Origins of the Wisniowecski Name
Family lore suggests that the name "Wisniowecski" relates to a member of Polish nobility and West family ancestors lived or provided important services to this noble. The Wisniewski surname is a habitational name, taken on from one of the many places in Poland called Wisniewo, Wisniew, or Wisniewa. These places all derive their name from "wisnia," meaning "cherry," and the surname means "one from the town of the cherry tree." The addition of a suffixes like -skiy, -skyi, -ski (Tarnovskyy, Sheptytsky), from Polish surnames in -ski, may signify aristocratic origins, but then generalized to more common uses
Historically, Jews used Hebrew patronymic names. In the Jewish patronymic system the first name is followed by either ben- or bat- ("son of" and "daughter of," respectively), and then the father's name. (Bar-, "son of" in Aramaic, is also seen.) Permanent family surnames among Ashkenazic Jews of Germany or Eastern Europe until the 18th and 19th century, where the adoption of German surnames was imposed in exchange for Jewish emancipation, but it wasn't until the 17th and 18th centuries that the rest of Europe followed suit.
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Note: Click image to see photos of Boguslav taken by David Kleiman on his visit in xxxx.
Jews lived in Boguslav since the late 16th or early 17th century. Already in the early period Jews played an important role in the economic life of the town. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Jews of Boguslav suffered from attacks by the Crimean Tartars and, especially, of the Cossacks and the Haidamaks. In 1768, during the uprising of Easstern Orthodox peasants and Cossacks, the so-called “Koliivshchina,” many Jews abandoned Boguslav but they returned several years later.