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This archive already has an Osvaldo De Franceschi, aged 26, a carpenter at Mione in 1810. Nineteen in 1806 and twenty-six in 1810 are three years apart and cannot both be right, so they are either the same man with a loosely-given age or two men of one name. What is certain either way is the father: an older Osvaldo, dead before October 1806. The archive had no generation above its two Osvaldos until now.

This extract names Pietro's own father. «Pietro quondam Matteo» — Matteo De Franceschi of Mione, dead before February 1809, and the father of a man whose daughter was born in 1768. A man whose granddaughter was born in 1768 belongs to a generation born around 1700 to 1720 — which is within living memory of the Zuane De Franceschi who left this valley for Istria in 1679.

She was forty when these papers were drawn. Her intended was fifty.

And the name she married into is the other name in the 1679 list. That list of village headmen recorded at Mione: «Zuane De Franceschi con un suo fiolo, Zuane d'Erman: questi tre nell'Istria, luogo imperiale» — a De Franceschi, his son, and an Erman, all three working in Istria.

A hundred and thirty years later the two families are still marrying each other in the same village — and the groom's own mother was Maddalena née de Franceschi, so 1809 is at least the second crossing between them.

This archive already holds Mattia Defranceschi, parish priest of Gologorica in Istria, named in the diocesan visitation of 1788. Two priests of one surname, three years apart: one in the Carnian valley this family came from, one in the Istrian parish it went to.

No link is claimed between them. What is worth saying is that this is not an isolated oddity — the Istrian encyclopedia entry already transcribed on this page lists a string of De Franceschi clerics who kept working in Carnia long after the crossing: «Filippo, son of Gian Battista, parish priest at Previs; Gian Matteo, son of Gian Pietro, parish priest at Moncalvo, canon of the cathedral of Pedena». A De Franceschi priest at Mione in 1785 is exactly what that list predicts.

So the allegati carry the parish registers forward into the state archive. The 1785 entry survives here whatever became of the book it was copied from — and it survives in a volume catalogued under 1811.

A man standing godfather in January 1789 is an adult. An adult in 1789 who is dead by 1806 is exactly the shape of that father. The identification is inferred, not documented — no document joins the two — but it is the only Osvaldo of this surname the village is known to have had in that generation, and he is here with the honorific «D.», Dominus, which the priest did not give to everybody on the page.

It now has it repeatedly from these files: Giorgi «de Nave» Mionensis (1785), Corva «de Nave» (1785 and 1801), this De Franceschi «de Nave» (1789), «Dominus Joannes Micoli-Toscano de Nave Mionensis» (1794) — and, in the Lenzone file, Fiorenzi «de Nave» Luincis (1778).

That last one matters, because it means Nave is not simply a corner of Mione. The clerks attach it to Mione and to Luincis alike, which makes it a small locality in the Ovaro cluster shared between the two — not a sub-division of either. This archive first wrote «a hamlet of Mione» and has corrected it.

What survives the correction is the important part: the same tiny place holds a De Franceschi household and the Micoli Toscano, whose palace archive keeps the 1679 Gorto contracts naming the Erman who travelled to Istria with Zuane De Franceschi. Not merely the same village — the same handful of houses.

That is the lesson. The allegati are not an index of who married; they are a seam of certified extracts copied out of parish registers that no longer have to survive, and the surname appears in them as godparent, as celebrant, as neighbour. Reading them only for the couple would have missed both.

The lesson for the rest of this valley is plain: read the allegati for the surname wherever it falls, not for the couple on the docket.

Two documents closed it. A witness to a Mione notarial act of 1813 signs himself, in his own hand and a plain lower-case g, «pietro galante fui presente testimonio» — so Galante is a real surname in this village. And the marriage register itself, read on 14 September 2026, gives «Appolonia Galante … figlia di Antonio Galante».

Four hands for Galante, two for Salante, and the register among the four. This archive has changed the name throughout and logged the correction.

That is the Micoli Toscano, whose palace at Mione holds the 1679 Gorto contracts this archive has been trying to reach for months — the ones that name the Erman who travelled to Istria with Zuane De Franceschi. They were not merely in the same village as this family. They were in the same hamlet.

He is nobody's relation here. He is the road itself, certified: a Carnian who died in Istria, and a home parish that knew.

The same file carries another kind of death — Giovanni di Domenico de Stefano, forty, drowned in the Degano on 5 May 1779 «in conductione lignorum», working the timber rafts, his body found the next day. The trade that built this valley, and the river that took him.

Sveti Lovreč is inland Istria, twenty kilometres from Poreč — the same country as Svetvinčenat, where this archive found its 1628 baptism.

His surname is Erman. His birth year is 1752 — the act says fifty-six in February 1809, and reads his birth act as 28 April 1752; the last digit of the year had been cropped out of the zoom used on the extract, and was guessed.

And «cramaro» was never a surname. The priest wrote «figlio di Pietro cramaro del villaggio di Mione» — Pietro the cramar, the Carnian pedlar who walked the passes into Austria and down into Istria. This page had called the Cramaro name «the road this family walked» and graded it as a surname. It was the road. It was just never a name.

