Genealogia rodu Sanguszków księcia Symeona Samuela Sanguszki
Genealogy of the Sanguszko Family by Prince Symeon Samuel Sanguszko

Summary/Abstract: A genealogy of the Sanguszko Family produced by Symeon Samuel Sanguszko (died 1638) is a short historical text presenting the history of the Sanguszkos in genealogical order: starting with the progenitor, it contains biographic notes of successive members of the family according to family branches. The genealogy made by a member of the family is a record of knowledge of a magnate about his own family, making it a valuable source for research into collective memory and historical culture of magnates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of those times. The work is known in three versions: the original and two its eighteenth-century copies. The analysis contains the filiation of known and established manuscript texts, time of their creation, their purpose, and their later archival and library history. Next, the sources of information of the author are established and based on this the historian’s craft of the author and the memory culture of his family are discussed. The genealogy was based on historical writings, mainly Maciej Stryjkowski’s chronicle, which was used for the reconstruction of the oldest history of the family, and the collective memory of the family, i.e. the knowledge passed down from generation to generation within the family, used to reconstruct the later history. A thorough analysis of the genealogy information revealed that some parts of the work were invented by the author to fill in the gaps between the part reconstructed on the basis of chronicles and that on the basis of family memory (“floating gap”). And finally, the importance of the genealogy for the Sanguszko Family’s identity and old-Polish knowledge of genealogy is presented. It turned out that the genealogy had a great impact both on the Sanguszko’s identity and the old-Polish genealogical studies, as it gave rise and strengthened the – untrue – conviction among both the family members and old-Polish historians that the Sanguszkos descended from Liubartas son of Gediminas. The annex contains a critical edition of the genealogy text, reconstructed on the basis of three old-Polish manuscripts and a nineteenth-century transcription of the original manuscript.

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