Tracing a rare name out of the eastern borderlands, and the people who carried it across three continents.
My name is Andrew Czerniachowicz. I built this to record the history of a surname that is rare, tied to one part of the world, and easy to lose once borders, languages and regimes change. It began as a question about where we came from. It has become, slowly, a small archive.
The site splits in two: the name itself, and the people who carried it.
The Name
Where Czerniachowicz comes from. Its Slavic roots, the -owicz patronymic, its noble status and the contested coat of arms. Also where it is found across Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, and just how rare it has become.
Enter ii.The Family
One branch of the name. The household at Krasna Słoboda, the brothers lost to Soviet repression, and my grandfather Antoni’s journey from a Volhynian village to the Russian north, out through Persia, a refugee camp in Uganda, and finally England. Told, where possible, through their own records.
EnterThe shape of the project, in four numbers.
- 1724 Earliest record
A Czernichowiecka, born at Dereczyn in present-day Belarus. The oldest trace of the name yet found.
- ≈69bearers In Poland today
On the PESEL registry, January 2026. The world total is probably only in the low hundreds.
- 3continents In one lifetime
Europe, Asia and Africa, in the path of one branch between 1940 and 1950.
- 123records Parish entries traced
Births, marriages and deaths indexed on Geneteka, across every spelling of the name.
CHER·NYAHK·OH·VITCH
/ t͡ʂɛrɲaˈxɔvit͡ʂ /, four syllables. Stress on the third in Polish, on the first in English usage.Are you a Czerniachowicz too? Write to me.
The name is rare — perhaps a couple of hundred living bearers worldwide, across Poland, the UK, Argentina, the United States and Australia. If you are one of them, or descended from one, I would very much like to hear from you. I am particularly trying to trace branches that left the Kresy before 1939, and any line connected to the parish of Krasna Słoboda, today Katiukha.
Photographs, names of grandparents, anything you remember. I will not publish anything without your permission, and I will share back whatever I find on your line.