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This project is a meeting place for users who share the R-Y6956 Y-DNA haplogroup, which means they are related along their paternal lines. Users in this group may want to share their family trees with each other to find overlaps and merge duplicate profiles in order to join or expand the World Family Tree and discover new relatives.
The historical population of the area was a mix of West Slavic, Polish, Baltic, German, Kashub, and Old Prussians with a sprinkling of Danes, Finns, Swedes, Balkan, and even French Huguenots. There are a lot of historical factors that brought that about. The Hanseatic League trading network (beginning in the 1300s) brought trade, culture, people and languages. The Reformation brought Protestantism. Germans settled in the area beginning in the 1200s or so. Poland had varying levels of control. Sweden invaded and ruled part of Pommern in the 1600s and the Danes were there even earlier. Prussia took over after that, morphing into modern Germany, and now the region is half in Germany and half in Poland.
Representatives of this haplogroup settled around 450 AD in Kujawy near Włocławek, from where they dispersed to the surrounding areas. Some settled in eastern Greater Poland and in the western part of the Łódź province.