Galicia had emerged as an Austrian crown land after the partition of Poland (1772-1795).

• In the first partition of Poland (1772), Austria received the southern half of Lesser Poland, the pledged territory of Spiš, and Galicia, and combined these territories to form the crown land of Galicia.
• In the third partition of Poland in 1795, large areas in central Poland also became part of the Habsburg crown land under the name of Western Galicia.

Under Joseph II, thousands of families, mainly from the Palatinate/Saar region, immigrated to Galicia in 1781- 1786. However, the Austrian government had at its disposal only the Starostei estates taken over from the Polish kings, the lands of the Jesuit order dissolved in 1773, and the monasteries confiscated by Joseph II since 1782.

In order to accommodate all the colonists, the Austrian administration managed to get Polish large landowners to settle German colonists on their estates as well, under similar conditions (so-called private colonization).

Fig. 8: Galicia 1772 - 1918
Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Kingdom_of_Galicia.png
User:Kpalion [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]

Colonists housed with Polish large landowners in the Zamość region included, for example, Alwinger, Dirk, Haupt, Löb, Paul, Pitsch, Söhn, Speicher, Ternes, Tokendorf.