Desired Outcomes: The 1930 Federal U.S. census lists 726 Sowinski, 184 Sovinski and 181 Sawinski records. Today, many of us with one of these surnames are doubtless related to descendants of others. And most of us are probably related to other Sowinski’s whose ancestors never emigrated and who account for the 13,000 or so Sowinski’s currently living in Poland. And there are Sowinski's throughout Europe, Canada and South America as well. The overarching goal of the SOWINSKI Y-DNA Project is simply to try to generate some structure and meaning from these numbers. Some of the specific targeted outcomes include: • To determine relationships among living SOWINSKI’s around the world • To identify and catalog all unique SOWINSKI lines of descent • To support traditional research-based genealogical findings • To identify the specific line of descent from the WYSZOGOTA-SOWINSKI clan of Polish nobility which can be traced to the village of Sowiny, south of Poznan. (51 43 33N, 16 49 43E) • To identify the specific branch related to Jozef Longin SOWINSKI, 19th century Polish general and cultural hero. Since SOWINSKI is a toponymic surname, and since there are over a dozen villages/towns across Poland from which one could acquire the name SOWINSKI, it is a reasonable assumption that not all living SOWINSKI’s are genetically related by “recent” ancestry. It is therefore a standing hypothesis of this study that there currently exist several distinct and unrelated genetic lines (i.e. multiple haplogroups) among living SOWINSKI’s. A statistically significant sampling of Y-DNA from living SOWINSKI males would either prove or disprove this hypothesis.