Okay, folks, get your snacks and drinks ready. Here's another long rambling post from me.

Okay, while I can't find anything to specifically attach our name to it, so it therefore might have absolutely zilch to do with the "long journey," I can find a few historical events that might have something to do with it.

It made sense to stick within about 200-300 years of history, since the name seems to be fairly new. Ya figure Zigmund was born in 1873 and his father Ignatuis seems to have had our last name also.

Now, from 1768 - 1772, there was an anti-Russian rising known as the "Confederation of Bar" which was crushed by the Russians. Over 5000 of these people, called "szlachta," were captured and sent to Siberia. Some escaped. So could it have something to do with that?

Then we have, in 1792, Russia didn't like something about the new Constitution and reform that the king had started and instigated a something, formed some sort of confederation against the new Constitution and then "asked" for help. Troops from Russia came in and then we had a war. The king's nephew resisted but then the Prussians joined in, also attacking the Polish armies and many patriots were forced to flee. So could it have something to do with that?

OR...heheh...in 1795, another partition wiped what was left of Poland. The king abdicated. A lot of captured Poles got sent to Siberia but a lot of them managed to escape. Many of them went to Italy, in 1797, and formed a Polish Legion, fought for Napoleon against Austria. They figured that they could help free Poland by fighting with the French against the countries that had partitioned Poland. So could it have something to do with that? Heheh.

The URL I used for this was: http://www.kasprzyk.demon.co.uk/www/HistoryPolska.html

Then, going back to simple deduction, I'm wondering if maybe Zigmund's parents or grandparents didn't come from the southern region of Poland. I got Zigmund's parents from Virginia (who's also wandering around this message board). She has Ignatuis Dlugokenski marrying Eva Ligoska and Eva came from Galacia/Austria(?), which would be Austrian-Poland I believe, if I'm understanding all of what I'm reading. Yet, Zigmund comes from Rypin, which would be in the more northern region of Poland. That's quite a journey all things considered. So could that have something to do with it? If so, I'm not sure of the reasons for the move though. I'm trying to connect dates and possibles reasons and to put it bluntly...I sucked at history in school heheh. I found some old maps at Poland's GenWeb at: http://www.rootsweb.com/~polwgw/ausgeruss.html

On a possibly unrelated yet interesting side-note, I stumbled across this site by accident:
http://ns1.iols.net/users/bingham/
and found one of the surnames, in the area they're researching, being
Dlugos and another being Dlugolinsky. From a map at: http://www.eurofresh.se/poland-map/polska-nowa.htm
Zakopane, which is now in Slovakia I think...would that have been close or in Austrian-Poland at one time? All of these maps are starting to make me dizzy. Anyhow, Ligoska is not one of the surnames they have yet, though. Hmmm, while I'm writing this in notepad, I'm wandering around that URL's links -- the one I passed on in the previous message --with all of the interesting Polish links. It has one related to the above one, researching Zakopane's area. And this one: http://targ.1avenue.com/
has a village named....drumroll please...Dlugopole, two villages named Ligasowka (possible Ligoska origin?)

Oh, and John, here's another link that I thought I had lost the other day regarding the name:
http://members.aol.com/genpoland/surnames.htm
and an extra I just found while doing all that legend searching stuff above:
http://www.cproots.com/surname%20origins/name%20systems/nams...