@@waynejohnson1786 well mainland Netherlands was always pretty small in most of it's history with pretty flat land that could easily be invaded but they still were a major power in Europe,I think that's pretty impressive
@@peacefulamerican4994 Not true. The Dutch Republic became a major power somewhere around 1609 and lost their major power status around 1750. The Dutch Republic only fell in 1795 Edit: the guy deleted his comment
As a Pole i love Netherlands. I used to live there for 4 years. One time i meet a girl from Poland who come to their friends living in Den Haag for 2 weeks vacations. Now we are living in Poland, she is my wife we have 2.5 y old son. Netherlands will be allways in my heart
Hi, I am from the north of Poland. My grandmother told me her side was from Olęders. Later in life I took a DNA test which confirmed the north German/Dutch roots.
Greetings from Kraków. As a half-Netherlandish reefer, half-Polish wodka myself, this was known to me and as historical tour guide I refer to it a lot. Kudos for the pronounciation! To this day, there is a town nearby Oświęcim / Bielsko-Biała (not too far west of Kraków) called Wilamowice (Willemsoord) where they still try and uphold the middle-Dietsch language (dubbed 'Wilamowski') and where once per year a festival is held to showcase the Netherlandish roots of the town's settlers. I say Netherlandish, though the migration in the 13th century took place mostly from Western Flanders. Plus, I dislike the adjective 'Dutch' and the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, London backs me up on this. Also, officially we now have to speak of 'Niderlandy' in Poland (and not 'Holandia' anymore) though in my case both are applicable - but: Netherlands they are and Netherlandish it is.
As a descendant of Masurian Olęders I really appreciate this video. Very unique language of Wysymorys could make an interesting as well. Its a mix of Old German and Dutch with Polish spelling spoken in Silesia. It is extremely endangered but there are ongoing projects to preserve it.
As a person with Polish and Dutch parents, the topic of Olęders is insanely fascinating to me - I even jokingly call myself an Olęder, seeing how my Dutch father emigrated to Poland. Great stuff!
There were also Scots immigrants to Poland in the 16th century. I read a book about the Stuart dynasty that mentioned that since Scotland was such a poor country at the time, some Scots moved to Poland for better opportunities. Coincidentally about a week later at work I met a woman whose surname was "Lennox", but when I asked her where her family was from, she said her husband's family was from Poland. I told about what I had just read and we agreed that explained how a family with a quintessential Scots name came to America from Poland.
One of my biggest branches of family genealogy is from Bornholm island Denmark. I was surprised when a Scot fell out of the tree. First I thought it was a mistake but it wasn't. Your information makes perfect sense. Bornholm is last island before entering the Baltic Sea. Being off the coast of Germany/Poland & Sweden it got lots of shipping traffic from all over northern Europe. The record didn't say where the Scot was from and I haven't found what happened to him. Maybe he went to Poland. Could happen. :)
Doesn't sound too credible. Immigrants had their names polonised throughout generations. Plus, Polish basically dropped the letter X some 100 years ago. And yes, people always migrated.
Although some have chosen to throw you shade, I personally think it's a great story. Yes, while Polish may not feature "x" in native words, the letter exists, is used in loanwords (and names!)and all Poles recognise it and know how to pronounce it😏 If I had been you in the same scenario, I would have certainly taken an interest in her surname and (husband's) back story and related it to both the fact and coincidence of my recent reading on the topic of the Scots in Poland!😆❤
The Scots were great travellers and explorers and their descendants are all over the world from Russia to Canada throughout Africa and Asia you will find people with Scottish ancestry
Hi, I was born In Pasłęk (ger.Preussisch Holland) currently in Poland. I believe it’s the only town in Poland with a population +20k that has been established by the Dutch in Poland back in 13th century and this fact is widely known by the locals. Although the Mennonites have mostly left the area after 1945, I attended voluntary Dutch lessons in Gdansk back in 2000. The classes were subsidised by Koningin Beatrix. The story of Oląders still lives on in Poland.
I mean, almost a third of the Medieval German settlement in the East (Ostsiedlung) was by Dutch and Flemish settlers, so I doubt your city is the only one. Actually, the East Low German dialects in general still have a huge part of Dutch in them, so much that some Linguists describe them as pidgin languages between dutch and Low German.
There is still a small Wymysorys language speaking community in Poland (about 25 people). Wikipedia classifies the language as German, but in an interview one speaker said that the original settlers came from the Netherlands
Back in the day no distinction between Dutch and (Low)German was made. Both languages being Germanic languages had an even stronger mutual intelligibility then and both of them merged or evolved into a or many new types / variations..
@@francesbrown5116 idk why'd she learn fries but all the power to her I guess, it kinda is like learning welsh oké you can speak it but english is easier 🤣
0:45 PL: Cześć polscy ludzie. Ten filmik jest dla dziadka Zuzi. Dziękuję za czekanie i mam nadzieję że film Ci się spodoba. Dziękuje bardzo. EN: Hello polish people. This video is for Zusia's grandfather. Thank you for waiting and I hope you will like the video. Thank you so much.
From the histories my Polish mother has told me, my great grandfather came to Poland from the Netherlands to find work. My mother met my Dutch father in Poland and moved to the Netherlands where he lived, so I was born in the Netherlands... And now I'm planning to move to Poland this year.
@@PrimalAspid96 I know, I’ve been going to Poland frequently and even for longer periods of time. I know that for example the health service isn’t that good to put it mildly, and I’ll earn half of what I could earn in the Netherlands. But Poland has it’s good points as well.
This video is really awesome... I was adopted by a Dutch person from the United States, my biological parents being of Native American and Norwegian descent, and of "German" descent. Almost two decades ago I was orphaned and subsequently ended up in southern Poland, and years later, in 2019 I moved to Gdańsk. Fast forward to 2021, and the aunt with whom I have contact, posts a meme on Facebook about growing with in a Ukrainian parents, and I'm like, how do you mean, Ukrainian? She then goes on and tells me that my grandfather was Ukrainian, and I'm like, wasn't he like German, to which she is like, no, they were German speakers from Ukraine, to which she emails me the stuff she found about Molotschna and I help her a bit with the translating of the things she found, and soon forget about it. Until December 2022 when a friend brings it up who is like totally into genealogy is bugging me to do research into my family tree, and I bring him in contact with my aunt - and until this time, I never really cared much about it, nor really had much of the feeling I had any "hometown" or anything due to being adopted and moving around and not really having had any sort of "roots" anywhere. This friend goes ahead and traces back my family history, turns out that pretty much everything which wasn't Norwegian or Native American, could be traced back to Olędrzy from Stogi Malborskie and trading families from the Gdańsk itself, the latter going back to the actual foundation of the city. Turns out I have nearly 1 000 years of family history in the city in which I ended up by accident in 2019...
Also, most of the Rogalski/Rogalska family from Gdańsk can actually to this day still trace back their family background to the Olędrzy, and possibly a few more, I just know about them because I'm apparently a product of the Rogalska and Van Dyck families from Gdańsk and Stogi Malborskie.
I've been to the cemetery in Stogi once. Quite an experience, especially on autumn evening in a windy weather it seemed straight out of a Gothic horror.
@Aleksander Korecki yeah, totally. I went there right before Christmas 2022 and it was cold and windy, but I just had to see where much of my ancestry is from. It was very interesting though to see with my own eyes where much of my roots lie, many of my ancestors are buried, after growing up for nearly 40 years not really knowing my roots. The funny thing is, I seem to have made a sort of reversed path my ancestors did, being adopted from the US by a Dutch woman, growing up around Nijmegen to find myself in the mountains of southeast Poland and finally ending up in Gdańsk, only to find out nearly four years after moving to Trójmiasto, that my ancestry has been here all along...
@@jasfan8247 voordat de Mennonieten kwamen woonden er ook al mensen in de regio Gdańsk 😉 Van mijn moeders kan kan ik mijn achtergrond ongeveer 1000 jaar terughalen in de regio, juist omdat Hanzehandelaren zo goed waren in het bijhouden van administratie.
I actually grew up in a town in Poland that was built on brine marshlands, which is now a famous spa town (Ciechocinek). There was an Olender settlement (called Słońsk, słony = salty in Polish, because the water there is salty) on the marshlands very close to it. They drained much of the swamps making space for my town to be built. There is still what remained of their protestant cemetery there, which was recently renovated by some local protestant activists. A very interesting video, thanks for making it.
Having spent my last summer holidays in Friesland (in Berlikum/Berltsum precisely) and ejoying them very much I have now only good feelings about the Netherlands, their people, landscape and history (thanks to seeing many interesting museums). This video is of great interest to me even if I knew a lot about settlers from the Low Countries in Poland in the centuries past.
Even as a Polish person I'm quite intrigued by this story. Even tho we had something about this topic in school, it wasn't as covered as here. Love the video.
There is an important part that is ommited at the end of the video though. When speaking of the deportation of Germanics from Poland it is Imperative to Mentiaon that It was Stalin and the Soviet Union in General that enforced that deportation. The Polish government was an unwilling puppet state so the fact that this is not mentoned really does a disservice to this video because for the uninformed the conclusion is that it was Poles that Willingly kicked out The millions of Germans that lived inside modern Poland, meanwhile the entire policy was decided by The Soviet Government, Dominated by Russians and Led by a Georgian.
@@tkc5980 So modern-day Poland won't have problems to apologize for the extermination of Germanic culture, right? They wouldn't have problems to pay reparations, right? They wouldn't have problems to return this territory, right?
@@abukafiralalmani m8. Now there are Millions of Polish people living there, Mostly expelled from Poland's Eastern Territoties. For this proposal of yours to make any sense you would have to alter the borders of Europe Like mad hell all the while commiting Genocide by expelling like 10 million people. Not to mention that if someone should pay reparations it should be Russia. The people that now live In Post-Germanic Areas come largely from the East, where Poles were forcefully removed from and directed west. It isn't exactly our fault that The Soviet Union wanted to Punish Germany AND Poland at the same time. But expelling the population now when there is almost noone that even remembers living there left is absolutely idiotic. A the Vast MAjority of the people that would have to be resettled would be born on the territory they were beng expelled from and the Germans that would have to come would have never lived there in the first place. Your Proposal is idiotic and ,makes zero logical sense.
@@abukafiralalmani Your questions have nothing in common with what he wrote. Also, please stop with the senseless revanchism, it's 2023 and we don't need any more major wars in Europe.
Fun fact about the painting mentioned at 26:27 is that it's also a hidden act of defiance against the Polish King. The God's Hand covers the tip of the tower of the Danzig rathaus. The tip had a golden sculpture of Zygmunt II August, King of Poland. Covering the King symbolized the freedom of the city of Gdańsk.
Gdansk, Kakow and Lwow had the position of Royal Cities in the Kingdom of Poland with many special commercial privileges or general "business" privileges, and moreover, members of the self-government of these cities, especially the mayor and his council, had a similar status to the nobility and could participate in the debates and votes of the Polish parliament. And the Polish nobility already from the 15th century felt free and almost equal to the king. Special royal privileges meant that in Poland the typical feudal gradation from previous centuries was abandoned and every member of the nobility (as well as a high official of the self-government in Royal Cities) was equal to princes or other aristocracy, and the king (and parliament) had to take their opinion into account. In Polish history, it is called "golden freedom of the nobility".
