Tomenable
Elite member
- Messages
- 5,419
- Reaction score
- 1,337
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Poland
- Ethnic group
- Polish
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- R1b-L617
- mtDNA haplogroup
- W6a
David Worthington from the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness, in his 2015 article "... Historians and the Scots in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (1569–1795)", wrote:
"The burgeoning of a historiography of the Scots in the PLC has been hindered by either the unavailability to scholars of, or their unwillingness to tackle, secondary sources in the relevant foreign languages. Despite this ethnic group having comprised, at one time, the largest representation of the Scottish diaspora in a foreign state, this article demonstrates that, since Poland–Lithuania’s partition, historiographical coverage has been compartmentalised along linguistic and national lines. The article is tripartite, outlining work in the German, Polish and English languages, albeit highlighting the detrimental effects caused, until recently, by the frequent isolation of these, and other linguistic traditions of historiographical significance, from one another."
According to Rosalind Mitchison, at the turns of the 16th and 17th centuries at least 100,000 people emigrated from Scotland - nearly half of them to Ulster. However, she did not include emigration to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and admitted that her estimate was probably too low.
Scottish Diaspora in Poland-Lithuania was even larger than that in Ulster.
Estimates for years 1600-1650 range from 7,400 to 30,000 families (the latter figure was given by William Lightgow in 1616). These numbers have to be multiplied by an average family size of 3 to 5 or even more people. If you multiply 30,000 x 3 you get 90,000 Scots, or about 1% of all inhabitants of the PLC (around 9 million). More moderate estimates say about 40,000 - 50,000 Scots in Poland. Scottish inhabitants were recorded by sources in at least 120-130 cities, towns and villages throughout Poland.
Both Catholic and Protestant Scots immigrated to Poland, Protestants for the most part converted to Catholicism throughout the 2nd half of the 17th and the 18th century. It also seems that many of them adopted genuinely Polish surnames (instead of just Polonizing their surnames phonetically). I personally had no idea about my Scottish roots, until I took DNA tests. I'm still not 100% sure about it, but I guess that further genealogical research and more advanced DNA tests will give me final answers.
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"Great numbers of our countrymen settled in Poland and it would almost seem, that there is a mysterious link connecting the two distant countries. If in those bygone days Scotsmen sought and found a home and sanctuary in Poland, in our own times a warm and brotherly sympathy for the suffering and exiled Poles has been manifested in Scotland."
- The Scotsman, 3 February 1864
- The Scotsman, 3 February 1864