Orsola was forty years old, the daughter of a household that this archive can now follow back to her grandfather Matteo, and she could not sign her own marriage. Her husband signed for her.

It is the same hand-to-mouth literacy the Muina papers showed the year before, where Maria Corva and Galante could not write and their children could. Here the woman is on the wrong side of that line, and her husband on the right one.

Osvaldo de Franceschi, aged 22, falegname, standing witness on 9 August 1809. This matters: the archive has flagged that «nineteen in 1806 and twenty-six in 1810 are three years apart and cannot both be right». Twenty-two in August 1809 puts him with the nineteen — born about 1787 — and leaves the «twenty-six» of 1810 as the odd reading.

Francesco de Franceschi, aged 25, witness on 21 September 1809 — born about 1784, and almost certainly the Francesco the tailor who married Margherita Gortan.

Pasqua née de Franceschi, named as the living mother of a bride: Maddalena Luchini, born 23 January 1789 at Luincis, daughter of Pietro Luchini and Pasqua nata de Franceschi. The archive had Pasqua «married into the Luchin» as a household. Here she is, dated, with a daughter of her own marrying.

Read the allegati to find the marriage. Read the register to believe it.

He stood godfather in January 1789 (the 1812 allegati). He consented in writing to his daughter's marriage on 7 September 1805. And by August 1806 he is «il fu Osvaldo» — dead.

Alive in September 1805, dead by August 1806. That is a twelve-month window, from two documents, for a man who had no date at all this morning.

Three years later her kinswoman Orsola, aged forty, could not sign her own marriage and her husband signed for her. Giacoma, at eighteen, could.

Two De Franceschi women, one village, three years apart, on opposite sides of the line. This archive will not pretend to know why, but it is the kind of thing that is only visible because both acts were read rather than indexed.

The De Franceschi daughters of this valley married trade as often as land, and trade is what took this family out of the mountains.

The Micoli Toscano palace at Mione holds the 1679 Gorto contracts — the ones naming the Erman who went to Istria with Zuane De Franceschi. In 1806 that same family is registering this family's marriages, and in 1794 one of them stood godfather at Nave. They are not a lead to chase; they are the neighbours.

This archive has been tracing De Franceschi daughters marrying out — into the Erman, the di Zuato, the Luchin. Here is a couple where both sides are the surname, in the same village, and the registrar thought it worth the word pure to make clear he had not written the name twice by mistake.

In a village of this size that is what you would expect and it is still worth recording: by 1803 there were enough De Franceschi households at Mione for two of them to marry each other.

Antonio is a second one. Two tailors of this surname in one village in the same decade, and neither is the other: Francesco's wife is a Gortan, Antonio's is a de Franceschi.

The household is new to this archive. It joins the four from the birth registers and the fifth from 1806.

He is here in April 1808 as a widower, standing at a neighbour's dead child. The marriage act of 1809 records that he had buried a wife, Cattarina née Carlevaris. This is the man in the year between.

The witnesses declare her born at Mione «da Francesco de Franceschi, e Margherita nata Gortan jugali, di professione sarto il primo, agricoltrice la seconda». Witnesses Antonio Bressan, 26, servant, and Matteo Lupieri, 22, possidente, both of Luint.

This archive already had her birth. The Mione birth index for 1806–1810 «opens on three De Franceschi entries, the first three lines of the whole book: Anna-Maria, Anna-Cecilia and Gio: Batta». Here is the other end of the shortest of those three lives — born 14 January 1810, dead on 25 January 1810 — eleven days. This archive first read the act as 28 January and, from its «un mese circa», put her birth in December 1809. Both were wrong: the act is dated «li 25 Venticinque Gennajo», figures and words agreeing, and the birth register has her born on the 14th.

It also confirms, from a second act, that Francesco the tailor's wife was Margherita Gortan — and Francesco is one of the two brothers of the act three weeks earlier.

Francesc'Antonio was born about 1803 — three years before the first Napoleonic register at Mione. He exists nowhere else. Every death act in these nine volumes is a person reaching back before the series, and that is where the generation of Matteo and the elder Osvaldo will be found, if they are found at all.

They are brothers. One sentence in a stranger's death act says so, and both men signed underneath it.

The village had fewer De Franceschi families than the register index suggested. It had more De Franceschi brothers.

The 1806 birth act has «Osvaldo de Franceschi, son of the late Osvaldo», about nineteen. The 1806 marriage act has Giacoma de Franceschi, «q.m Osualdo», daughter of the late Osvaldo and Cattarina née Gobbi. And the elder Osvaldo consented to that marriage in writing on 7 September 1805 and was dead by August 1806.

If the Osvaldo of 1806 is the Osvaldo of 1809 — and the ages agree — then Francesco, Osvaldo Antonio and Giacoma are three children of the elder Osvaldo and Cattarina née Gobbi. The four households of the birth registers collapse toward one family with a dead father.