There was also a significant community of dutch immigrants in Denmark, who settled on Amager (island south of Copenhagen) in the 16th century. They mostly kept to themselves, and they still spoke Dutch into the 19th century.
There were groups of Germans (and frisians) who settled in coastal sweden, most stopped speaking german until the 40a-50s (until then german was commonly spoken as a second language as well). There are however a lot of german churches that were established by these communities.
@@MojnMojn that is common across all the North. in Norway as well. Iceland is the only country that survived the German influence, hence they speak very differently from their kindred in the continent.
The Dutch and Danes did a lot of things together like trading and war. The Dutch Navy defeated the Swedish Navy which had Copenhagen in a blockade. Now that's a good friend. 👍
This is such an interesting topic, thank you for covering it! Even today, you can find some random Dutch people in Poland. My classmate was half-Dutch as his father was from the Netherlands but I also managed to meet a Dutch family living literally in the middle of nowhere in a Polish village that had 100 inhabitants at best. Till this day cannot wrap my head around it but they seemed very happy with their life so good for them.
They were relatively wealthy and produced a lot of kids, that swerved out all over the world. And they loved freedom, so most of them went their own way. The VOC (Dutch East India Company) didn't want Dutch as settlers because they would not accept authority and soon start their own independent settlement.
@@Varangoi Yep, many Dutch integrated with the local population, keeping a few good things from their culture. Rarely you'll find Dutch neighborhoods or villages. They didn't clutter or keep their language, but soon became successful locals, by combining the best of both worlds. Few exceptions are religious groups, they tended to stick together and live according their believes in a small community. But the large majority just dissolved into locals, though millions emigrated to US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many more countries. And adapted their family names to local customs.
@@ysbrandd I think even though I'm American and general claimant ancestry is English I recall seeing Dutch, Flemish and possibly Frisian merchants in my genealogy. Which surprised me when my ancestry lineage found that. Well 1.500 ancestors i guess such a thing was inevitable.
Mentioning Gdańsk and Pomerania, it is also worth mentioning Kashubs and their language. Kashubs are indigenous Slavs living in Pomerania. And Gdańsk in Kashubian is "Gduńsk".
Unfortunately our historical awareness is a bit twisted because of many years of Russian propaganda in communist times, so videos like that cover unpopular topics are so valuable. When I think of Polish - Dutch relations in times of the I Republic, I always think of admiral Arend Dickmann who was a Dutchman serving in Polish Navy and who died in the battle of Oliwa defeating Swedes. It wasn't big battle, but our naval history was never rich, so it's still our biggest battle and victory :D Thanks for this video, I'd love to see more like this!
@@adanbareth_ the stronger myth is the hard border between the Netherlands and Germany, it always used to be a soft border or none depending on the time.
My Mom's side of the family are of the Mennonites that went from Friesland through Poland/"East Prussia" to Russia and Ukraine. My Grandfather was born in Omsk, in Siberia, in the 1920's shortly after his family came to Canada as did my Grandmother's family. Both families settled in Saskatchewan before resettling on Vancouver Island in British Columbia on the West coast of Canada. This video effectively charts the journey of my ancestors.
@Ūnsre Scyldas I ,myself, am not of the faith and wasn't raised in it (my dad's side of the family is of Scottish and English/Irish extraction and were Baptists (Canadian not the crazy Southern kind. There used to be a difference.)). My mother's generation spread across canada and is fully integrated. Once in Canada, my great-grandparents and grandparents mingled to a degree with the non Mennonites around them (they weren't of the hide away from the rest of humanity and pretend it's the 17th century extraction of Mennonite). Now, all of my aunts and uncles (my mom is the oldest of 8) are spread across Canada from the Westcoast to southern Ontario with my cousins spread even further afield.
In Żuławy Wiślane there are old mennonites cementaries, they lived there to the second world war. It is not a town but a natural region near the Wisła River Delta. There were alot of small villages with fairly good soil. They helped with drainage here, mainly building floodbanks which still stands today. Huge part of my familly history is connected to those lands, thats why I comment :) Nice video, Greetings for all of the Holendrzy watching this vid!
That is what my grandparents called the Grosses Werder. May of my ancestors farmed land there for centuries. Now we are scattered across the globe. I am in Uruguay, nice to hear there is still some memories of the Mennonites how lived there. Kind regards!!
Greetings from Gdańsk. As a Kashubian raised in Werder (Żuławy Region) I know this stories very well, and I'm happy that people from other countries are interested in my region history :)
Wow, nie miałem pojęcia, że taka historia miała miejsce, super materiał! Oglądam twoje filmy od dawna, bo są bardzo ciekawe, ale zazwyczaj dotyczą historii ludów germańskich. A teraz także, i polski wątek, super! I especially wrote it in Polish, to make you more enjoyment while translating on Google Translate. :) Cheers!
I live in Poznań and there was a significant amount of colonists from Bamberg in Germany coming to the region in (if I remember correctly) XVII century. They had quite an impact on our culture and even language and their descendants live in Poznań still (they have specific names, so you can tell).
Tak! Mój Szwagier od pokoleń jest z Poznania (jego dziadkowie są dosłownie z Dębca (😎😆), gdzie osiedli Bambrzy w XVIII wieku. I ma bamberskie/niemieckie nazwisko.
The Uruguayan flag by the end caught me off guard. I knew many Poles went to Uruguay after the war but I didn't know they were Mennonites or that they were descendants of Dutch moved to Poland. This was a very interesting piece of history! I loved these stories that are lesser known but equally fascinating. Thanks for the video!
There were different groups. The Mennonites came mostly from the region around Gdansk ( dutch origin ) and Lwow ( now Lviv Ukraine, these were of swiss origin ). The ones from Dansk spoke mostly german the ones from Low were mostly bilingual in German and Polish. But here in Uruguay there where also other polish immigrants not of Mennonite origin. We had neighbors like that and my grandpa would speak polish with them no problem. So there's not one origin for polish immigrants in Uruguay. Poles, Jews, German/Dutch and German/Swiss Mennonites all came from current or historic Polish territories and spoke polish as a first or second language.
My dad came from the Neumark, which was Brandenburg and later Pomerania. He used to tell me that there were some "Holländer" in the ancestry. I never could really imagine anything other than a random family of Dutch people moving to Poland but never thought there was that much going on. I remember he told me that the Polish and German people didn't really mix where he lived. I found that our family name is existing in the Netherlands too. So thanks for clearing that for me! All the best from Berlin 😃
Great video Hilbert. As a political scientist with obsession with history I'm amazed how you keep finding pieces of history that I'd never heard of before and that are so interesting.
First of all thank you for great episode and very nice polish pronunciation 🙂 24:32 I think it is also worth mentioning is that reason of relocating of German and Olęder people was not only due to viewing them as Nazi collaborators and enemies of Polish state. It was one of the steps of implementing policy introduced by Allies after 2nd World War which were to create heterogeneous countries in East and Central Europe. Also Polish people were relocated to Poland from parts of modern day Ukraine, as well as were Ukrainians from modern day parts of Poland to Ukraine. USSR and other communists forced thousands of people to change place they were living for many years, to completely different one. Ps. Could you make a video about Hutsuls or Lemkos? Their history is also really colorful and interesting.
I did not expect this. It it makes sense for you to speak about it as Dutch. A lot of Scottish people came to Poland as olenders in 1600's, which is also funny.
Following up on this you should do a video about the Dutch farmers that were brought in to make the island of Amager, right next to central Copenhagen itself, productive because it was geographically similar to the coastal lowlands :)
My friend from Muenster Germany only could understand the old local German dialect, that her father spoke with his friends, only after she learned Dutch.
It is probably because dutch is the west germanic language that changed least compared to proto-germanic so it has sounds that died out everywhere else. maybe they have a dialect where some souds survived and made it difficult to understand if you only know german.
@@ysbrandd nah, it's bc plattdüttsch is a dying dialect, rarely spoken by the younger generations or the people they are mainly listening to in the Netherlands it's of course still simply their language which you just can't escape I can understand and if forced also almost fluently speak platt......often did it when visiting the Netherlands .....
@@feldgeist2637 Plattduutsch is not a dialect. a dialect of what? Hochdeutsch? Standard Hochdeutsch itself is a mongrel mix between actual hochdeutsch in southern Germany and the Plattduutsch language. Plattduutsch on the other hand is much older than Hochdeutsch, and with enough Plattduutsch skill you can even understand a few segments from old Saxon or so. hence almost all Germanic peoples have it easier understanding Plattdeutsch than the Mischling language replacing it. standard Hochdeutsch is a descendant of Plattduutsch.
Great video and amazing channel! In my home village in Poland, there is a street called Holendry, and in a next village also a street named Olędry :) Great piece of history. Thank you!
Great video, as always! I'm an ethnography student in Cracow and I remember the elder proffessor of mine having a lecture about Olędrzy one time. He mentioned - however i take it with a grain of salt - that one of his collegues had been studying originally menonite communities in Australia. Supposedly, there had been a vauge mythical-like belief among these people, kind of folk tale about the lost land their ancestors came from, where the soil had been fertile and the river broadly flowed. With this matching the characteristics of the lower Vistula valley, the guy even menaged to organise a short trip to Poland for them. The other thing I once encounterd is the map of red-haired people percentage in different parts of all Europe (you can look it up easily). Don't have a clue if it's related in any way but in whole Poland there was just one spot with higher density of redheads, exactly in the area of the former Olędrzy settlements.
I have also heard that the menonites were exempt from millitary service by the Polish kings throughout the 17th century. Does anyone of you know something about that by any chance?
31:40 LOOK MOM, IM FAMOUS. Im glad you enjoyed my comment mate, vexillology is my one artistic passion, so it was quite fun to see you having fun with flags!
great video. i love how you used so many languages(i didnt need the subtitles for the dutch and german texts). I also love the flag (im an expert on vexilology) .
Hello Hilbert. At last a video my Polish friend from work can relate more to. My uncle was a UK POW in Silesia, where a friend from school was from. My only previous understanding was via that, from old maps and from history for wargames, which this peaceful settlement never featured in, so this was nice to learn.
Great video! I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would love to hear more about the communities Tha moved abroad to North and South America. Also, a video on the language would be amazing. Thank you for all your hard work!
Dobra robota i nareszcie wiem dlaczego trochę mówisz po polsku. 😉 Very good video and you can even make a fun of yourself (a bit). Fun fact, one of two types of old windmills in Poland is called "Holender". It was popular in the West of Poland till the 19th century. Basically in the lands taken later by Prussia/later Germany. However, there were also some, not so common, "Dutchman" windmills in Central and Eastern Poland as well as parts of today's West Ukraine. One of these Dutch inspired windmills is now in the "skansen" (open-air museum of traditions and folklore, for these who don't know) in Lublin, city where I live. It was originally build in interwar period in one of villages of Lublin voivodship by Polish people but with the solid Dutch inspiration I guess. There were very sparse "Olender" settlements set within the region of this voivodship (later Russian governate) up till the mid 19th century.
@@morriskaller3549 I know about it. The official name is different but people call it "skansen" between themselves. It became the eponym of open air folklore museum. The popular name has been used for many decades and was never meant to offend anyone.
