A close cousin to my father, Wiktorian Nadolski, was a lover ofhistory and explorer of documents. He lived in Nadolin – a landed property north of Brest, on the Bug river, located in the neighborhood of my fathers family estate.Uncle Nadolsbi changed the former name of the village and landed property from Stupiczewo to Nadolin. A rumor had it that the name, sounding very indecently in Belarusian, dates back to times immemorial when, for some unknown reason all male residents of the village were displaced. Only a hundred women were said to have stayed behind. And therefore peasants in the neighborhood started calling the place with such an ironic and indecent name.
Wiktorian Nadolsk’s interest in the history of local estates and villages resulted from the fact that the places had formerly been a property of the Kościuszko family. It concerned, e.g. Stupiczewo, Kolankowia, Leniewicze, Perepiiki and Siechanowicze. Nadolski’s studies and investigations were based on old documents kept in the archives of the Stupiczewo manor. They were written in Russian; the later ones were also in Polish. The oldest document dated from 1563. It read that “Iwan and Fedor Kośtiuszkowiczy, Hrodzkije landowners in the county of Kemeneck” divided the property: Iwan got the old manor in Stupiczewo, Fedor – Połowica and Perepiiki villages (the latter formed a part of my father’s property before the war).
Wiktoryn Nadolski described in detail 10 documents from the 17th c. and 11 from the 18th c. Ali related to the Kościuszkos and concerned last wills and testaments, acts of purchase and sale, sharing out family property, bequests, donations, pawns, lawsuits, regulation of borders, etc. On that basis, Nadolski prepared a study published in 1908 as: “Genealogy of the Kościuszko family collected from old Stupiczewo documents”.
Professional vs. amateur
Tadeusz Korzon derived an analogical Iln-eage of the Kościuszkos and published it in 1894 in his work entitled “Kościuszko, Biography drawn from documents”. Family tables printed later were based on Korzon’s argument. The family trees compiled by Nadolski and Korzon differ essentially as, according to my uncle, the first recorded in documents progenitor of Thaddeus Kościuszko was Kostiuszko, probably a minor (“putnyj”) boyar of Kamieniec and Lithuania. Nadolski enumerated his descendants as: Fiedor – Mikołaj – Paweł – Hieronim and Ludwik. According to Korzon, first went Fiedor I who was followed by Kostiuszko (Konstanty) – Fetor II – Hrechory -Jan – Aleksander Jan – Ambroży and Ludwik. As Korzon couldn’t have known Stupiczewo documents, it would be interesting to juxtapose them with data on which he based his arguments. But do the sources he used still exist. The Stupiczewo documents were lost, and only an abstract of several pages has been preserved.
Polish quarrels
From all writings collected by my uncle, it follows that nobility in former Rus Litewska (Lithuanian Russia), in the surroundings of Brest of Lithuania, did not live in harmony and concord. About 1736 Wawrzyniec Kościuszko, owner of Leniewicze, had some disputes and even lawsuits against the Suzins. The grievance was over property borders and fishing in the Leśna river. Kościuszko learned that the Suzins intended to sell their estates to Jerzy Matuszewic, the administrator in Sokole district. Thus he sent him a letter informing that there are some still unsettled legal interests between his own estate and grounds owned by the Suzin family. According to legal regulations at that time, such a state of affairs should have stopped transactions of sale or purchase. However, neither Matuszewic nor the Suzins reacted to the warning, and in 1738 Ludwik, Faustyn and Józef Suzin sold Stupiczewo, with other villages, to Jerzy Matuszewic and his wife, Teresa (nee Kepska) for a nice sum of 40,000 Polish złoty.
After the transaction, the new owners let the Suzins the land for a few years. Just at that time outrage, fights and suits between Wawrzyniec Kościuszko, the Suzins and Matuszewic started. The Suzins lured Kościuszko to Stupiczewo where they insulted him and attacked his servants with their sabers.
Kościuszko sued them at once, and he did the same to Matuszewic accusing him of the fact that, having been warned beforehand, he still purchased the estate from the Suzins. He accused his neighbors of violence, beating and imprisoning one of his officials, Przesłucki and of burning down his own manor in Drąbczewo. The Suzins sued Matuszewic as well accusing him of violet treatment of their official and early expulsion from the estate (forcing out from a property using violence).
The eventual verdict announced in absentia at the court in Brest sentenced the Suzin family to fines and exile. They moved then to Siechanowicze and one of them even as far as Kobryńskie where the family had some pawned estates. When appointed officials from the Brest court came to Siechanowicze to enforce the sentence, armed Suzins resisted and drove off the executors, threatening them with sabers and forcing them to eat up the act of sentence. It gave rise to another lawsuit, this time a criminal one.