This is inference, and it is labelled as such. No document says the three are siblings of each other. What the documents say is that two of them are brothers, that two of them had a dead father called Osvaldo, and that all of it happens in one small village inside three years.

Three of the four agree on a birth around 1786–87. The fourth does not, and this page has already noted that «nineteen in 1806 and twenty-six in 1810 cannot both be right».

They still cannot. But it is now three against one, and the odd reading is the 1810 one. Declared ages in these acts are what a neighbour said on a doorstep, not what a register held — and this is a clean demonstration of how far they can drift.

A tailor and a carpenter, twenty-four and twenty-two, in a mountain village in 1809, both signing. Their kinswoman Orsola, forty years old, could not sign her own marriage six weeks later and her husband signed for her.

The literacy in this family is not a line drawn by generation. It is drawn by sex, and this archive should stop being surprised by it.

Anna's age puts her birth at about 1771, and the act says she was born at Mione. That is thirty-five years before the earliest surviving civil register, and it is the reason the death books were opened at all: a death act states an age, and an age back-dates a birth.

Her baptism can only be in the Pieve di Gorto books at Luincis. She is now the fourth named person this archive is waiting on that one collection for.

The first is that she was born a de Franceschi. That is not a strange thing to propose here: the 1808 death act says in as many words that Antonio de Franceschi's wife was «Giovanna, pure de Franceschi» — also a de Franceschi — and the registrar wrote pure precisely so nobody would read it as a slip of the pen. Two De Franceschi couples in seven years, in a village of a few dozen houses, is what endogamy looks like.

The second is that Matteo Lupieri simply entered a married woman under her husband's surname. He does not do it elsewhere in this volume — the other women are given as «nata» somebody — which argues against it, but a single volume is thin evidence about a clerk's habits.

What is not in doubt is Paolo.

Francesco the tailor, husband of Margherita Gortan · Osvaldo Antonio the carpenter, husband of Cattarina Brencis — and the 1809 death register says those two are brothers · Antonio the tailor, husband of Giovanna «pure de Franceschi» · Gio: Pietro Erman de Franceschi, the fifty-five-year-old widower of 1808 who remarries Orsola in 1809 · and now Paolo, whose wife dies in his house in November 1815.

Paolo appears nowhere in the 1806–1812 births, marriages or deaths already read. He is a new name, and at a guess an older man — his wife was forty-four.

Reading a Mione register act by act at a magnification where the hand is legible takes three or four screen-fulls per page, and the volumes run eleven to fifteen pages. The 1813 volume took seventeen passes to establish a negative.

The Tavola Alfabetica at the back of each volume from 1813 answers the same question in three. The 1815 table gave the surname, the village, the day, the month, the act number and the folio — enough to open the right leaf first time.

1812 and earlier have no table. Those still have to be read the slow way, and 1812 is half-read.

Seventeen deaths in the comune that year, across Mione, Muina, Luint, Luincis, Ovasta, Agrons, Liariis and Entrampo. The surnames are Bulfon, Della Pietra, Senni, Pol, Rossi, Raffael, Tolson, Steffani, Nino, Fortin, Duminj, Urban, Vernier and one «infante maschio non battezzato» at Agrons.

No De Franceschi, in any role — not as the dead, not as a parent, not as a witness. One near miss that cost two screenfuls: the witness at act 14 is an «Osvald'Antonio», which is exactly our carpenter's name, and he turned out to be a Tolson.

Forty-two in August 1812 means born about 1770. Anna was forty-four in November 1815, so born about 1771. Husband and wife born within a year of each other, both at Mione, both — on the face of the register — carrying the same surname.

He is the fifth Mione household and he is no longer only a doorway.

April 1808 — witness at a child's death, «d'anni cinquantacinque in circa», agricoltore · 21 August 1808 — brings a newborn to the office, fifty-eight, agricoltore · 13 February 1809 — bridegroom, fifty-six, agricoltore, widower of Cattarina Carlevaris, marrying Orsola de Franceschi; born 28 April 1752 · 9 July 1809 — witness at a Muina birth, fifty-four circa, and already «possidente» · August 1812 — witness here, fifty-nine, «Possidente»

The trade changes, and the birth registers date the change much more tightly than the death register could. Through 1808 and into February 1809 he works the land. By 9 July 1809 — five months after the wedding — the register calls him a landowner, and he is one still in 1812.

A man of fifty-six who marries a woman of forty and is styled possidente within half a year has, on the ordinary reading, married property. Ordinary reading, not proof: a man can buy land in five months, and the word may simply be a different clerk's habit.

The one thing that does not fit is arithmetic. Born 28 April 1752, he was sixty on 18 August 1812, and the act says fifty-nine. A year's slack in a register age is unremarkable — the earlier acts are just as loose — but it is recorded here rather than quietly rounded.

In 1809 and again in 1812, a man signs himself «Erman de' Franceschi» — byname first, surname second, in his own hand, twice, four years apart. That is not a clerk's compound. It is what the man called himself.