@@morriskaller3549 Yeah, why say "autobus nocny linii numer trzy odjeżdża spod przystanku Muzeum Wsi Lubelskiej" when you can say "nocna trójka rusza spod skansenu" 🥴
@@annakobuk3618 Do you happen to know of any sources about the mentioned Dutch settlers around Lublin as mentioned in the video and in your comment? It's easy to find evidence of Dutch settlement in areas such as Pomorskie, Podlaskie, Mazowieckie, Śląsk; evidence in Lubelszczyzna and Red Ruthenia are harder to come by. If only place names all gave away their origins as quickly as "Niemce".
This was beyond fascinating. My Dutch husband loves all these videos about arcane Dutch history. I come from a Jewish community with strong cohesion and it was interesting to see how long a community can remain intact while moving around.
Just a note: my mother spoke fluent Polish even though her ancestors came to the USA in 1862, maybe earlier. He had no respect for "PlouderDuetsh" which she called Low German. She fluently spoke some high German, all the Slavic languages, including Russian.
Interesting video. This reminds me a bit about the Dutch presence in Northeast Brazil in the 17th century, when the Netherlands invaded Northeast Brazil, in retaliation for the Iberian Union of Portugal and Spain, and turned the coast of Northeast Brazil into a Dutch colony from 1630 to 1654. At that time, the Dutch West India Company brought Prince John Maurice of Nassau to administer the colony, which brought much prosperity to it, bringing architects and engineers to rebuild the city of Recife in the Dutch style, gave freedom religious for Catholics, Jews and Protestants, something unheard of in Brazil and lent money to Portuguese landowners to rebuild the sugar mills. After the revolt that ended Dutch rule and the Portuguese resettlement, little trace of the former Dutch presence remained here in the region. Most notable is the not uncommon number of people with very white skin, light hair and blue eyes, such as myself, a phenotype that probably demonstrates an ancient Dutch ancestry.
There was a vice-governor of Dutch Brazil in the years 1637-1646 named Krzysztof Arciszewski who was Polish in Dutch service. There is an entry on him in Wikipedia.
@@adamzieba8364 Yes that's true. His name sounded familiar to me in your answer and when searching on Wikipedia, I remembered that the history books of my state (Rio Grande do Norte) talk about him. Interestingly, last year, the book "The Memoirs of Krzysztof Arciszewski (1630-1637): A Pole at the Service of the West Indies Company in Brazil" was released here in Brazil, a book that reproduces the detailed reports left by Arciszewski about the time in which he served as lieutenant governor of the colony.
I have not expected to see "Olędrzy" on UA-cam. I grew up in Mazovia and I remember one school trip when they showed us countryside typical for the region and explained how Olędrzy had infuenced the traditions. I remembered they introduced hedgerows of willow trees as windbreaks and probably also for flood management. They never told us the circumstances which made them move and how they disappeared (although it might have been too much for 7 year olds), so many thanks for the explanation! Oh, and they said that they already settled in the Middle Ages, but it might be my brain misremembering things from almost 30 years ago :-)
Thank you very much Hilbert for this interesting history I never ever heard ofit. We stayed at the end of february Szczyrk for wintersport and we loved it. Bedankt voor het interessante verhaal, groeten uit Zeeland.😀 👋
Amazing video! I learned about my ancestors through a "Narrative Ahnentafel Report", my last known mennonite ancestor was born in the Netherlands around 1480-1500AD, then the report has Mennonite ancestors in the 1600's in Danzig Poland. So this Video was very interesting to me, also I love the flag you designed on the left!
Menno Simons comes from my town Witmarsum Friesland, Netherlands. A town north of the Netherlands in the province Friesland. Only 40 meters from my house is a statue in front of the church from Menno Simons...4.00 minuts into this upload...thx for the info, great video...and we love Poland very much!
Fantastic presentation, but it's a pity you did not mention about the Olender Aquapark in Toruń, and Olenderski Skansen, an open-air museum just outside Toruń where many examples of memonite architecture pearls have been gathered together. Also there is a beautiful menonite house for sale in Gruczno, if someone was interested in an airbnb project...
Very cool video again. I love to watch them, maybe you can do a video about those people or other Dutch people who went to Ukraine like you said. Or maybe about the Dutch and the Danes. I read somewhere that they(we) are very close related as well with the English.
No wiesz ogólnie to jest więcej takich grup np górale to potomkowie Wołochów dzisiejszych Rumunów. Tak naprawdę tylko 55% polskiej populacji ma korzenie słowiańskie.
I'd like to hear you speak Scandinavian languages. Maybe a video about the Hanseatic league and Bergen, specifically it's dialect, being influenced by German and Dutch or Scanias dialect being Danish influenced.
the phrase Holender jasny, literally translated as light dutch person, is used in Poland here as a light swear and we say it when we are frustrated sometimes, though i find the more common phrase is Cholera jasna
@@cezary8222 I'd say the english equivalent of jasna/jasny with swear words is "holy". So personally I'd put "jasny Holender" somewhere along the lines of "holy moly".
Amazing I am an architect and I am currently building a house near the village of Cieciszew ( Konstancin Jeziorna district ) and what is a quiet interesting, part of this village has been inhabited by Olęders back then and there are original Olęder style houses to this day ( in designig proces i am obligaded to follow to the certain extend the historic architecture :) ) Kaz Olszaniecki Poland keep preparing next pieces
I lived close to a formerly Olęder area next to Warsaw with houses on terpy (Terpen You mention) connected by trytwy (elevated roads). Their community halls and cemeteries are still there and I have visited them too. Very interesting to see more of their/our common history!
This needed to be said, viewed and spread! I thought I knew quite a bit about that region, that Poland was more tolerant, for example. But this video more than doubled what I knew. My maternal great grandfather left Königsberg for America at about the time of the Unification. His passport stated: Königreich Preußen, Königsberg, lutherisch, but his behavior as related in the family was odd. He refused to speak German or allow his children to learn it [I am the first member of that family, that I know of, to study German and German history]. He never spoke about Germany or Prussia and never wanted to return. He never set foot in a church, Protestant or Catholic. When my mother's family tried to trace him back to his place of birth, they utterly failed. My evaluation of this data is that he was a victim of the Preußischer Kulturkampf, meaning that his name could indicate Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Russian or Jewish roots, depending on how written [I've seen two different versions on family records]. Since there are Polish and Lithuanian Catholic churches here, that he could have attended and didn't, I suspect that he might have been forcibly converted from Judaism or Orthodox. They were either looking in the wrong places, or the Russian occupation obliterated all evidence. I appreciate the effort required to research the data in the video, and the work to produce the video. Kudos Hilbert!
Historic Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth was multi-ethnic nation, composed from Poles, Balts and Cossack's. But also large number of Jews and Tatars. It was in fact know from tolerance. Current state is result of enforced resettlement during WW2 (and other external interventions). Poles aren't really racist, but have limited contact with foreigners (who were not occupants) not further then three decades ago. It is why many older people still act like people of colors are mythical creatures. But not the younger ones.
Your great grandfather could be just an ordinary German immigrant to the US who happened not liking the church. Many German immigrants were keen on integrating and that their chilldren would speak good English and not be bullied. At the time your great grandfather German immigrants were looked down on similar to the Irish. Later anti-german sentiment occured due to the first and second world war.
@@henningbartels6245 My great grandfather came from East Prussia and had a slavic name. So while your suggestion is plausible, given the dislike of Germans for Slavs, Jews and [in Lutheran areas] Catholics and Orthodox, an immigrant with a typically Slavic or Jewish name that could also be Polish, Lithuanian or Russian depending on orthography, is somewhat more likely to be non-German ethnically. That part of the world is, like the Balkans, a hodgepodge of mutually antagonistic minorities. When they assimilate in the US they are likely to, eventually, mix happily with other groups.
@@JMM33RanMA I just wanted give you another perspective. After war nearly 1.5 million left or were forced to leave East Prussia moved westward. Many of my neighbors were former East Prussians with fairly ordinary German names.
@@henningbartels6245 Thanks, but I was aware of the Russians' ethnic cleansing in the Baltic republics, Crimea, Karelia and East Prussia, as well as other places. Mass removal of problem people to Siberia [the lucky ones, as they weren't just murdered] goes back to the Czarist regime, and has been done in Eastern Ukraine more recently. I consider myself of German ancestry based on the official record, also English colonial Yankee, and Irish. My loyalty is to the US Constitution, not the US current regime nor to the political parties. History is interesting, and was once my academic major before it was relegated to a hobby.
17:35 After a single attempt at chatting in Plautdietsch -- as a Dutch speaker, I'd love to watch a video on the language. The Mennonites I came across in Ontario were very friendly, lovely people. We found Plautdietsch to be mutually unintelligible with Dutch, but were able to exchange some pleasantries using German. Meeting some South Africans at the Royal Alcázar was much easier. I mistook their Afrikaans for "a Flemish dialect I'm unfamiliar with" at first so we could easily understand each other, even if I couldn't catch every word. The only confusion we had was about rennen/hollen, and that was easily resolved with a bit of mime.
Congrats, it's such in interesting video! I've seen these "Olędry" village names many times, but I only knew that we had some Dutch communities in the past and I vaguely remembered that they sought here religious freedom and had skills to deal with water and to dry wetlands. About the name - Olędrzy is plural, and it may sound strange to an English ear (because - how and why?), but the singular form is Olęder, and the plural form is just made according to one of usual patterns.
This is an excellent video with loads of utmost interesting information. Thank you! Świetny film i kopalnia ciekawych informacji! Dziękuję! Pozdrowienia z Krakowa 😃
That was fascinating and informative. For several years I've wanted to learn more about these "Hollander" villages, because one of my grandmothers came from a German village on the Vistula River in Russian-ruled Poland, which I've assumed was one of them. One of Grandma's cousins thought the family may originally have been Dutch, but I wonder if she wasn't getting that from the term "Hollander" or (Olęnder), as the family was all German Lutheran, and the village inhabitants are so-identified in the census of the Russian empire in the 1890s. (Grandma was born just a little too late for her own name to appear in the census.) One of Grandma's uncles had served in the Russian cavalry and could write in Russian, but he came to the U.S. (as did many others of the village) a few years before WWI started. Grandma had described three villages adjacent to each other, and it took me a while to figure out just where they were before we went to see the area in 2018, as she had given the German names for everything. She had spoken of going to school with Polish and Russian children, and said she and her friends walked home with two Russian girls, but they didn't speak to each other, and then the Russian girls went off to their home in the woods. (The area away from the river is forested now, too.) But I wish one of us had asked her how that worked with children of three different languages and three different religions. The language used in schools was often contested in German-ruled parts of Poland, and I wouldn't expect this to have been different. The Polish village of the three is still going strong. Grandma's village is now mostly underwater from a dam reservoir built in the 60s. Do you know of any English-language books about these Olęnder communities? Much of what I've learned about them has been from a couple of books by William Hagen.
