryk Zieliński (1920-1981) was a historian, and Izabella Zielińska (1910-2017) a pianist and teacher whose life ran from before one war to well past the century's end.

Two of the name are honoured for what they did when it cost most. Zbigniew Hugo Zieliński (1907-1967) and Ryszard Juliusz Zieliński, born 1931, are both recognised as Righteous Among the Nations, and both are recorded under the Świnka arms that the Łomża majors carried into the Kościuszko rising. Whatever that herb meant when a village of smallholding nobles first claimed it, it is a decent thing for it to end up attached to.