told you so friday: i am not polish

people often try to tell me i am polish, they either tell me that my facial features or my last name marks me as polish. my father is named stan, and i have never really met anyone named stan who is not polish. but ever since a very lovely polish girl, who came from poland to chicago, once gave me a facial and told me i wasn't polish-looking i've always scoffed at these attempts to pinpoint my rich and complicated ancestry. it's not my nature, however, to scoff without really knowing. so how rich and how complicated is my ancestry?

it seems natural to begin this quest through a simple process of elimination combined with an examination of what i do know about my family. hmm, i don't really know much about my family since my paternal grandparents died before i was born and my dad doesn't talk about his family or um anything really. my mother says we have a genealogy in the basement somewhere but it's buried amidst the piles of her obsessive-compulsive disorder and she won't let me go digging. she says it says we're prussian. fuck...prussia hasn't existed for a really long time and it was very, very big. so let's go back to poland. wait, where is poland*? for a better answer to that question than i could ever give, might i suggest you check out a copy of "A Polish son in the motherland: an American's journey home" by my colleague Leonard Kniffel from your local library.

let's try this again. my last name is a Variant of eastern German Prillwitz, a habitational name from places so named in Pomerania and Mecklenburg. if you check out that link you'll see how in 1920 my clan was concentrated in ... wisconsin! given that right before the turn of that century 1 out of 3 mecklenburgers emigrated, it would seem likely some of my relatives were part of the mass exodus.

did you see how my ancestors were known as mecklenburgers? we shall now briefly detour back to wisconsin to talk about burgers, because you know i can never go too long without thinking about my belly. read a whopper-sized history of the hamburger here, or just skim the excerpt below:

1885 - Charlie Nagreen of Seymour, Wisconsin, at the age of 15, sold hamburgers from his ox-drawn food stand at the Outagamie County Fair. He went to the Outagamie County Fair and set up a stand selling meatballs. Business wasn't good and he quickly realized that it was because meatballs were too difficult to eat while strolling around the fair. In a flash of innovation, he flattened the meatballs, placed them between two slices of bread and called his new creation a hamburger. He was known to many as "Hamburger Charlie." He returned to sell hamburgers at the fair every year until his death in 1951, and he would entertain people with guitar and mouth organ and his jingle:

Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers hot; onions in the
middle, pickle on top.

Makes your lips go flippity flop.

The town of Seymour, Wisconsin is so certain about this claim that they even have a Hamburger Hall of Fame that they built as a tribute to Charlie Nagreen and the legacy he left behind. The town claims to be "Home of the Hamburger" and holds an annual Burger Festival on the first Saturday of August each year. Events include a ketchup slide, bun toss, and hamburger-eating contest, as well as the "world's largest hamburger parade."

i am proud to have called wisconsin home, i imagine the hamburger is too. and maybe this foolish quest for my roots need go no further, might i be satisfied with my kindred, meaty brethren and ketchup slides?

no. i want to tell you more about mecklenburg. actually i just want you to read that history because it will tell you about the university in 1419, the adoptions of many different official religions, the numerous divisions and reunifications of my motherland, and the land lendings and occupations. but what is the best part about mecklenburg? this!

Mecklenburg was occupied in the sixth century by the Wends, a Slavic people. The Mecklenburg dynasty was established in the 1100s when the Wendish ruling family accepted Christianity and German domination.

i rule!

from now on, please address me as mare vendicus. i own finland too. i wanted to find myself and instead i found an empire.

* i'd intended to skip sharing polish lore, since as you now know, i am not polish. but i was reading about poland and this guy casimir (the last king of a purely polish state and the adopted last name of someone ... pole ... where was i ) and the polish people in general, when i came across this gem: "Their women, when married, do not commit adultery. But a girl, when she falls in love with some man or other, will go to him and quench her lust. If a husband marries a girl and finds her to be a virgin, he says to her, "If there were something good in you, men would have desired you, and you would certainly have found someone to take your virginity". Then he sends her back, and frees himself from her. " ouch, that's a double-edged sword if i ever!