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Position:Home>Genealogy> What can you tell me about my name, Florian Furgal?


Question:origins, history maybe, stuffy like that


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: origins, history maybe, stuffy like that

www.ancestry.com

Florian
German and Polish: from Latin Florianus, a derivative of Florus (see Flora). St Florian is the patron of Upper Austria and Poland; he was a high-ranking Roman officer who was put to death by drowning in the River Enns during the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian. A second saint of the same name was martyred in Palestine in the 7th century together with sixty companions

www.polishroots.org

There is a verb furgac~ (accent over the c, the word is pronounced roughly "FOOR-gach"), a term used in dialect, which means "to take flight, fly away, flee." In Polish, names were often formed by taking such verbs, dropping the infinitive ending -ac~, and adding the suffix -al~a (I'm using l~ to stand for the Polish l with a slash through it, which sounds like our w). This suffix generally means one who's always doing the action or demonstrating the quality described -- e. g., Biegal~a is from biegac~, "to run," and means someone who's always running. In this case, Furgal~ or Furgal~a would apparently mean "one who's always taking off, one quick to flee." So that explains the name if it is Furgal or Furgala.
Furgal~ is very common, however; there were 1,149 Poles by that name, living all over the country but with the largest numbers in the provinces of Katowice (127), Krakow (174), and Tarnow (331) -- which suggests the name is most common in southern Poland. There were also 984 Furgal~a's, with half living in one province, Przemysl (466), also in southeastern Poland. The large numbers in Tarnow and Przemysl provinces suggest the name is most common, and may have originated, in southeastern Poland, near the Ukrainian border.

This is what www.ancestry.com has to say about the name,
Florian
German and Polish: from Latin Florianus, a derivative of Florus (see Flora). St Florian is the patron of Upper Austria and Poland; he was a high-ranking Roman officer who was put to death by drowning in the River Enns during the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian. A second saint of the same name was martyred in Palestine in the 7th century together with sixty companions.
There was nothing for Furgal.
Hope this helps.

The social security death index has 95 entries for your last name, and the rootsweb family files show other researchers who have found records in Eastern Europe (ie Austria, Ukraine, so forth). One shows a Michal/ Michael Furgan from (Poland or Austria), who immigrated and died in Massachusetts. The thing to keep in mind is that Polish persons born in the late 1800s, are of Polish heritage, but since Poland didn't exist for many years, they can appear in records as German, Austrian, or other nationalities. That is a political issue.
It should be easy for you to find the name of your grandfather/ great grandfather, if he was in the US before 1930. Thus, his line could be found in census records. The social security death index is useful for anyone who died since about 1960ish, to verify the dates. Once you locate the immigrant ancestor, perhaps one of the rootsweb files is a relative of yours, who has already found details and locations in Europe.