So Erman at Mione is a branch-name inside the surname, not a separate surname — which changes how the 1679 line should be read, and it means every «Erman» entry in the Mione indexes is a candidate for this family rather than a neighbour's.

The other signatures in the volume are Colledan, Fabris, Nino, Steffani, Pol, Gortan, Coluss, Sudretto and Ottaviani. As with 1814, a De Franceschi buried inside the body of another act as a parent could have escaped this pass. The 1813 and 1815 negatives, which have tables behind them, are stronger.

October 1806 — about nineteen · 14 January 1809 — twenty-two · August 1809 — twenty-two · 1810 — twenty-six · 10 September and 26 November 1814 — twenty-seven

Twenty-seven in late 1814 means born 1786 or 1787, which is what the 1806 and both 1809 readings say. The 1810 act, which would put him at 1784, is now four documents against one and can be set aside as a clerk's estimate.

That is worth more than it looks. An ancestor with a birth year pinned to a two-year window is a person a parish book can be searched for; an ancestor with a five-year window is not.

In January 1809 Osvaldo Antonio de Franceschi is «falegname» — a carpenter — and «di Mione». In September and November 1814 Osvaldo de Franceschi is «Servitore» — a servant — and a neighbour of two dead people at Muina.

For one man: the ages line up exactly (22 in January 1809 → 27 in autumn 1814); Mione and Muina are seven hundred and eighty-four metres apart across the Degano, which is not a migration, it is a walk; and the surname is not common enough in this comune for two men of the same forename to be casually assumed.

For two men: the trade is different and the place is different, and «vicini del Defunto» reads as a man who lives at Muina, not one who happened to be there. Muina is also where this archive's other Carnian strand sits — so a second Osvaldo there is not an idle possibility, it is the possibility that would matter most.

Unresolved. The 1814 acts are recorded here under both readings, and the Mione household table is not being rewritten on the strength of them.

To my eye they are the same hand — the same oversized open O, the same -ald- ligature, the same double-looped capital F, the same absence of slant. The 1809 signature adds «Ant.o» and capitalises «De»; the 1814 one does neither.

I am not a document examiner and this is not a finding. It is a reason to lean one way, offered with the image references so that anyone who knows more than I do can look at the same two lines and disagree. What it is not is permission to merge the two men in the tables.

1813 was read act by act and checked against the volume's own alphabetical table. 1814 has no table. It was swept page by page at a magnification that shows signature blocks clearly but not every name inside every act, and read closely only where the surname surfaced.

So the honest statement is: the surname appears on images 8 and 9 of the 1814 volume, and a page-level sweep found it nowhere else. If a De Franceschi is buried inside the body of one of the other acts as a parent, this pass could have missed them.

Five months before she died, the banns name her «Anna nata Brunis». She married into the surname. The second reading was right and I should say so plainly.

The reasoning that pointed the other way was not wrong, only outweighed: the 1808 act really does go out of its way to write pure, and that couple really were both De Franceschi. One endogamous marriage at Mione, not two.

On the surname itself: the hand gives Brunis. Brencis — a family already documented in this village, and the surname of Osvaldo the carpenter's wife — cannot be excluded at this resolution, and the marriage allegati would settle it.

The trade keeps returning. Francesco is a tailor (1806–1810). Antonio is a tailor (1808). The young man whose body Paolo and Gio: Pietro identify in 1812 is a tailor. And now Felice Santo. In a comune whose other men are agricoltori, falegnami and possidenti, the De Franceschi of Mione are needleworkers, repeatedly — and the tailor is the cramar trade this archive has argued walked over the mountains into Istria.

His mother dies five months after these banns, aged forty-four.

The Mione Matrimoni volume for 1815 runs to five images and does not contain this marriage. The act should be in Ovaro's 1815 marriage register — a body this archive has never read, although it has read all twenty-six volumes of Ovaro's allegati.

That also means the allegati for this marriage are Ovaro's, and allegati carry baptismal extracts. Felice Santo's extract would come out of the Pieve di Gorto books and would give Paolo and Anna's own generation a date.

They are worth more per page than the marriage registers, because a banns notice does in four lines what a marriage act does in two pages: it names both parties, their trades, their villages, and the names of all four parents, with «del fu» marking which of them were already dead.

This was found by mistake, while looking for the birth registers — which are still not located.

Batta de' Franceschi and Maria née Brenis put a married couple into that gap. Their daughter Ottavia was old enough to bear a son in about 1780, so Ottavia was born around 1750–1760, and her parents married before that — born, most likely, in the 1720s or 1730s.

They are dead by August 1812 and they appear in no other act of the Mione civil registers: not as parents in the births, not in the marriages, not in the deaths 1806–1815, all of which have now been read. The only reason this archive has them at all is that a Napoleonic clerk had to say whose daughter the groom's mother was.

They are the deepest named De Franceschi couple this project holds from Carnia outside the 1679 list.