@@Superrichy261985 I think Volhynia is further to the east, or southeast. My grandmother's village was between Włocławek and Płock, but on the west side of the river. That area might be part of Masovia, but I'm not sure whether Masovia usually included any of the west side of the river. Grandma called her village Grossdorf, but that didn't help much because it just means big village. But we found her brother's naturalization application, which gave it as Gross Dembe. There is more than one Dęb Wielke in Poland, but Grandma had said her village was near Rötslavik (as my father had written it down) and Dęb Wielke is part of a cluster of three villages, just as Grandma had told us. The Russian empire census for Dęb Maly, which is adjacent to Dęb Wielke, is full of surnames of distant relatives of mine and other people I know from the small town in Minnesota where some of these people ended up. They all spoke German, but there are some Polish-sounding names among them, and one of Grandma's great-uncles, one with a stereotypical German surname, seems to have told the American census taker that his first language was Polish. Whether there were other German villages near Dęb Wielke and Dęb Maly, I don't know, and am not sure how to find out, either. Maybe I could figure it out with the help of that Russian empire census, but that would be tedious work.
That's really interesting. I've been researching the history of my family too recently and I had to search in archive census which is all written in russian cyrrylic cursive 😭 it's terrible. Btw I have a German sounding surname in my ancestry "Linder". Might it be also a Dutch surname? Or rather Austrian, as I am from southeastern Poland?
@@askarufus7939 I've known people with the surname Linder, but that was long ago. I assumed it was a German name, because I grew up in German communities or in communities with a strong German Lutheran presence, so I just became familiar with a lot of German names around me and tended to distinguish them from others. But I don't really know. The old ethnic distinctions were going away, and people of my generation tended not to make a big deal of them.
2:47 More than two hundred years ago, in English, people called German and Dutch "High Dutch" and "Low Dutch". Jonathan Swift employed these old terms in his novel "Gulliver's Travels" (1726).
This is a fantastic video - I learned so much! have you ever considered making one about the androsi-eraklonian migrations? I hear professor daniel griffin has an excellent monograph on the subject. Many thanks for your great work!!
I think it is worth mentioning that a very popular and beloved Polish pop singer was Anna German (originally Hörmann), born in the Soviet Union town of Urgentch of Mennonite parents with her forefathers coming truly from Polish Zulawy. Her father was killed by the soviets accused of being a German spy, and her mother Irma Hörmann married a Polish citizen of German descent during the war, and emigrated to Poland with her mother and daughter. The three generations of women settled in Wroclaw, where Anna fullfilled her study as a master of geology in 1962. She has never worked in this trade however as she chose a career of a singer. She was tremendously successfull an also popular as a person due to her charm and kind appearance. She was also very popular in the Soviet Union and other countries of the Soviet Block, and in Italy, where she got a prize at San Remo festival in 1967. Her descent was somehow toned down in the communist era, but fully revealed after her death in the postcommunist epoch.
German married a Polish Jew. Her father was born in Lodz, which had a sizable German minority up to 1945. Karl Dedecius, who founded the German Polish Institute and became famous as a translator of Polish and Russian literature in the 60s was born there.
enjoyed your perspective of the mennonites, both sides of my family lived in prussia/poland and were part of the migration to ukraine/russia, then to north america (Kansas) in late 19th century. I’m also a descendant of Adam Wybe (wiebe) of 17th century Gdansk who was a Dutch engineer from Harlingen Friesland. Hope to visit Friesland and Poland some day!
Ik weet niet precies waar ik het gehoord heb, maar ik heb begrepen dat tijdens de grote ontginning in met name Holland het allerlei mensen, ook uit niet Hollandse geweste naar Holland trokken om daar een stuk moeras droog te leggen en om vervolgens daar als vrij-boer op te kunnen leven. Het lijkt er op dat een soortgelijke aanpakt in Polen tijdens een later tijdseenheid gebruikt is. Ps. Mijn voorouders hebben rond 1550 zon soort stuk moeras gepacht van de kerk en zijn daarop vrij-boer geworden. Dat stuk moeras was veengebied of veen gebied en daardoor heeft heel wat later een andere latere voorouder zichzelf Feenstra genoemd - komend van het feen. Wat de Friese taal gebruikte nauwelijks de letter V maar eerder de letter F. Friso Feenstra
Couple of years ago I took part in a survey of German Olęder settlements in Greater Poland. They weren't Mennonites, but Evangelicals (the legal Olęders, not the ethnic ones). To this day there is a small population of German Olęder descendants living near Pyzdry in Greater Poland. Another group moved to Australia after Prussian imposed religious regulation in 19th century. There is also a group of people at the uni devoted to the research on Greater Poland Olęders and local museums are involved in preserving their heritage too.
Nooit geweten dit. Super interessant! Ik heb Friese, Noorse en Pruisische voorouders. En geloof nu te weten waarom ik mij zo aangetrokken voel tot deze gebieden. Leuk dat je ook iets prive laat zien. Ben ook wel benieuwd naar meer info over de taal. Love&Blessings from( Z-)Holland
Very interesting vlog to watch. Maybe an idea to follow if and in what extension the Dutch names of this former immigrant families still exist in the nowadays Poland/Ukraine/Russia ex-Mennonite territories. Or even further. Dank je wel voor het delen van je kennis 😀👍
There is a small village in my Świętokrzyskie Voivodship. It's called - Holendry . The Mennonites settled there. Their ancestors still live there today.There are several towns in Poland with this name. It is also worth paying attention to something like - Confederation of Warsaw 28 01 1573. Document establishing religious freedom. It is also worth for foreigners to distinguish between royal and princely Prussia. From 1457, Malbork belonged to the king of Poland. Royal Prussia belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (that is why the Mennonites could live there without any obstacles). Ducal Prussia (the area of today's Kaliningrad) rebelled and after some time Poland had no influence on what was happening there. After the partitions of Poland and the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Mennonites had to flee from Prussia. A large number of them settled in the Russian partition, where they were not persecuted because of their religion.
I'm from Gdańsk/Danzig and when I'm learning about the history of my city I often find some Dutch people that had a great impact on it : ) For example the commander of the biggest naval polish victory was dutch.
Chapeau! What a great research. I wish this kind of stuff would make it to the programs of polish schools. So interesting and makes so much sense. I haven't heard about any of this before. I though definitely felt that there must have been something more behind the history of some regions in Poland that almost seem "random" qua architecture specifically. ALSO I wanted to mention that there actually is a place somewhere in Southern Poland that I heard about on the Polish Radio once that might have to do with The Netherlands or the groups of people that migrated from that region centuries back. It was a whole beautiful reportage covering all the mystery around the ethnicity and the language practiced in that town. The name of the place is Wilamowice. Who know, maybe it is directly connected to the topic of your viddy. groetjes!
Hi Hilbert , my maternal grandparents actually belong to the last wave of Mennonites fleeing Russian advance into Prussia in 1945. They were collected into refugee camps in Gronau and Backnang in Germanyby the MCC (some who fled to Danemark ended up in prison camps their). And my grandparents decided to emigrate in 1948. Two widows with their many children, two of which would end up being my grandma and grandpa.we are few in Uruguay, less than a 1000. While in Paraguay and Brazil their are large Russian Mennonite settlements with thousands Peter settlement. There are also large Alt Colonie settlements in Bolivia ( extremely traditional groups) and in Mexico as well as the Yucatan, but these are also of Russian Mennonite origin. The descendants of the Prussian Mennonites that stayed until 1945 and the fled only used few Platt words and mostly just spoke Hochdeutsch, so here in Uruguay you will not here much Platt. Now in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia that's a different story and Platt is still the lingua franca of the Russian Mennonite descendants. If you would like some input from a Uruguayan Mennonite feel free to contact me. Just to be clear, I am Mennonite, but beside the Dutch-Prussian Mennonite background I also have some Swiss Mennonite DNA from the Lviv area settlements dissolved in 1939 division of Poland, German Lutheran, Polish Catholic, and even some Jewish Litvak in me. I am an avid hobby genealogist 😊
Thank You! I read a pretty famous Polish novel recently (partly bc of a vaguely remembered tv-series in my childhood) "The Farmers"? Not sure what the title is in English, or ofthe author, Henryk Sienkewizc? Anyway one of the conflicts was that the local big landowner brought in "Germans" to break new land, that the village wanted to buy, I guess they might have been "Olenders"?
Considering how small Netherlands is it's impressive how they were a major power for a long period
Fax
If you think about it, most of the worlds major powers started from a small geographical location. Whether it’s Romans, Mongols, British, etc
@@waynejohnson1786 well mainland Netherlands was always pretty small in most of it's history with pretty flat land that could easily be invaded but they still were a major power in Europe,I think that's pretty impressive
@@peacefulamerican4994 Not true. The Dutch Republic became a major power somewhere around 1609 and lost their major power status around 1750. The Dutch Republic only fell in 1795
Edit: the guy deleted his comment
it still is
As a Pole i love Netherlands. I used to live there for 4 years. One time i meet a girl from Poland who come to their friends living in Den Haag for 2 weeks vacations. Now we are living in Poland, she is my wife we have 2.5 y old son. Netherlands will be allways in my heart
jako polak który mówi po polsku, niderlandzku, angielsku i francusku potwierdzam :D
groeten uit het westland :)
lekker gedaan jonge!! Gratki!
Hi, I am from the north of Poland. My grandmother told me her side was from Olęders. Later in life I took a DNA test which confirmed the north German/Dutch roots.
Greetings from Kraków. As a half-Netherlandish reefer, half-Polish wodka myself, this was known to me and as historical tour guide I refer to it a lot. Kudos for the pronounciation!
To this day, there is a town nearby Oświęcim / Bielsko-Biała (not too far west of Kraków) called Wilamowice (Willemsoord) where they still try and uphold the middle-Dietsch language (dubbed 'Wilamowski') and where once per year a festival is held to showcase the Netherlandish roots of the town's settlers. I say Netherlandish, though the migration in the 13th century took place mostly from Western Flanders.
Plus, I dislike the adjective 'Dutch' and the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, London backs me up on this. Also, officially we now have to speak of 'Niderlandy' in Poland (and not 'Holandia' anymore) though in my case both are applicable - but: Netherlands they are and Netherlandish it is.
@HistoryWithHilbert- thanks, if only I had Telegram (not)
Wilamowski is considered a separate language by most
I live in Poland for 29 years as a Holander. Nobody told this ever to me! so THNX
@@elselienvanpunkturijslande1712 zelfs op UA-cam kun je leren via de comments :)
Isnt oswiecim Auschwitz?
As a descendant of Masurian Olęders I really appreciate this video. Very unique language of Wysymorys could make an interesting as well. Its a mix of Old German and Dutch with Polish spelling spoken in Silesia. It is extremely endangered but there are ongoing projects to preserve it.
Oleders were dutch jews
I would also love to hear about it on this channel
As a person with Polish and Dutch parents, the topic of Olęders is insanely fascinating to me - I even jokingly call myself an Olęder, seeing how my Dutch father emigrated to Poland. Great stuff!
I think your claim to Olęderdom is legit
Does your father speak polish well? Im dutch and polish seems so hard.
There were also Scots immigrants to Poland in the 16th century. I read a book about the Stuart dynasty that mentioned that since Scotland was such a poor country at the time, some Scots moved to Poland for better opportunities. Coincidentally about a week later at work I met a woman whose surname was "Lennox", but when I asked her where her family was from, she said her husband's family was from Poland. I told about what I had just read and we agreed that explained how a family with a quintessential Scots name came to America from Poland.
