Vistula River Settlements Project This FamilyTree DNA Project is designed for people whose ancestors were settlers to the Vistula (Weichsel, Wisla) River Basin in Poland. Although new arrivals to the area continued into the twentieth century, German, Dutch Mennonite, and Jewish groups who began their migration up the river from the Baltic Sea to Warsaw in the sixteenth century may have been the first groups to create villages among the Poles living along the river. For now, this project will focus on the river settlements from Thorn to Warsaw. Throughout history, portions of the river and its tributaries were variously within the political jurisdictions of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, the Swedish Empire, the Prussian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, the Duchy of Warsaw, the Russian Empire, the German Third Reich, and it is currently completely within the boundaries of Poland. Each political change brought requirements as to the official recordkeeping language and spelling convention for village names. Some settlements (kempa, kepa) no longer exist because of major changes in the floodplain or military decisions. We will try to compensate for these changes by displaying current coordinates to their historic names whenever known. Although the settlers usually retained their religion and ethnicity, some of these families changed their surnames to Polish. DNA matching will help overcome what otherwise might be a dead-end for a paper trail. We anticipate that Using DNA as a tool to pool information with people scientifically known to be related. This will be vital in tracing ancestral origin. The surnames listed on this site are known by our members to have lived in the Vistula Basin. If you have ancestral ties to the region we would welcome your participation in the project.