Family history can not only be interesting, it can be enlightening, rewarding, time-consuming, disappointing, expensive, confusing, and frustrating, too. Not only do you have to contend with not-so-helpful relatives and non-existent or missing records, but also foreign names, localities and terms. Like place names and surnames, first names have their variants, translations, equivalents, linguistic and phonetic renderings, and bastardized forms that have absolutely nothing to do with the origin or meaning of the name. As William has stated in this book: "It's not surprising that doing "Polish" genealogical research may mean you have to deal with names that come from, or are affected by, Belorussian, Czech, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Yiddish." Take one look at your ancestor's name in Hebrew or Cyrillic and you'd think you were looking at hieroglyphics. Broadly, "Polish" names are those names that one encounters while researching ancestors who cam from any area one regarded as part of the Commonwealth of Poland, Both William and I have no doubts that you will get some benefit out of using this work. We have endeavored to provide you, the researcher, as much assistance as possible with those names that can be traced and analyzed. But just remember that a book like this should not be used, it should be utilized.