One of my biggest branches of family genealogy is from Bornholm island Denmark. I was surprised when a Scot fell out of the tree. First I thought it was a mistake but it wasn't. Your information makes perfect sense. Bornholm is last island before entering the Baltic Sea. Being off the coast of Germany/Poland & Sweden it got lots of shipping traffic from all over northern Europe. The record didn't say where the Scot was from and I haven't found what happened to him. Maybe he went to Poland. Could happen. :)
Doesn't sound too credible. Immigrants had their names polonised throughout generations. Plus, Polish basically dropped the letter X some 100 years ago. And yes, people always migrated.
Yes, as a Pole i did DNA heritage test and was surprised I have a bit of Scottish blood :)
Although some have chosen to throw you shade, I personally think it's a great story. Yes, while Polish may not feature "x" in native words, the letter exists, is used in loanwords (and names!)and all Poles recognise it and know how to pronounce it😏
If I had been you in the same scenario, I would have certainly taken an interest in her surname and (husband's) back story and related it to both the fact and coincidence of my recent reading on the topic of the Scots in Poland!😆❤
The Scots were great travellers and explorers and their descendants are all over the world from Russia to Canada throughout Africa and Asia you will find people with Scottish ancestry
Hi, I was born In Pasłęk (ger.Preussisch Holland) currently in Poland. I believe it’s the only town in Poland with a population +20k that has been established by the Dutch in Poland back in 13th century and this fact is widely known by the locals. Although the Mennonites have mostly left the area after 1945, I attended voluntary Dutch lessons in Gdansk back in 2000. The classes were subsidised by Koningin Beatrix. The story of Oląders still lives on in Poland.
I mean, almost a third of the Medieval German settlement in the East (Ostsiedlung) was by Dutch and Flemish settlers, so I doubt your city is the only one. Actually, the East Low German dialects in general still have a huge part of Dutch in them, so much that some Linguists describe them as pidgin languages between dutch and Low German.
There is still a small Wymysorys language speaking community in Poland (about 25 people). Wikipedia classifies the language as German, but in an interview one speaker said that the original settlers came from the Netherlands
Back in the day no distinction between Dutch and (Low)German was made. Both languages being Germanic languages had an even stronger mutual intelligibility then and both of them merged or evolved into a or many new types / variations..
Pozdrowienia dla mieszkańców Wilamowic z Bielska :)
25 lmao
My sister went from the UK to Friesland and learnt Dutch and Fries.
@@francesbrown5116 idk why'd she learn fries but all the power to her I guess, it kinda is like learning welsh oké you can speak it but english is easier 🤣
0:45
PL: Cześć polscy ludzie. Ten filmik jest dla dziadka Zuzi. Dziękuję za czekanie i mam nadzieję że film Ci się spodoba. Dziękuje bardzo.
EN: Hello polish people. This video is for Zusia's grandfather. Thank you for waiting and I hope you will like the video. Thank you so much.
Not Zusia, but Susan/Suzy
@@eava708 Zuzanna ;-)
@@justmynickname I mean the English version of this name
@@eava708 you don't have to translate the name, it can stay in Polish version
@asjevon1826 I know but he translated it, and he did it wrong. "Zusia" is not english version, but Suzy
From the histories my Polish mother has told me, my great grandfather came to Poland from the Netherlands to find work.
My mother met my Dutch father in Poland and moved to the Netherlands where he lived, so I was born in the Netherlands...
And now I'm planning to move to Poland this year.
Poland isn't heaven on earth just saying in advance. Good luck to you if you settle here
@@PrimalAspid96 I know, I’ve been going to Poland frequently and even for longer periods of time.
I know that for example the health service isn’t that good to put it mildly, and I’ll earn half of what I could earn in the Netherlands.
But Poland has it’s good points as well.
@@PolskiHusar117 Could you tell me what are the biggest cons of living in Netherlands and what is better in Poland in your opinion?
@@PolskiHusar117 ❤
This video is really awesome...
I was adopted by a Dutch person from the United States, my biological parents being of Native American and Norwegian descent, and of "German" descent. Almost two decades ago I was orphaned and subsequently ended up in southern Poland, and years later, in 2019 I moved to Gdańsk.
Fast forward to 2021, and the aunt with whom I have contact, posts a meme on Facebook about growing with in a Ukrainian parents, and I'm like, how do you mean, Ukrainian? She then goes on and tells me that my grandfather was Ukrainian, and I'm like, wasn't he like German, to which she is like, no, they were German speakers from Ukraine, to which she emails me the stuff she found about Molotschna and I help her a bit with the translating of the things she found, and soon forget about it.
Until December 2022 when a friend brings it up who is like totally into genealogy is bugging me to do research into my family tree, and I bring him in contact with my aunt - and until this time, I never really cared much about it, nor really had much of the feeling I had any "hometown" or anything due to being adopted and moving around and not really having had any sort of "roots" anywhere. This friend goes ahead and traces back my family history, turns out that pretty much everything which wasn't Norwegian or Native American, could be traced back to Olędrzy from Stogi Malborskie and trading families from the Gdańsk itself, the latter going back to the actual foundation of the city. Turns out I have nearly 1 000 years of family history in the city in which I ended up by accident in 2019...
Also, most of the Rogalski/Rogalska family from Gdańsk can actually to this day still trace back their family background to the Olędrzy, and possibly a few more, I just know about them because I'm apparently a product of the Rogalska and Van Dyck families from Gdańsk and Stogi Malborskie.
I've been to the cemetery in Stogi once. Quite an experience, especially on autumn evening in a windy weather it seemed straight out of a Gothic horror.
@Aleksander Korecki yeah, totally. I went there right before Christmas 2022 and it was cold and windy, but I just had to see where much of my ancestry is from.
It was very interesting though to see with my own eyes where much of my roots lie, many of my ancestors are buried, after growing up for nearly 40 years not really knowing my roots.
The funny thing is, I seem to have made a sort of reversed path my ancestors did, being adopted from the US by a Dutch woman, growing up around Nijmegen to find myself in the mountains of southeast Poland and finally ending up in Gdańsk, only to find out nearly four years after moving to Trójmiasto, that my ancestry has been here all along...
1000 jaar? De meeste Mennonieten werden weggejaagd vanaf rond 1620.
@@jasfan8247 voordat de Mennonieten kwamen woonden er ook al mensen in de regio Gdańsk 😉
Van mijn moeders kan kan ik mijn achtergrond ongeveer 1000 jaar terughalen in de regio, juist omdat Hanzehandelaren zo goed waren in het bijhouden van administratie.
I actually grew up in a town in Poland that was built on brine marshlands, which is now a famous spa town (Ciechocinek). There was an Olender settlement (called Słońsk, słony = salty in Polish, because the water there is salty) on the marshlands very close to it. They drained much of the swamps making space for my town to be built. There is still what remained of their protestant cemetery there, which was recently renovated by some local protestant activists. A very interesting video, thanks for making it.
As a Dutch I love poland! Jeszcze Polska nie zginela ❤
Greetings from Poland :)
Having spent my last summer holidays in Friesland (in Berlikum/Berltsum precisely) and ejoying them very much I have now only good feelings about the Netherlands, their people, landscape and history (thanks to seeing many interesting museums). This video is of great interest to me even if I knew a lot about settlers from the Low Countries in Poland in the centuries past.
Aww 🥰 thank you! Right back at you!
Yet? Never will, other we come help.
Even as a Polish person I'm quite intrigued by this story. Even tho we had something about this topic in school, it wasn't as covered as here. Love the video.
There is an important part that is ommited at the end of the video though. When speaking of the deportation of Germanics from Poland it is Imperative to Mentiaon that It was Stalin and the Soviet Union in General that enforced that deportation. The Polish government was an unwilling puppet state so the fact that this is not mentoned really does a disservice to this video because for the uninformed the conclusion is that it was Poles that Willingly kicked out The millions of Germans that lived inside modern Poland, meanwhile the entire policy was decided by The Soviet Government, Dominated by Russians and Led by a Georgian.
@@tkc5980 yeah, XX century is in general full of periods in europe, we mostly dont talk about :)
@@tkc5980 So modern-day Poland won't have problems to apologize for the extermination of Germanic culture, right? They wouldn't have problems to pay reparations, right? They wouldn't have problems to return this territory, right?
@@abukafiralalmani m8. Now there are Millions of Polish people living there, Mostly expelled from Poland's Eastern Territoties. For this proposal of yours to make any sense you would have to alter the borders of Europe Like mad hell all the while commiting Genocide by expelling like 10 million people. Not to mention that if someone should pay reparations it should be Russia. The people that now live In Post-Germanic Areas come largely from the East, where Poles were forcefully removed from and directed west. It isn't exactly our fault that The Soviet Union wanted to Punish Germany AND Poland at the same time. But expelling the population now when there is almost noone that even remembers living there left is absolutely idiotic. A the Vast MAjority of the people that would have to be resettled would be born on the territory they were beng expelled from and the Germans that would have to come would have never lived there in the first place. Your Proposal is idiotic and ,makes zero logical sense.
@@abukafiralalmani Your questions have nothing in common with what he wrote. Also, please stop with the senseless revanchism, it's 2023 and we don't need any more major wars in Europe.
Oh, what a marvellous surprise!
I'm delighted to see you covering this topic, and doing it in such depth. Wielkie dzięki Hilbert!
Next episode: the Dutch colonies on Mars and how they seeded the earth with life billions of years ago
Dutch/Frisian
how they build a deadstar 🤣
@@KaasSchaaf666 how the dutch/frisians built and destroyed both deathstars!
He already did that episode! But he didn't explain how the Frarsians came to Mars...
Nice try, but the Dutch settled down on estates that had been vacated by their previous occupants. So the Poles beat the Dutch to Mars
Fun fact about the painting mentioned at 26:27 is that it's also a hidden act of defiance against the Polish King. The God's Hand covers the tip of the tower of the Danzig rathaus. The tip had a golden sculpture of Zygmunt II August, King of Poland. Covering the King symbolized the freedom of the city of Gdańsk.
Gdansk, Kakow and Lwow had the position of Royal Cities in the Kingdom of Poland with many special commercial privileges or general "business" privileges, and moreover, members of the self-government of these cities, especially the mayor and his council, had a similar status to the nobility and could participate in the debates and votes of the Polish parliament. And the Polish nobility already from the 15th century felt free and almost equal to the king. Special royal privileges meant that in Poland the typical feudal gradation from previous centuries was abandoned and every member of the nobility (as well as a high official of the self-government in Royal Cities) was equal to princes or other aristocracy, and the king (and parliament) had to take their opinion into account. In Polish history, it is called "golden freedom of the nobility".
There was also a significant community of dutch immigrants in Denmark, who settled on Amager (island south of Copenhagen) in the 16th century. They mostly kept to themselves, and they still spoke Dutch into the 19th century.
There were groups of Germans (and frisians) who settled in coastal sweden, most stopped speaking german until the 40a-50s (until then german was commonly spoken as a second language as well). There are however a lot of german churches that were established by these communities.
@@MojnMojn that is common across all the North. in Norway as well. Iceland is the only country that survived the German influence, hence they speak very differently from their kindred in the continent.
