Piłsudski family
The Piłsudski family is a family of nobility that originated in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and increased in notability under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Polish Republic.
The family was Polonized Lithuanian nobility that over time became part of the Polish nobility ; it has been called either a Polish noble family or a Polonized Lithuanian noble family. Its most famous member was Józef Piłsudski, described variously as a Pole or as Polonized-Lithuanian noble.
The Piłsudskis date back to pagan times in Lithuania and are recorded from the 13th century.
The family took its name in 1539 from the Samogitian village of Pilsūdai, now in Lithuania's Tauragė district, where the family ancestor, the Starost of Upytė, Baltramiejus Ginvilas, established himself.
The earliest notable members of the family include Roch Mikołaj Piłsudski, Stolnik of Vawkavysk. His marriage to Małgorzata Pancerzyńska—whose brother, Karol Pancerzyński, was Bishop of Vilnius—raised the wealth and prestige of the Piłsudski family.
The family also became related through several marriages to the Billewicz, another prominent and wealthy noble family. In 1863 Józef Piłsudski, senior, married Maria Billewicz; one of their children, Józef Piłsudski the younger, would become the famous Polish hero and dictator, and the most celebrated member of the family. Józef Piłsudski's closest and most prominent relatives included his three brothers—Adam Piłsudski, a politician; Bronisław Piłsudski, a noted ethnographer; Jan Piłsudski, a lawyer and politician—and his daughters: Wanda Piłsudska, who remained in England after World War II, practicing psychiatry, then in 1990 returned permanently to Poland, where she died in 2001 and Jadwiga Piłsudska, who was a ferry pilot during World War II.
Today, the remaining male members of Józef Piłsudski's family are Japanese. They are in fact the descendants of Bronisław Piłsudski, Józef's older brother who married an Ainu woman and lived in Sakhalin.
