peseckis

Surnames. The Peseckis surname is Lithuanian in origin. Our immediate family descends from people who came to the United States in 1912 from the region near Luoke in Zemaitija (or equivalently Samogitia) in Lithuania.

In an Americanized pronunciation, the 'ck' is a hard 'k' sound. In Lithuanian pronunciation, the 'ck' is like the 'tsk' sound in English.

There are other surnames, including those whose apparent origin is in countries other than Lithuania, that strike us as similar to our own. We do not know if these are anything more than superficial resemblances. That said, the countries of origin are usually eastern European.

Keeping in mind that in Lithuanian the Peseckis surname is pronounced like 'Pesetskis', these are some surnames we have come across that seem similar:

Surnames Origins

Peseckis Lithuania

Peseckas Lithuania

Pesetsky/Pesetzky Belarus

Pesetski/Pesetskii Belarus

Pesezki Belarus

Peseski/Pesesky ?

Pasetsky/Pasetzky ?

Pizetsky/Pisetski Belarus, Poland

Pyasetski Belarus

Piasecki Poland

Pesek/Pasek Czech, Bohemia

Pezeshki/Pezeschgi Iran

Pezeshk/Pezek Iran

Pezeshkzad Iran

Pezeshkian Armenian

Given the strong historical associations among the ancestors of peoples in present-day Lithuania and Belarus and Poland, some connection of our surname with other surnames in those regions would not be surprising, though we are without specific information that would establish such connections.

It is interesting that within this grouping of surnames one finds a diversity of cultural and religious associations. These include 'pagan' (viz. native Lithuanian), Christian, Jewish and Islamic beliefs. As one example, the surname 'Pesezki' is contained in a list of Jewish families from Lyuban, Belarus, killed by Nazis in 1941.

We also find the surnames of non-Eastern European (e.g. Iranian) origin intriguing. While our interest in languages is purely avocational, we understand that one can regularly observe transformations, among Indo-European languages, of elements within such sound clusters as s-z and g-k and t-d and p-b-v. Only one or two such small shifts in sound, together with the addition of a suffix like 'is' or 'an' or 'zad' that is characteristic of naming in the given language, produce the apparent surname similarities.

We also cannot resist noting that we have found reference to the word 'peseshkef' or 'peseshkaf'. (We were lead on this trail by observing that 'Pezeshki' seems to mean something like 'medecine' in Persian, though we know no Persian and gleaned this from a survey of Iranian web pages. These are the only references we have found that attach any kind of meaning to even the remotest possible roots of our surname.) To quote:

"The peseshkef, a prehistoric flint knife in the shape of a fish tail, was used in Egypt to cut the umbilical cord at birth, circa 5000 BC. This was the first special-purpose surgical instrument. Because of the importance of rebirth in the Egyptian religion, a stylized knife with magical properties became part of the equipment for the "opening of the mouth" ceremony to permit a mummy to partake of nourishment in the afterlife. It also became the emblem of the birth goddess, Meskhenet."

If you can shed any light on the origins or potential connections among these surnames, please email us, we would be very interested in exchanging ideas.