Ah like gothenburg
The Dutch and Danes did a lot of things together like trading and war. The Dutch Navy defeated the Swedish Navy which had Copenhagen in a blockade. Now that's a good friend. 👍
This is such an interesting topic, thank you for covering it! Even today, you can find some random Dutch people in Poland. My classmate was half-Dutch as his father was from the Netherlands but I also managed to meet a Dutch family living literally in the middle of nowhere in a Polish village that had 100 inhabitants at best. Till this day cannot wrap my head around it but they seemed very happy with their life so good for them.
it is very busy here. people tend to move away to buy some land and raise a family. i might do it myself soon.
My grandmother had the surname Holland. her lineage goes back to a dutch farm in Norway.
Dutch people seem to have been everywhere...
they were traders and seafarers so that is quite logical, but it is still cool to think about!
They were relatively wealthy and produced a lot of kids, that swerved out all over the world.
And they loved freedom, so most of them went their own way. The VOC (Dutch East India Company) didn't want Dutch as settlers because they would not accept authority and soon start their own independent settlement.
@@dutchman7623 That's a cool fact.
@@Varangoi Yep, many Dutch integrated with the local population, keeping a few good things from their culture. Rarely you'll find Dutch neighborhoods or villages.
They didn't clutter or keep their language, but soon became successful locals, by combining the best of both worlds.
Few exceptions are religious groups, they tended to stick together and live according their believes in a small community.
But the large majority just dissolved into locals, though millions emigrated to US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many more countries. And adapted their family names to local customs.
@@ysbrandd I think even though I'm American and general claimant ancestry is English I recall seeing Dutch, Flemish and possibly Frisian merchants in my genealogy. Which surprised me when my ancestry lineage found that. Well 1.500 ancestors i guess such a thing was inevitable.
Mentioning Gdańsk and Pomerania, it is also worth mentioning Kashubs and their language. Kashubs are indigenous Slavs living in Pomerania. And Gdańsk in Kashubian is "Gduńsk".
Unfortunately our historical awareness is a bit twisted because of many years of Russian propaganda in communist times, so videos like that cover unpopular topics are so valuable. When I think of Polish - Dutch relations in times of the I Republic, I always think of admiral Arend Dickmann who was a Dutchman serving in Polish Navy and who died in the battle of Oliwa defeating Swedes. It wasn't big battle, but our naval history was never rich, so it's still our biggest battle and victory :D
Thanks for this video, I'd love to see more like this!
Arend Dickmann was German from Dithmarschen, unfortunately it is another type of post-war antigerman propaganda :)
@@adanbareth_ the stronger myth is the hard border between the Netherlands and Germany, it always used to be a soft border or none depending on the time.
@@adanbareth_ how is that? Polish, English, and Dutch wikipedia says he was a Dutchman
nie pierdol
My Mom's side of the family are of the Mennonites that went from Friesland through Poland/"East Prussia" to Russia and Ukraine. My Grandfather was born in Omsk, in Siberia, in the 1920's shortly after his family came to Canada as did my Grandmother's family. Both families settled in Saskatchewan before resettling on Vancouver Island in British Columbia on the West coast of Canada. This video effectively charts the journey of my ancestors.
What is your community now like? or have you just integrated into the wider American/Canadian culture? unlike the Amish.
@Ūnsre Scyldas I ,myself, am not of the faith and wasn't raised in it (my dad's side of the family is of Scottish and English/Irish extraction and were Baptists (Canadian not the crazy Southern kind. There used to be a difference.)). My mother's generation spread across canada and is fully integrated. Once in Canada, my great-grandparents and grandparents mingled to a degree with the non Mennonites around them (they weren't of the hide away from the rest of humanity and pretend it's the 17th century extraction of Mennonite). Now, all of my aunts and uncles (my mom is the oldest of 8) are spread across Canada from the Westcoast to southern Ontario with my cousins spread even further afield.
In Żuławy Wiślane there are old mennonites cementaries, they lived there to the second world war. It is not a town but a natural region near the Wisła River Delta. There were alot of small villages with fairly good soil. They helped with drainage here, mainly building floodbanks which still stands today. Huge part of my familly history is connected to those lands, thats why I comment :) Nice video, Greetings for all of the Holendrzy watching this vid!
Ciekawe urodziłem się w Elblągu A moje nazwisko pochodzi z Sobolowa
That is what my grandparents called the Grosses Werder. May of my ancestors farmed land there for centuries. Now we are scattered across the globe. I am in Uruguay, nice to hear there is still some memories of the Mennonites how lived there. Kind regards!!
Greetings from Gdańsk. As a Kashubian raised in Werder (Żuławy Region) I know this stories very well, and I'm happy that people from other countries are interested in my region history :)
My mom's parents and their ancestors come mostly from that region. Mennonites who then emigrated to Uruguay in 1948.
Wow, nie miałem pojęcia, że taka historia miała miejsce, super materiał! Oglądam twoje filmy od dawna, bo są bardzo ciekawe, ale zazwyczaj dotyczą historii ludów germańskich. A teraz także, i polski wątek, super!
I especially wrote it in Polish, to make you more enjoyment while translating on Google Translate. :) Cheers!
What an awesome video, Thank you Hilbert and keep it up!
I live in Poznań and there was a significant amount of colonists from Bamberg in Germany coming to the region in (if I remember correctly) XVII century. They had quite an impact on our culture and even language and their descendants live in Poznań still (they have specific names, so you can tell).
Tak! Mój Szwagier od pokoleń jest z Poznania (jego dziadkowie są dosłownie z Dębca (😎😆), gdzie osiedli Bambrzy w XVIII wieku. I ma bamberskie/niemieckie nazwisko.
@@xdlol59 Dembca tak to sie pisze orginalnie i poprawnie
The Uruguayan flag by the end caught me off guard. I knew many Poles went to Uruguay after the war but I didn't know they were Mennonites or that they were descendants of Dutch moved to Poland. This was a very interesting piece of history! I loved these stories that are lesser known but equally fascinating. Thanks for the video!
Well they werent polish, they considered themselves germans migrating from the russian empire,
There were different groups. The Mennonites came mostly from the region around Gdansk ( dutch origin ) and Lwow ( now Lviv Ukraine, these were of swiss origin ). The ones from Dansk spoke mostly german the ones from Low were mostly bilingual in German and Polish. But here in Uruguay there where also other polish immigrants not of Mennonite origin. We had neighbors like that and my grandpa would speak polish with them no problem. So there's not one origin for polish immigrants in Uruguay. Poles, Jews, German/Dutch and German/Swiss Mennonites all came from current or historic Polish territories and spoke polish as a first or second language.
Easily your funniest work yet! Just as informative, but wow was I cracking up with your "introductions" of new languages.
amazing work as always
My dad came from the Neumark, which was Brandenburg and later Pomerania. He used to tell me that there were some "Holländer" in the ancestry.
I never could really imagine anything other than a random family of Dutch people moving to Poland but never thought there was that much going on. I remember he told me that the Polish and German people didn't really mix where he lived. I found that our family name is existing in the Netherlands too.
So thanks for clearing that for me! All the best from Berlin 😃
Great video Hilbert. As a political scientist with obsession with history I'm amazed how you keep finding pieces of history that I'd never heard of before and that are so interesting.
First of all thank you for great episode and very nice polish pronunciation 🙂
24:32
I think it is also worth mentioning is that reason of relocating of German and Olęder people was not only due to viewing them as Nazi collaborators and enemies of Polish state. It was one of the steps of implementing policy introduced by Allies after 2nd World War which were to create heterogeneous countries in East and Central Europe. Also Polish people were relocated to Poland from parts of modern day Ukraine, as well as were Ukrainians from modern day parts of Poland to Ukraine. USSR and other communists forced thousands of people to change place they were living for many years, to completely different one.
Ps. Could you make a video about Hutsuls or Lemkos? Their history is also really colorful and interesting.
Love your obscure knowledge videos..
Really cool stuff! I'm always learning things I never knew before here on your channel, thank you!
I did not expect this.
It it makes sense for you to speak about it as Dutch.
A lot of Scottish people came to Poland as olenders in 1600's, which is also funny.
Following up on this you should do a video about the Dutch farmers that were brought in to make the island of Amager, right next to central Copenhagen itself, productive because it was geographically similar to the coastal lowlands :)
My friend from Muenster Germany only could understand the old local German dialect, that her father spoke with his friends, only after she learned Dutch.
It is probably because dutch is the west germanic language that changed least compared to proto-germanic so it has sounds that died out everywhere else. maybe they have a dialect where some souds survived and made it difficult to understand if you only know german.
@@ysbrandd nah, it's bc plattdüttsch is a dying dialect, rarely spoken by the younger generations or the people they are mainly listening to
in the Netherlands it's of course still simply their language which you just can't escape
I can understand and if forced also almost fluently speak platt......often did it when visiting the Netherlands .....
@@feldgeist2637 Plattduutsch is not a dialect. a dialect of what? Hochdeutsch? Standard Hochdeutsch itself is a mongrel mix between actual hochdeutsch in southern Germany and the Plattduutsch language.
Plattduutsch on the other hand is much older than Hochdeutsch, and with enough Plattduutsch skill you can even understand a few segments from old Saxon or so. hence almost all Germanic peoples have it easier understanding Plattdeutsch than the Mischling language replacing it. standard Hochdeutsch is a descendant of Plattduutsch.
Great video and amazing channel! In my home village in Poland, there is a street called Holendry, and in a next village also a street named Olędry :) Great piece of history. Thank you!
Great video, as always!
I'm an ethnography student in Cracow and I remember the elder proffessor of mine having a lecture about Olędrzy one time. He mentioned - however i take it with a grain of salt - that one of his collegues had been studying originally menonite communities in Australia. Supposedly, there had been a vauge mythical-like belief among these people, kind of folk tale about the lost land their ancestors came from, where the soil had been fertile and the river broadly flowed. With this matching the characteristics of the lower Vistula valley, the guy even menaged to organise a short trip to Poland for them.
The other thing I once encounterd is the map of red-haired people percentage in different parts of all Europe (you can look it up easily). Don't have a clue if it's related in any way but in whole Poland there was just one spot with higher density of redheads, exactly in the area of the former Olędrzy settlements.
I have also heard that the menonites were exempt from millitary service by the Polish kings throughout the 17th century. Does anyone of you know something about that by any chance?
Thank you for this great video Hilbert! Watched all of it in one sitting. Was glued to the screen
31:40 LOOK MOM, IM FAMOUS. Im glad you enjoyed my comment mate, vexillology is my one artistic passion, so it was quite fun to see you having fun with flags!
great video. i love how you used so many languages(i didnt need the subtitles for the dutch and german texts). I also love the flag (im an expert on vexilology) .
Hello Hilbert. At last a video my Polish friend from work can relate more to. My uncle was a UK POW in Silesia, where a friend from school was from. My only previous understanding was via that, from old maps and from history for wargames, which this peaceful settlement never featured in, so this was nice to learn.
As a Pole I am always happy to see Polish related videos! Dziękuje!
Wonderful information and video.Thanks a lot, from an elderly Dutch born living in Australia.
I love both the flags at the end, they're great!