The list already holds Giacoma marrying a merchant of Chialina in 1806, the Muina bride of 1808, and Orsola marrying Erman de Franceschi in 1809. Ottavia is a generation older than all three and comes from the other direction: not from a marriage act, but from a grandchild's.

That is the method, stated: where a daughter's own marriage is missing, her children's banns will name her — with her maiden surname and her father's.

Here the same surname stands again, three years earlier and in the same register series, as «Maria nata Brenis». Two women of that name marry De Franceschi men a generation apart.

And the family is already in these books under a third spelling: the entire 1806 death register of Mione consists of one act, for a Brenci child. Osvaldo the carpenter's wife is Cattarina Brencis; the second witness at the 1808 child's death is Agostino Brencis.

Brenci · Brencis · Brenis · Brunis — and the 1808 birth register adds Prencis, with an unmistakable capital P.

I first wrote this as «one Mione family, four spellings». That is firmer than the evidence allows, and it is loosened here rather than left standing: B and P are not letters this hand confuses, so Prencis/Brencis — the carpenter's wife — and Brenis/Brunis — Ottavia's mother and Paolo's wife — are two clusters that may join, not one settled name.

The correction to Anna does not depend on it: what that turned on was «nata» followed by a surname of any spelling.

That act would give Giambattista Zanelli's age again, name all four parents again, and — if it follows the pattern of the 1809 marriage — carry allegati: baptismal extracts copied out of the Pieve di Gorto books, which is the only place Batta and Maria can be found alive.

This archive already held that second Osvaldo and I did not put him in the frame. He is Osvaldo de Franceschi of Muina, born 14 March 1788, son of Antonio q.m Leonardo and Maria née Corva, who married Appolonia Galante on 28 January 1808 and whose daughter Anna Maria was born at Muina in December 1809.

Three things now point at him rather than at the carpenter:

The village. The 1814 witnesses are «vicini del Defunto» — neighbours — at Muina. The Muina Osvaldo lives at Muina. The carpenter is «di Mione» in every act that names him.

The trade. Agricoltore to servitore is a small step; falegname to servitore is not.

And the arithmetic, which is the part that convinced me. Born 14 March 1788, he was nineteen years and ten months on 17 January 1808 and the banns call him twenty. He was twenty-six and a half on 10 September 1814 and twenty-six and eight months on 26 November, and both acts call him twenty-seven. The same rounding, six years apart, producing the recorded figure exactly both times.

The lean was in the wrong direction, and I should retire the observation rather than defend it. If the 1814 man is the Muina Osvaldo, then what I was looking at is two men who learned to write in the same valley from the same kind of teacher — which is exactly what period handwriting looks like, and exactly the trap I flagged and walked into anyway.

The hedge did its job. The observation did not.

This archive published Salante, corrected it to Galante on the strength of four hands against two, and renamed sixteen occurrences. The count is now six against two, from a document that was not part of the original argument.

The two dissenters remain what they were: the parish priest writing the baptismal extract, and the clerk who docketed the file. Both were copying from the baptismal book, so Salante is what stands in the Pieve di Gorto register — which is worth knowing when that book is finally read.

It states the wedding before it happens. «Il matrimonio sarà celebrato li vent'otto Gennajo corrente nel Villaggio di Muina» — eleven days ahead, with the village named. Where a marriage act is missing or filed in another comune, the banns still say when and where to look.

And it gives an age on a fixed day. Ages in these registers drift; an age attached to a stated Sunday, checked against a baptismal date the allegati already supply, turns the drift into a measurable habit — which is what let this page tell two Osvaldos apart.

Appolonia is given as «d'anni venticinque e mezzo» — twenty-five and a half, an oddly exact figure for a clerk. Born 3 May 1782, she was twenty-five years and eight months. He was rounding down for her and up for the groom, on the same line.

It gave this archive a son for Paolo, a maiden name for Anna that overturned a published reading, a married-out daughter nobody had, her parents — a couple born in the 1720s or 1730s who appear in no other act — and an age on a stated Sunday that told two Osvaldos apart.

That is five things the Mione births, marriages and deaths, all read, could not supply.

But it is a sweep, not a transcription. A De Franceschi buried mid-sentence as a grandparent, in a faint hand, could have escaped it. The 1813 negative is the strongest of the five because the volume's own alphabetical table confirms it independently; the other four rest on the sweep alone.

Recorded that way rather than as nine clean volumes.

A banns notice is not a record of a marriage. It is a notice inviting the world to object, posted where the government's orders are posted, and read aloud twice on successive Sundays precisely so that anyone with an impediment has time to say so. Most of them are followed by a wedding. Some are not, and the register was designed with that in mind.

So the honest reading of the August 1812 notices is: a marriage was promised, announced twice, and does not appear in the register of the comune it belonged to, that year or in the two years after. Whether it was stopped, delayed beyond this archive's reach, or celebrated somewhere I have not looked, this page does not know.

Batta de Franceschi and Maria née Brenis stand. So does Ottavia's marriage to Francesco Zanelli, who is alive in 1812 and named as such. What is in doubt is only whether their son married Lucia Roder that autumn.

