Childhood

Childhood
Chopin's father, Nicolas Chopin, a Frenchman from Lorraine, had emigrated to Poland in 1787 at the age of sixteen and had served in Poland's National Guard during the Kościuszko Uprising. He subsequently tutored children of the aristocracy, including the Skarbeks, whose poorer relative, Justyna Krzyżanowska, he married. The wedding took place at the 16th-century parish church in Brochów on 2 June 1806. (Justyna's brother would become the father of American Union General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski.
Frédéric Chopin was the couple's second child and only son. He was born at Żelazowa Wola, fifty kilometres west of Warsaw, in what was then the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw. The parish record of the baptism (discovered in 1892) gives 22 February 1810 as his date of birth, but the true date is widely believed to be 1 March, the date which the composer and his close family usually gave.He was baptized on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1810, in the same church in Brochów where his parents had married. The parish register cites his given names in the Latin form Fridericus Franciscus; in Polish he was called Fryderyk Franciszek.