Also greetings and pozdrowienia from Łódź, Poland!
Your Polish pronunciation is really good. Great video!
Great video! I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would love to hear more about the communities Tha moved abroad to North and South America. Also, a video on the language would be amazing. Thank you for all your hard work!
Dobra robota i nareszcie wiem dlaczego trochę mówisz po polsku. 😉 Very good video and you can even make a fun of yourself (a bit). Fun fact, one of two types of old windmills in Poland is called "Holender". It was popular in the West of Poland till the 19th century. Basically in the lands taken later by Prussia/later Germany. However, there were also some, not so common, "Dutchman" windmills in Central and Eastern Poland as well as parts of today's West Ukraine. One of these Dutch inspired windmills is now in the "skansen" (open-air museum of traditions and folklore, for these who don't know) in Lublin, city where I live. It was originally build in interwar period in one of villages of Lublin voivodship by Polish people but with the solid Dutch inspiration I guess. There were very sparse "Olender" settlements set within the region of this voivodship (later Russian governate) up till the mid 19th century.
There is only one skansen and it's in Stockholm. - a swede.
@@morriskaller3549 I know about it. The official name is different but people call it "skansen" between themselves. It became the eponym of open air folklore museum. The popular name has been used for many decades and was never meant to offend anyone.
@@morriskaller3549 Yeah, why say "autobus nocny linii numer trzy odjeżdża spod przystanku Muzeum Wsi Lubelskiej" when you can say "nocna trójka rusza spod skansenu" 🥴
@@annakobuk3618 Do you happen to know of any sources about the mentioned Dutch settlers around Lublin as mentioned in the video and in your comment? It's easy to find evidence of Dutch settlement in areas such as Pomorskie, Podlaskie, Mazowieckie, Śląsk; evidence in Lubelszczyzna and Red Ruthenia are harder to come by. If only place names all gave away their origins as quickly as "Niemce".
This was beyond fascinating. My Dutch husband loves all these videos about arcane Dutch history. I come from a Jewish community with strong cohesion and it was interesting to see how long a community can remain intact while moving around.
What a wonderful story, and what a nice video. Thank you!
Great stuff, thanks for the deep research and sharing!
Just a note: my mother spoke fluent Polish even though her ancestors came to the USA in 1862, maybe earlier. He had no respect for "PlouderDuetsh" which she called Low German. She fluently spoke some high German, all the Slavic languages, including Russian.
Interesting video. This reminds me a bit about the Dutch presence in Northeast Brazil in the 17th century, when the Netherlands invaded Northeast Brazil, in retaliation for the Iberian Union of Portugal and Spain, and turned the coast of Northeast Brazil into a Dutch colony from 1630 to 1654. At that time, the Dutch West India Company brought Prince John Maurice of Nassau to administer the colony, which brought much prosperity to it, bringing architects and engineers to rebuild the city of Recife in the Dutch style, gave freedom religious for Catholics, Jews and Protestants, something unheard of in Brazil and lent money to Portuguese landowners to rebuild the sugar mills. After the revolt that ended Dutch rule and the Portuguese resettlement, little trace of the former Dutch presence remained here in the region. Most notable is the not uncommon number of people with very white skin, light hair and blue eyes, such as myself, a phenotype that probably demonstrates an ancient Dutch ancestry.
There was a vice-governor of Dutch Brazil in the years 1637-1646 named Krzysztof Arciszewski who was Polish in Dutch service. There is an entry on him in Wikipedia.
@@adamzieba8364 Yes that's true. His name sounded familiar to me in your answer and when searching on Wikipedia, I remembered that the history books of my state (Rio Grande do Norte) talk about him.
Interestingly, last year, the book "The Memoirs of Krzysztof Arciszewski (1630-1637): A Pole at the Service of the West Indies Company in Brazil" was released here in Brazil, a book that reproduces the detailed reports left by Arciszewski about the time in which he served as lieutenant governor of the colony.
I have not expected to see "Olędrzy" on UA-cam. I grew up in Mazovia and I remember one school trip when they showed us countryside typical for the region and explained how Olędrzy had infuenced the traditions. I remembered they introduced hedgerows of willow trees as windbreaks and probably also for flood management.
They never told us the circumstances which made them move and how they disappeared (although it might have been too much for 7 year olds), so many thanks for the explanation! Oh, and they said that they already settled in the Middle Ages, but it might be my brain misremembering things from almost 30 years ago :-)
Thank you very much Hilbert for this interesting history I never ever heard ofit.
We stayed at the end of february Szczyrk for wintersport and we loved it.
Bedankt voor het interessante verhaal, groeten uit Zeeland.😀 👋
Thanks for this. There are a lot of Mennonites in this area of Canada and you helped me understand another bit of their history.
Amazing video! I learned about my ancestors through a "Narrative Ahnentafel Report", my last known mennonite ancestor was born in the Netherlands around 1480-1500AD, then the report has Mennonite ancestors in the 1600's in Danzig Poland. So this Video was very interesting to me, also I love the flag you designed on the left!
Menno Simons comes from my town Witmarsum Friesland, Netherlands. A town north of the Netherlands in the province Friesland. Only 40 meters from my house is a statue in front of the church from Menno Simons...4.00 minuts into this upload...thx for the info, great video...and we love Poland very much!
Fantastic presentation, but it's a pity you did not mention about the Olender Aquapark in Toruń, and Olenderski Skansen, an open-air museum just outside Toruń where many examples of memonite architecture pearls have been gathered together. Also there is a beautiful menonite house for sale in Gruczno, if someone was interested in an airbnb project...
Very cool video again. I love to watch them, maybe you can do a video about those people or other Dutch people who went to Ukraine like you said. Or maybe about the Dutch and the Danes. I read somewhere that they(we) are very close related as well with the English.
Wow great work! As a Pole I really wish we'd learn more about the Olenders at school.
No wiesz ogólnie to jest więcej takich grup np górale to potomkowie Wołochów dzisiejszych Rumunów. Tak naprawdę tylko 55% polskiej populacji ma korzenie słowiańskie.
Thank you for your material.
I'd like to hear you speak Scandinavian languages. Maybe a video about the Hanseatic league and Bergen, specifically it's dialect, being influenced by German and Dutch or Scanias dialect being Danish influenced.
Or Finland-Swedish. Some Swedish dialects in Finland are the most Conservative versions of Swedish
the phrase Holender jasny, literally translated as light dutch person, is used in Poland here as a light swear and we say it when we are frustrated sometimes, though i find the more common phrase is Cholera jasna
jasny/jasna in this case means bright, not light. We can say "jasny Holender or Holander jasny" and it can be translated into "damn it"
Een Poolse landdag (a polish Diet) means a chaotic meeting in Dutch, after the royal elections.
@@cezary8222 I'd say the english equivalent of jasna/jasny with swear words is "holy". So personally I'd put "jasny Holender" somewhere along the lines of "holy moly".
Amazing
I am an architect and I am currently building a house near the village of Cieciszew ( Konstancin Jeziorna district ) and what is a quiet interesting, part of this village has been inhabited by Olęders back then and there are original Olęder style houses to this day ( in designig proces i am obligaded to follow to the certain extend the historic architecture :) )
Kaz Olszaniecki Poland
keep preparing next pieces
Suriname, New York, India, Indonesia, Japan, Poland.... Dem Dutchies are everywhere 😳
I lived close to a formerly Olęder area next to Warsaw with houses on terpy (Terpen You mention) connected by trytwy (elevated roads). Their community halls and cemeteries are still there and I have visited them too.
Very interesting to see more of their/our common history!
This needed to be said, viewed and spread! I thought I knew quite a bit about that region, that Poland was more tolerant, for example. But this video more than doubled what I knew. My maternal great grandfather left Königsberg for America at about the time of the Unification. His passport stated: Königreich Preußen, Königsberg, lutherisch, but his behavior as related in the family was odd. He refused to speak German or allow his children to learn it [I am the first member of that family, that I know of, to study German and German history]. He never spoke about Germany or Prussia and never wanted to return. He never set foot in a church, Protestant or Catholic. When my mother's family tried to trace him back to his place of birth, they utterly failed.
My evaluation of this data is that he was a victim of the Preußischer Kulturkampf, meaning that his name could indicate Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Russian or Jewish roots, depending on how written [I've seen two different versions on family records]. Since there are Polish and Lithuanian Catholic churches here, that he could have attended and didn't, I suspect that he might have been forcibly converted from Judaism or Orthodox. They were either looking in the wrong places, or the Russian occupation obliterated all evidence.
I appreciate the effort required to research the data in the video, and the work to produce the video. Kudos Hilbert!
Historic Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth was multi-ethnic nation, composed from Poles, Balts and Cossack's. But also large number of Jews and Tatars. It was in fact know from tolerance. Current state is result of enforced resettlement during WW2 (and other external interventions). Poles aren't really racist, but have limited contact with foreigners (who were not occupants) not further then three decades ago. It is why many older people still act like people of colors are mythical creatures. But not the younger ones.
Your great grandfather could be just an ordinary German immigrant to the US who happened not liking the church. Many German immigrants were keen on integrating and that their chilldren would speak good English and not be bullied. At the time your great grandfather German immigrants were looked down on similar to the Irish. Later anti-german sentiment occured due to the first and second world war.
@@henningbartels6245 My great grandfather came from East Prussia and had a slavic name. So while your suggestion is plausible, given the dislike of Germans for Slavs, Jews and [in Lutheran areas] Catholics and Orthodox, an immigrant with a typically Slavic or Jewish name that could also be Polish, Lithuanian or Russian depending on orthography, is somewhat more likely to be non-German ethnically.
That part of the world is, like the Balkans, a hodgepodge of mutually antagonistic minorities. When they assimilate in the US they are likely to, eventually, mix happily with other groups.
@@JMM33RanMA I just wanted give you another perspective. After war nearly 1.5 million left or were forced to leave East Prussia moved westward. Many of my neighbors were former East Prussians with fairly ordinary German names.
@@henningbartels6245 Thanks, but I was aware of the Russians' ethnic cleansing in the Baltic republics, Crimea, Karelia and East Prussia, as well as other places. Mass removal of problem people to Siberia [the lucky ones, as they weren't just murdered] goes back to the Czarist regime, and has been done in Eastern Ukraine more recently.
I consider myself of German ancestry based on the official record, also English colonial Yankee, and Irish. My loyalty is to the US Constitution, not the US current regime nor to the political parties. History is interesting, and was once my academic major before it was relegated to a hobby.
17:35 After a single attempt at chatting in Plautdietsch -- as a Dutch speaker, I'd love to watch a video on the language. The Mennonites I came across in Ontario were very friendly, lovely people. We found Plautdietsch to be mutually unintelligible with Dutch, but were able to exchange some pleasantries using German.
Meeting some South Africans at the Royal Alcázar was much easier. I mistook their Afrikaans for "a Flemish dialect I'm unfamiliar with" at first so we could easily understand each other, even if I couldn't catch every word. The only confusion we had was about rennen/hollen, and that was easily resolved with a bit of mime.
Congrats, it's such in interesting video! I've seen these "Olędry" village names many times, but I only knew that we had some Dutch communities in the past and I vaguely remembered that they sought here religious freedom and had skills to deal with water and to dry wetlands.