Three of the volume's six acts were read closely; three were swept at page level only, at a magnification that shows surnames in signature blocks and marginal notes but not every name inside a paragraph.

The 1813 and 1814 checks are stronger, because both volumes carry their own alphabetical tables listing every marriage of the year by surname — but the 1814 table's left column is partly lost in the binding shadow, and I read it in a crop that clipped the first letters of two rows.

So: probably not married at Mione in 1812–14, and not certainly. The next thing to read is the three untranscribed acts.

Margherita needs no argument. She stands in front of the registrar and says the child is her brother's. «Suo fratello Osvaldo de' Franceschi, di professione Fallegname» — the trade matches the carpenter exactly, the village matches, and the wife's name matches.

Twenty-two in July 1808 means born about 1786 — between Francesco (about 1784–85) and Osvaldo (about 1786–87), which is where a sister belongs. The group is now Francesco, Osvaldo Antonio, Margherita documented, and Giacoma still inferred.

She is also the earliest-born child in the Mione household table with an hour attached to her, and she was registered the same day she was born, which is unusual in this register: most acts come a day or two late.

Six months later her brothers Francesco and Osvaldo both sign their own names at the foot of a death act. Three years before, their kinswoman Giacoma signed hers — «Giacoma de Franceschi q.m Osualdo affermo m.p.», manu propria, at eighteen. And in February 1809 Orsola, aged forty, could not sign her marriage and her husband signed for her.

So the line is not simply drawn by sex after all: Giacoma could write and Margherita could not, and they are the same generation in the same village. This archive has said twice that literacy here is «drawn by sex, not by generation». On four data points that is too neat, and the honest statement is that it varied household by household.

Yesterday, on the strength of Brenci (1806), Brencis (1808 and 1810), Brenis (1812) and Brunis (1815), I wrote that these were «one Mione family, four spellings in ten years of the same clerks' handwriting».

With a clear P in front of one of them, that is firmer than the evidence allows. B and P are not letters this hand confuses. It may still be one family — Friulian surnames drift hard — but Prencis/Brencis (the carpenter's wife) and Brenis/Brunis (Ottavia's mother, and Paolo's wife) should be treated as two clusters that may join, not as one settled name. The Anna correction does not depend on it: what that turned on was «nata» plus a surname of any spelling.

The other series run to 1815: marriages, marriage allegati, banns and deaths all do. Only the births stop, and they stop in 1810.

So Giovanni Battista, born 15 October 1810, is the last De Franceschi birth the civil registers of this comune can give this archive. Any child born to Francesco and Margherita Gortan, to Osvaldo and Cattarina, or to Paolo and Anna between 1811 and 1815 is invisible here — and can only be in the Pieve di Gorto.

What can be said: a man of fifty-six does not carry a stranger's newborn to the town hall. And Gio: Pietro Erman de Franceschi is the son of a dead Pietro Erman — so a living Pietro Ermanni at Mione in 1808, married and with a first child, is most naturally his own son, named for his grandfather. The alternative is a brother.

Inferred, and labelled so. What is documented is the household itself: Pietro Ermanni × Orsola née Crosilla, agricoltori of Mione, and their son Gio: Batta Benedetto, born 20 August 1808 at three in the afternoon.

One more detail worth keeping: the father is entered as plain «Ermanni» while the older man signs «Erman De Franceschi». The compound name is the elder's; the son is written short.

Set Gio: Pietro's recorded ages beside his documented birth of 28 April 1752 and the method looks weaker:

April 1808 — «cinquantacinque in circa», when he was 55 turning 56 · 21 August 1808 — fifty-eight, when he was 56 · 13 February 1809 — fifty-six, when he was 56 · 9 July 1809 — «cinquantaquattro circa», when he was 57 · August 1812 — fifty-nine, when he was 60

A spread of fifty-four to fifty-nine for a man who was fifty-six to sixty — in the same commune, in the same registers, sometimes months apart. Four months after being called fifty-five he is called fifty-eight; eleven months after that, fifty-four.

The Osvaldo identification does not fall — it rested on the village and the trade as much as the age, and those still point one way. But the age leg of it is now worth less than I said, and saying so is cheaper than being caught by it later.

The Lupieri run through every act of this comune: Valentino Lupieri is the registrar and a witness by turns, Matteo Lupieri succeeds him, another Lupieri is thirty and attinato. This one is a doctor, and he is at Luint — the village whose men also show up at Mione weddings as tailors.

It is a small correction to the picture of an isolated alpine commune. There was a physician a mile up the valley in 1808, and he could write.

This Matteo is alive in March 1809, works as a shoemaker, has a daughter of eighteen and a newborn. He was born somewhere around 1765–75.

They are not the same man, and this archive will not weld them. What it does show is the thing the burial ground at Gorto already suggested: the names come round again. An elder Matteo, a grandson or nephew given his name, two generations apart in one village of a few dozen houses.

And it is a fifth trade for the surname here — after the tailors, the carpenter, the farmers and the landowner, a calzolajo.

