The ancestry of Elizabeth Anne Peek — the American South and Podlaskie, Poland
Compiled from the Peek Family Tree — 445 individuals across 197 family groups. Prepared June 2026.
The Shape of It
Your ancestry splits almost perfectly down the middle, one half from each parent — and the two halves could hardly be less alike. Your father's side reaches deep into the American South: a dense, well-documented web of families settled across Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia, several of them in the colonies before the Revolution. Your mother's side is almost entirely Polish, drawn from a tight cluster of villages in the Podlaskie region of the northeast, who crossed to the New England mill towns around the turn of the twentieth century.
English & Scots-Irish colonial South, with threads of German, French Huguenot, and possibly Italian.
Polish — the Podlaskie villages of Makowskie, Wypychy, Nadbory, and Siestrzanki.
The Peek Line
This is the larger and older of your two branches, and the migration follows a pattern repeated by thousands of Southern families: Virginia and the Carolinas in the 1700s, pushing southwest into Alabama and then Mississippi by the early 1800s, chasing newly opened land. By the mid-nineteenth century the family is firmly rooted in Jasper, Copiah, and Covington counties, Mississippi, where they stay for generations.
The Peek surname traces back to Capt. George Peek (c. 1720–1808), recorded in the tree as an officer of the 14th Virginia Regiment and rooted in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. The 14th Virginia was a real Continental Army regiment, formed in 1777 and drawing its companies from exactly that part of Virginia — Halifax, Pittsylvania, Albemarle and neighbors — which makes the geography of the claim sound. From him the line runs through William Peek (1755–1843), George Peek (1784–1860) who moved the family to Alabama, and on into Mississippi.
The Mississippi Peeks include Dr. Ocie Rush Peek (1867–1941) and, through marriage, a string of clergymen — Rev. Edward P. Stanley, Rev. Elijah Gardner — suggesting a family of some standing in their counties: the local doctor, the circuit preacher, the names that turn up in church and courthouse records.
The Makowski Line
Where the Peek side sprawls across a continent, the Makowski side is remarkably concentrated. A large share of these families come from the same small cluster of villages in Podlaskie Voivodeship in northeastern Poland — Makowskie, Wypychy, Nadbory, Siestrzanki, Burzyn — names that repeat across the generations because people married their neighbors for two hundred years.
Michał (Michael) Alexander Makowski (1894–2003) was born in the village of Makowskie — the place the family is named for — and died in Pascoag, Rhode Island. He lived to 108 years old, spanning from the Poland of the partitions to twenty-first-century America. His father Walenty Makowski (1859–1935) lived and died in the same village his ancestors had farmed.
Several of these lines carry the marker "herbu Nowina" — "of the Nowina coat of arms." In Polish naming this signals descent from the szlachta, the minor nobility, who were identified by shared heraldic clans rather than individual titles. The Brzostowski and Grądzki families both appear with this mark, hinting at gentry roots — likely the kind of modest, land-poor nobility that was common in this corner of Poland.
Your mother's mother's side — the Modliszewski, Pietruszka, Czelusniak, and Bożek families — is also wholly Polish, some of them from Galicia (the Austrian-ruled partition of Poland, around Wysoka). They settled into the Fall River and Rhode Island mill-town corridor, the great magnet for Polish immigration to New England, between roughly 1890 and 1920.
The Two Migrations
How Much to Trust
Ancestry trees are a mix of careful documentation and hopeful copy-paste. Here is an honest sorting of the claims in yours, strongest first.
The Podlaskie lines are tightly clustered, internally consistent, and tied to specific parish villages with the kind of detail (exact dates, the herbu Nowina heraldic marks) that comes from real parish registers. Michał Makowski's 1894 birth in Makowskie and long life to 2003 is easy to confirm against immigration and census records.
The Jasper / Copiah / Covington County Peek, Whitman, Francis, and Smith families sit in well-trodden census territory and are very likely accurate back to the early 1800s.
Capt. George Peek in Pittsylvania County fits the real geography of the 14th Virginia Regiment, which genuinely recruited there. The line back to him is plausible; treat the exact military rank as "likely but verify against a pension or DAR record" rather than proven.
The "Giovanni Tomaso Longino of Ravenna" story is widely repeated and, unusually, backed by some real Surry County, NC records and a DAR patriot listing for John Thomas Longino. The Italian-noble origin itself rests on family tradition — enjoy it as a strong family legend, not a documented fact.
Anything in the 1600s–1720s with confident day-and-month birth dates (and any single ancestor pushed back to a glamorous origin) is where Ancestry trees are least reliable. The further back a clean date sits, the more it deserves a raised eyebrow.