Nuo valsčiaus tijūno iki valstiečio: vienos lenkų bajorų giminės likimas Žemaitijoje

ENThe paper analyses the fate of the Oziębłowski, h. Radvanas, family in Samogitia. The first information about them is provided by V. Kojelavičius: Castellan of Sochaczew Szczęsny Oziębłowski had son Jonas with his first wife (nee Rzevucka), and another son Lenard (or Lenart) with his second wife Anna Lanckoronska. Around the 70s of the 16th century, the sons moved to live in the LGD. The son of Jonas Ščesna- vičius, also Jonas, converted to the Reformed religion and established the Evangelical community in Šilalė. True, the said version of Kojelavičius is still to be checked. We know that at the time Šilalė belonged to the Orvydas family. The second son Lenart with his wife Dzierżkówna had son Kasparas. It was that branch that settled down in Samogitia for a long time. In 1588, Kasparas Lenartavičius Oziębłowski for an impressive sum of 6,150 threescores of groshes bought the Gelgaudiškis manor, the small town, and the church from Grigalius Masalskis. Gelgaudiškis was inherited by the sons of Kasparas: Jonas, Motiejus, Andrius, and Petras.Andrius Kasparaitis had the most successful political career: in the period of 1621 to 1643, he was the tiun of the Šauduva rural district. One can state that the family of Oziębłowski setled down in Samogitia in the late 16th to the first half of the 17th century and belonged to the local elite. What happened over the next century to make Kazimieras, a descendant of the Oziębłowski family, to go to court in 1742 in order to prove he was a noble, but not a peasant? How far did the historical memory of the family go? Did they remember their Polish origin? All those questions can be answered with the help of the documents from the Samogitian Land Court Year Books, the Lithuanian Metrica, and different extracts stored in the Aušra Museum in Šiauliai. The case of the Oziębłowski family is unusual; over 150 years, its social status underwent cardinal changes: economic prosperity changed for the balancing between a noble and a peasant. That led to deeper and more exhaustive studies of its history, or, in terms of micro-history, to the use of the method of thick description to find a case of a “typical exception“. The reconstruction of the social relations of one family and the studies of the genealogical memory can contribute to the definition of the vectors of the immigrant integration into the local community and the deviations from them.