To: cmcvey@jlmnet.com, who wrote:

...Could you tell me the name origins for my great grandparents names? Sztukowski and Makowski...

Names ending in -owski usually derive from a place name the family came from or was otherwise associated with. Typically, those place names end in -ow or -owo, although there are

other possibilities. Thus Makowski means "person or family associated with Makow/Makowo"; if the family was noble, they probably owned the estate or village at some time, and if

they were peasants, they probably lived and worked there. There are several Mako~w's and at least one Makowo in Poland, so it's tough to tell which of them your particular Makowski's

might have come from. As is usually the case when a surname can come from several different place names, Makowski is a very common name in Poland -- as of 1990 there were 25,340 Poles by that name, with no apparent concentration in any one part of the country. Warsaw province has the most, with 3,155, but virtually every province has at least a few hundred Makowski's living in it. The ultimate root of the name is mak, which means "poppy," so that "Makow" or "Makowo" may have started out meaning "the place with lots of poppies." In some cases it can also come from short forms of first names such as Maksym and Makary, kind of like our English nickname "Mack"; in those cases Makow or Makowo meant "Mak's place."

So Makowski means either "person from Mak's place" or "person from the poppy place."