"The great Poles are our family": I spent years of hard work to prove this statement. I intended to make it obvious for as many people as possible that people like Zawisza the Black, Nicolas Copernicus, M. Rej, J. Kochanowski, T. Kościuszko, A. Mickiewicz, A. Fredro, C.K. Norwid, M. Curie-Skłodowska, John Paul II and thousands of others who built our country and made it worldwide famous were not some strangers from another planet but people like us - our kith and kin.
That everyone can be like them (if he only wants).
That we are responsible for what our ancestors left to us: we should take care of it and develop it.
The prevailing part of the database is made of landowners (middle nobility) of the Commonwealth of Both Nations. However, it was not a criterion: my aim was to include every (Polish) people who are in any way genealogically connected with poets: Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski. I managed so far (until March, 2010) to collect over 300,000 such people: living since 12th to 21st century. Therefore, there are also peasants, townsmen and also Jewish families here.
There are, in general, no families not connected to Poland (or wider: to the Commonwealth of Both Nations) in the broadest sense, according to the guidelines of Polski Słownik Biograficzny.
There is one exception: the database incorporated all people from the Genealogy of Sejm Wielki Descendants (www.sejm-wielki.pl) who have family ties to Jan Kochanowski even if they do not feel any ties with Poland, as HIH Maria Vladimirovna, the head of Russian Imperial Family.
In first editions there were no ruling dynasties (only some their members if they are related to commoners). Since then, it has been changed to include the rulers of Poland, which in turn forced to include families ruling the neighbouring states: it is impossible to grasp the genealogy of Piasts, princes of Pomerania, Jagiellons, Vasas and Wettins without grasping Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns.
The presented work shows connections between people, not data about specific people. It shouldn't be used as a source of biographic information and only as a guide where such information can be found
Since 4th edition (2009) the title of this work changed from These Great Poles are our Family to The Minakowski's Great Genealogy. I realized that now nobody remembers the original titles of Paprocki's, Niesiecki's, Boniecki's or Uruski's armorials: everybody calls them just "Uruski's Armorial" or "Niesiecki's Armorial" instead of the original title like Rodzina (Family) or Korona (The Crown). The adjective "Great" is intended to point a difference from my "small" genealogy, which is The Genealogy of the Descendants of the Great Sejm, published at www.sejm-wielki.pl.
The base consists now (on March 5th, 2010) of 306,491 identified people (not counting e.g., unknown mothers). The sources used are:
The database (in the GeneWeb version) is generated from the source data: my database consisted of almost one million records which are kept in SQL format. The source base contains separately all pieces of information as they appear in the sources. During the generation process all pieces of information about a person are merged together.
Such way of building is perfect if the sources are complementary but fails if the sources contradict one another. So if one source says that the father of Mikołaj Dąbrowski was Jan Dąbrowski and another says that it was Henryk Dąbrowski, the resultant base claims that his father is Jan Henryk Dąbrowski or Henryk Jan Dąbrowski. In most cases this is true but sometimes it is erroneous.
The "Notes" section in the each person's page lists all the places where some pieces of information about the person were found. Therefore, if somebody finds an error related to some person, the error was either in some of the sources or in erroneous identification (the latter is considered below).
The main way of identifying persons who appear in various sources (or in various places in the same source) was the identification of marriages. If we find two instances of Zygmunt Pudłowski marrying Salomea Darowska, it is almost always the case that these are the same people.
Another way, but used sparingly, was identifying by the dates of life (if both sources quote the same year of birth or death) and by the offices (but mostly confined to the Senate).
Later, the families were identified: e.g. two fathers (or mothers) of an identified person should be the same person. Similarly, two children of some marriage who have the same first name are usually the same person (if nothing suggests the opposite).
Identifying names, not only the exact spelling was considered but also phonetic similarity. To achieve it, the standardization of first names, last names and coats-of-arms was introduced, and especially:
It was assumed that if any man uses a hereditary przydomek, coat-of-arms, surname, aristocratic title or locative predicate, it is inherited perpetually by all his male descendants (and their daughters) - if it is not known that some descendant changed it to another one.
If date of birth is not known, it is calculated by the program according to what is known about the dates of life of his or her family. The less I know, the less accurate the date is. But it was very important not leave many persons without setting them to at least a century when they should have lived. So the date marked "ca. 1630" or "possibly 1630" should be considered "1630 give or take 50 years".
The most important use of this base is showing connections between various famous people, e.g., that:
One of interesting observations is that Jan Potocki (1761-1815), author of Pamiętnik znaleziony w Saragossie, was direct descendant of Jan Kochanowski (died 1584) and was connected with following people from the wold of great literature:
And his grandson, Alfred hr. Potocki, namiestnik Galicji (died 1889) was a direct descendant of such great poets as:
Users of Mozilla Firefox should open a new tab and enter the following URL: "about:config", then scroll the page to "security.checkloaduri" and then change the selection to "false". Otherwise, images (coats-of-arms) will not be seen.
Windows XP users asked if the "GWD" program should still be blocked should answer "unblock". The current database is not available if the gwd.exe program is blocked or closed.
The program used to power the base (GeneWeb 4.10) works under Windows operating system (especially: Windows XP). I am not experienced in other operating systems; it definitely _is_ possible to run it on other platforms, but it is not so easy so it should be done by somebody else.
The base will work much faster if you copy the directory minakowski from the CD to any place in your computer and then run the program start.bat. Running it from the CD-ROM is slow and moreover it demands a hard disk named C, which has writable directory C:\temp\geneweb\.
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