Unlettered. It is a harsher word and it is the clerk's, not this archive's, and it is quoted rather than paraphrased for that reason.

She was about eighteen, and she had walked her newborn sister to the town hall at an hour of the morning when the child was a few hours old. Giacoma de Franceschi signed her own marriage at eighteen in 1806. Maria could not sign a birth act at eighteen in 1809, in the same village. That is the second pair this week that breaks the neat rule, and the rule should stay broken.

A shoemaker's child is witnessed by another shoemaker. The 1806 marriage of Giacoma was witnessed by four tailors. The 1808 birth of Cattarina was witnessed by a Micoli-Toscano of the palace family and a Lupieri.

The witness lists are a trade directory. They are also the part of these acts this archive read past for months while collecting parents, and they are where the village actually shows itself.

Those were the first three lines, not the whole of it. Two more are now read straight off the registers: Cattarina, 10 July 1808, and Giovanna-Maddalena, 2 March 1809. The true figure for De Franceschi births at Mione in those five years is at least five, and the birth index itself has not yet been located on Antenati — the three-page tables at arks an_ua667540 and an_ua667566 turn out to be the marriage and death indexes for the same span.

In October 1810 the same man signs his own son's birth «de franceski osualdo». Lower-case throughout. Surname first. Franceschi spelled franceski. His own forename spelled osualdo.

Two days ago I laid two signatures side by side and said they looked like one hand. I hedged it — «I am not a document examiner and this is not a finding» — and then withdrew it a day later when the 1808 banns pointed at a different man.

Here is the proof that the withdrawal was right, and it comes from the man himself. One person, twenty-one months, two hands so different that if I had found them in separate parishes I would have called them separate people. Signature comparison at this magnification, in this valley, in this century, is worth nothing, and this page will not do it again.

Brenci — the single act of the 1806 death register · Prencis — the 1808 birth of her daughter Cattarina, a clear P · Crencis — this act, October 1810, and the capital is neither of the first two · Brencis — what this archive recorded from the 1810 act before I read it myself · Brenis — Ottavia's mother in the 1812 banns · Brunis — Paolo's wife Anna in the 1815 banns

I have tried three times to decide what this surname is, and each attempt has been overtaken by the next act. The honest position is that the clerks of Mione could not spell it either, and that B, P and C are not distinguishable in this hand at the head of this word.

So the name is recorded here as «Brenci / Prencis / Crencis» with the act each spelling comes from, and no preferred form. The two women — the carpenter's wife and Paolo's — may or may not be of one family; the spelling cannot decide it, and neither can I.

This is that act, read directly rather than at second hand: «de Franceschi Osvaldo, d'anni ventisei». The outlier is real and it is his own son's birth, reported by him in person.

Which, set beside Gio: Pietro Erman being recorded 55, 58, 56, 54 and 59 across five acts for an actual 56 to 60, says the plain thing: ages in these registers are worth about three years either way, even when the man himself is standing at the desk.

Roter the shoemaker is the same man who witnessed Matteo the shoemaker's child in March 1809, aged twenty-four then and twenty-four now. A shoemaker stands for a shoemaker, a tailor for a tailor. These witness lists are the village's trade directory, and they are the part of a birth act this archive spent months reading past.

And with Gio: Batta, 15 October 1810, the civil births stop. Any child born to these households between 1811 and 1815 is in the Pieve di Gorto or nowhere.

This archive has never held a De Franceschi weaver. It has held tailors — Francesco, Antonio, and the cramar argument built on them — and a carpenter, farmers, a landowner, a shoemaker. The road into Istria has been argued from sartori, on the reasoning that the needle trades were the ones that travelled.

«Felice Santo de Franceschi, di professione tessitore.» A weaver of this surname, in this village, a hundred and thirty-six years after three men of it walked to Istria as weavers. It proves no descent and it is not offered as one. What it does is put the 1679 trade back in the family's own hands, in a register, rather than in an argument.

They are adjacent crafts — the loom and the needle, cloth made and cloth cut — and in a village of a few dozen houses a man may well have done both. But the honest reading is the uncomfortable one: these clerks used cloth-trade words loosely, and this archive has leaned on «sartore» as though it were precise.

That cuts both ways and should be said plainly: it weakens the tailor argument and it weakens the weaver finding. What survives is that the family worked cloth, which is what the 1679 list says about it too.

This page has been through this surname three times and given up on it twice: Brenci (1806), Prencis (1808), Crencis (1810), Brenis (1812), Brunis (1815 banns) — and I wrote that the carpenter's wife and Paolo's wife were «two clusters that may join, not one settled name».

Here they join. Anna, read at Mione as Brunis, is written Brencis at Ovaro by a different clerk in a different comune — and Brencis is the form this archive already had for Cattarina, the carpenter's wife. It is one surname, and the six spellings are six clerks.

The caution was right and the conclusion it reached was too weak. A second comune was what it needed.

