Being that kind of weird

[redbird]

On my lunch break, after buying and eating a sandwich with enough stuff that half of it will probably be tomorrow's lunch, I poked around Google images, researching European geography and terminology for eve99. It turns out that defining the borders of either Silesia or Galicia is difficult, even once you've explained to Google that you mean the Galicia that's at least partly Polish, not the one in Iberia. My grandmother was a Galitzianer, not a Galician, but this may not be a distinction that can readily be translated into French.

Comments

[beginning.livejournal.com]

I have a somewhat-friend who is from Galicia-Spain and is currently living in Galicia-Poland.

Being Galician

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

My dad always claimed that we could claim to be Gallegos, which doesn't help much with Google, of course, unless you mean to include results in Spanish, but does simplify conversation. His mother's name was Maddera, and he said her family was originally from somwhere near Compostela. I do believe, however, that the denizens of the Galitzianers are also descendents of the ancient Gauls, as are the Gallegos.

Re: Being that kind of weird

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

IIRC galicia (poland) didn't exist as a entity before annexation by the austrian empire in the late 1700s, which later ceded half of that area to russia, and after WWII some of that went to ukraine. so i am not surprised it would be hard to define a person's ancestry in those terms. i think the eastern part was ruthenia, and the western part was ...somethingpolska (ah, here it is: malopolska = little poland) before austria gobbled it up, but my european history has faded.

was there actually a part of poland that was called galicia pre-austria? maybe there was; the name "galizien" makes no sense in german, so they probably took it from polish. ok, so i broke down and googled it, and yeah, the name originates from halych (polish = halicz/galicz), which was once the capital of the principality of halych-volhynia, then under hungarian rule. so i was wrong about it not existing as an entitly before. and here's a quick little article about what else "galitzianer" means (http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.07.06/arts4.html). probably not something your grandmother would have appreciated, *ahem*.

in french, so sayeth wikipedia, that would be "galicie", while the spanish galicia is "la galice", a person from either is "galicien".

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Silesia and Galicia may be accurately bounded for certain periods of time, and good information on that might well be on the web, if some geek has gotten around to it yet. But for reliable facts on stuff like this, I'd still turn to a good historical atlas.

[redbird]

A good point--the Web doesn't seem to have anything useful on the particular village my mother asked me about. The historical atlas involves a library trip, and she can make it as well as I.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Do you want to know what countries a particular village was in at particular dates in history? I figured that out for my ancestral villages (now in Lithuania and Belarus), which took a lot of work with historical atlases and history books and such.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

you probably know this, but depending on the time period, the village might be mentioned in polish, german, russian, ukrainian, yiddish, hungarian, slovak, and even romani (for certain small areas in which roma (were) settled). that can make finding it a bitch.