About the name - Olędrzy is plural, and it may sound strange to an English ear (because - how and why?), but the singular form is Olęder, and the plural form is just made according to one of usual patterns.
This is an excellent video with loads of utmost interesting information. Thank you!
Świetny film i kopalnia ciekawych informacji! Dziękuję!
Pozdrowienia z Krakowa 😃
That was fascinating and informative. For several years I've wanted to learn more about these "Hollander" villages, because one of my grandmothers came from a German village on the Vistula River in Russian-ruled Poland, which I've assumed was one of them. One of Grandma's cousins thought the family may originally have been Dutch, but I wonder if she wasn't getting that from the term "Hollander" or (Olęnder), as the family was all German Lutheran, and the village inhabitants are so-identified in the census of the Russian empire in the 1890s. (Grandma was born just a little too late for her own name to appear in the census.) One of Grandma's uncles had served in the Russian cavalry and could write in Russian, but he came to the U.S. (as did many others of the village) a few years before WWI started. Grandma had described three villages adjacent to each other, and it took me a while to figure out just where they were before we went to see the area in 2018, as she had given the German names for everything. She had spoken of going to school with Polish and Russian children, and said she and her friends walked home with two Russian girls, but they didn't speak to each other, and then the Russian girls went off to their home in the woods. (The area away from the river is forested now, too.) But I wish one of us had asked her how that worked with children of three different languages and three different religions. The language used in schools was often contested in German-ruled parts of Poland, and I wouldn't expect this to have been different. The Polish village of the three is still going strong. Grandma's village is now mostly underwater from a dam reservoir built in the 60s.
Do you know of any English-language books about these Olęnder communities? Much of what I've learned about them has been from a couple of books by William Hagen.
the area you are describing might be Volhynia. That woul be in german Wolhinien or something similar
@@Superrichy261985 I think Volhynia is further to the east, or southeast. My grandmother's village was between Włocławek and Płock, but on the west side of the river. That area might be part of Masovia, but I'm not sure whether Masovia usually included any of the west side of the river. Grandma called her village Grossdorf, but that didn't help much because it just means big village. But we found her brother's naturalization application, which gave it as Gross Dembe. There is more than one Dęb Wielke in Poland, but Grandma had said her village was near Rötslavik (as my father had written it down) and Dęb Wielke is part of a cluster of three villages, just as Grandma had told us. The Russian empire census for Dęb Maly, which is adjacent to Dęb Wielke, is full of surnames of distant relatives of mine and other people I know from the small town in Minnesota where some of these people ended up. They all spoke German, but there are some Polish-sounding names among them, and one of Grandma's great-uncles, one with a stereotypical German surname, seems to have told the American census taker that his first language was Polish.
Whether there were other German villages near Dęb Wielke and Dęb Maly, I don't know, and am not sure how to find out, either. Maybe I could figure it out with the help of that Russian empire census, but that would be tedious work.
That's really interesting. I've been researching the history of my family too recently and I had to search in archive census which is all written in russian cyrrylic cursive 😭 it's terrible.
Btw I have a German sounding surname in my ancestry "Linder". Might it be also a Dutch surname? Or rather Austrian, as I am from southeastern Poland?
@@askarufus7939 I've known people with the surname Linder, but that was long ago. I assumed it was a German name, because I grew up in German communities or in communities with a strong German Lutheran presence, so I just became familiar with a lot of German names around me and tended to distinguish them from others. But I don't really know. The old ethnic distinctions were going away, and people of my generation tended not to make a big deal of them.
2:47 More than two hundred years ago, in English, people called German and Dutch "High Dutch" and "Low Dutch". Jonathan Swift employed these old terms in his novel "Gulliver's Travels" (1726).
This is a fantastic video - I learned so much!
have you ever considered making one about the androsi-eraklonian migrations? I hear professor daniel griffin has an excellent monograph on the subject. Many thanks for your great work!!
I think it is worth mentioning that a very popular and beloved Polish pop singer was Anna German (originally Hörmann), born in the Soviet Union town of Urgentch of Mennonite parents with her forefathers coming truly from Polish Zulawy. Her father was killed by the soviets accused of being a German spy, and her mother Irma Hörmann married a Polish citizen of German descent during the war, and emigrated to Poland with her mother and daughter. The three generations of women settled in Wroclaw, where Anna fullfilled her study as a master of geology in 1962. She has never worked in this trade however as she chose a career of a singer. She was tremendously successfull an also popular as a person due to her charm and kind appearance. She was also very popular in the Soviet Union and other countries of the Soviet Block, and in Italy, where she got a prize at San Remo festival in 1967. Her descent was somehow toned down in the communist era, but fully revealed after her death in the postcommunist epoch.
German married a Polish Jew. Her father was born in Lodz, which had a sizable German minority up to 1945. Karl Dedecius, who founded the German Polish Institute and became famous as a translator of Polish and Russian literature in the 60s was born there.
enjoyed your perspective of the mennonites, both sides of my family lived in prussia/poland and were part of the migration to ukraine/russia, then to north america (Kansas) in late 19th century. I’m also a descendant of Adam Wybe (wiebe) of 17th century Gdansk who was a Dutch engineer from Harlingen Friesland. Hope to visit Friesland and Poland some day!
Harlingen is a very pictureque town worth visiting especially in summer.
German here, your german on 24:04 was amazing, I understand everything! WOW
Ik weet niet precies waar ik het gehoord heb, maar ik heb begrepen dat tijdens de grote ontginning in met name Holland het allerlei mensen, ook uit niet Hollandse geweste naar Holland trokken om daar een stuk moeras droog te leggen en om vervolgens daar als vrij-boer op te kunnen leven. Het lijkt er op dat een soortgelijke aanpakt in Polen tijdens een later tijdseenheid gebruikt is. Ps. Mijn voorouders hebben rond 1550 zon soort stuk moeras gepacht van de kerk en zijn daarop vrij-boer geworden. Dat stuk moeras was veengebied of veen gebied en daardoor heeft heel wat later een andere latere voorouder zichzelf Feenstra genoemd - komend van het feen. Wat de Friese taal gebruikte nauwelijks de letter V maar eerder de letter F. Friso Feenstra
Couple of years ago I took part in a survey of German Olęder settlements in Greater Poland. They weren't Mennonites, but Evangelicals (the legal Olęders, not the ethnic ones). To this day there is a small population of German Olęder descendants living near Pyzdry in Greater Poland. Another group moved to Australia after Prussian imposed religious regulation in 19th century. There is also a group of people at the uni devoted to the research on Greater Poland Olęders and local museums are involved in preserving their heritage too.
Nice research and presentation.
Nooit geweten dit. Super interessant! Ik heb Friese, Noorse en Pruisische voorouders. En geloof nu te weten waarom ik mij zo aangetrokken voel tot deze gebieden. Leuk dat je ook iets prive laat zien. Ben ook wel benieuwd naar meer info over de taal. Love&Blessings from( Z-)Holland
Very interesting subject! Unknown to me!
Very interesting vlog to watch. Maybe an idea to follow if and in what extension the Dutch names of this former immigrant families still exist in the nowadays Poland/Ukraine/Russia ex-Mennonite territories. Or even further. Dank je wel voor het delen van je kennis 😀👍
Hi 😀
I normally subscribe to handel after watching 5+ vids. You got my full attention after just one 👍
Great job and waiting for more 😀
Dzięki ziomuś!
There is a small village in my Świętokrzyskie Voivodship. It's called - Holendry . The Mennonites settled there.
Their ancestors still live there today.There are several towns in Poland with this name. It is also worth paying attention to something like - Confederation of Warsaw 28 01 1573. Document establishing religious freedom. It is also worth for foreigners to distinguish between royal and princely Prussia. From 1457, Malbork belonged to the king of Poland. Royal Prussia belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (that is why the Mennonites could live there without any obstacles). Ducal Prussia (the area of today's Kaliningrad) rebelled and after some time Poland had no influence on what was happening there. After the partitions of Poland and the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Mennonites had to flee from Prussia. A large number of them settled in the Russian partition, where they were not persecuted because of their religion.
I'm from Gdańsk/Danzig and when I'm learning about the history of my city I often find some Dutch people that had a great impact on it : )
For example the commander of the biggest naval polish victory was dutch.
WHAT WAS HIS LAST NAME?
@@AVE_LUCIFERUS_666 Arend Dickmann, yeah funniest shit ever
My 5x great grandfather (yeah, im into genealogy) was an Olęder from Wielkopolska. His ancestors were given a surname "Olęderczyk".
Chapeau!
What a great research. I wish this kind of stuff would make it to the programs of polish schools. So interesting and makes so much sense. I haven't heard about any of this before. I though definitely felt that there must have been something more behind the history of some regions in Poland that almost seem "random" qua architecture specifically.
ALSO I wanted to mention that there actually is a place somewhere in Southern Poland that I heard about on the Polish Radio once that might have to do with The Netherlands or the groups of people that migrated from that region centuries back. It was a whole beautiful reportage covering all the mystery around the ethnicity and the language practiced in that town. The name of the place is Wilamowice. Who know, maybe it is directly connected to the topic of your viddy.
groetjes!
I'm a survivor ! Absolutely Great ! Thank you !
Old Poland was ethnicly diversified and tolerant country. I hope this heritage prevails. I knew man with Olender surname. Great episode !
Good video but wow you nail the dutch, spanish, frisian and polish pronounciations. Really impressive, well done!
Wanna hear something REALLY impressive? I've probably watched ALL your videos, from beginning to end, quite a few repeat viewings as well!
Hi Hilbert , my maternal grandparents actually belong to the last wave of Mennonites fleeing Russian advance into Prussia in 1945. They were collected into refugee camps in Gronau and Backnang in Germanyby the MCC (some who fled to Danemark ended up in prison camps their). And my grandparents decided to emigrate in 1948. Two widows with their many children, two of which would end up being my grandma and grandpa.we are few in Uruguay, less than a 1000. While in Paraguay and Brazil their are large Russian Mennonite settlements with thousands Peter settlement. There are also large Alt Colonie settlements in Bolivia ( extremely traditional groups) and in Mexico as well as the Yucatan, but these are also of Russian Mennonite origin. The descendants of the Prussian Mennonites that stayed until 1945 and the fled only used few Platt words and mostly just spoke Hochdeutsch, so here in Uruguay you will not here much Platt. Now in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia that's a different story and Platt is still the lingua franca of the Russian Mennonite descendants. If you would like some input from a Uruguayan Mennonite feel free to contact me.
Just to be clear, I am Mennonite, but beside the Dutch-Prussian Mennonite background I also have some Swiss Mennonite DNA from the Lviv area settlements dissolved in 1939 division of Poland, German Lutheran, Polish Catholic, and even some Jewish Litvak in me. I am an avid hobby genealogist 😊
Thank You!
I read a pretty famous Polish novel recently (partly bc of a vaguely remembered tv-series in my childhood) "The Farmers"? Not sure what the title is in English, or ofthe author, Henryk Sienkewizc?
Anyway one of the conflicts was that the local big landowner brought in "Germans" to break new land, that the village wanted to buy, I guess they might have been "Olenders"?
Great video and nice to put a face to the voice.