Opened. The witnesses are all of Liariis and all named with their fathers — del fu Giacomo Crisilla, del fu Osvaldo de Canova, del fu Nicolò Crisilla. And Daniele del fu Osvaldo de Canova, forty-nine, stands beside a bride who is «figlia del fu Osvaldo Antonio» de Canova — while the act insists all four witnesses are «non parenti, né affini». Either there are two dead Osvaldo de Canova at Liariis, or the formula is boilerplate. This archive does not know which, and the marriage allegati for Ovaro 1815 would say.

It already had a better answer, documented, on this same page. His marriage act of 1809 gives him as «son of the late Pietro Erman and Maddalena née de Franceschi». The compound is his two parents: an Erman father and a De Franceschi mother, carried together — which is ordinary Carnian practice and needs no by-name at all.

So the 1810 signature is not a discovery. It is the fourth and fifth confirmation of something the 1809 act had already settled, and its value is that he writes it himself rather than having it written for him. The 1679 list naming «De Franceschi … Erman» side by side still names two families; a generation later they married.

Logged as a correction. Reading a volume end to end is no protection against forgetting what the archive already holds.

A tonsured son is not a peasant family's ordinary choice. It costs Latin, it costs a patron, and it takes a working man out of the fields. This is the first sign in the Mione records of a household with something behind it.

And his mother is «Giovanna nata de' Franceschi», married to Antonio de' Franceschi. Two De Franceschi lines at Mione, marrying each other — which is what a surname does when it has been in one village long enough to be several families.

The 1806 household list already ran to fifteen De Franceschi households. This is the other side of that number: the name was not a family at Mione, it was a population — which is exactly why a single De Franceschi in an Istrian register proves nothing on its own, and why this archive keeps refusing to bridge Mione and Gologorica on a surname.

Eight death volumes remain, and from 1813 each ends with a «Tavola Alfabetica» that makes the search a page rather than a volume. The negative is recorded because a negative in a register that has been read properly is worth keeping.

Gio: Batta De' Franceschi — dead before 1789, since Osvaldo is already «quondam Gio: Batta» when Giacoma is baptised. Osvaldo De' Franceschi — his son, married to a Cattarina, dead before 1806. Giacoma — born 25 May 1789, married Ignazio di Prato at Mione in 1806.

Every word of it is copied out of the Pieve di Gorto's own baptismal register by Don Gio: Batta Dario, the priest who held the book — the same man who, nine years later, copied out Felice Santo's. That is now two pages of a book nobody has been able to open, delivered by the Napoleonic bureaucracy.

He cannot be Giacoma's father. Giacoma was born in 1789, when he was five, and her father was dead by 1806, when he was twenty-two and had not yet married.

So Mione held two men called Osvaldo De' Franceschi, both married to a Cattarina, one dead before 1806 and one alive after 1810. This archive has already published the wrong thing once this week by letting a name do the work of a document, and been caught merging two men called Ivan before that. They are recorded as two, and no link between them is asserted — though a grandson named for a grandfather is the commonest thing in these valleys, and it would be the first place to look.

Twelve Mione volumes remain, and seven at Ovaro. On this evidence the series is not a supplement to the marriage registers. It is the best thing in the archive, because it is the only place where the lost parish book speaks.

She is now documented: born 25 May 1789, daughter of Osvaldo and Cattarina, married to Ignazio di Prato of Chialina in 1806. A tree entry became a record. That is the whole purpose of this archive stated in one line.

Here is the road running the other way, on paper, in 1807. A civil officer at Capodistria writing to a civil officer at Ovaro; banns read out in two provinces of the same Napoleonic kingdom for one wedding; a widowed mother in Istria notarising her consent so that her son can marry into Carnia. The two ends of this family's story are two offices corresponding.

And the groom is a sarto. This page has now recorded a tailor, a weaver, a carpenter, a shoemaker and a landowner of the surname; the trade that keeps recurring on this road is cloth.

One of them gave this archive Pietro De Franceschi, a whole generation out of nothing. This one shows that the same series can hold Istrian documents.

Mione has thirteen volumes of allegati and not one has been read. They are now the highest-value shelf in the archive, and the reason has changed: not only because they quote the Pieve di Gorto's lost baptismal register, but because a Mione man who had gone down to Istria and came home to marry would leave his paperwork in exactly this series.

None of that is firm enough to publish as a name. This archive has been caught once already this week reading a surname six ways and asserting it as one, and the correct response to a difficult hand is to record what is certain — the dates, the places, the trades, the offices — and leave the rest open until somebody reads it better.

What the file is worth does not depend on the names. It is the two offices, the two provinces, and the year.

So this is not hearsay at a wedding. It is the Pieve di Santa Maria di Gorto's own baptismal register, quoted verbatim in 1815 by the man who held it — and the register itself is the book this archive has been trying to get at for two days. A page of it has now come to us, inside a civil file, because the state demanded paperwork.

Pietro De Franceschi of Mione is therefore documentary, at one remove: a certified extract rather than the original leaf.

A hundred and thirteen years later, Giovanni Micoli-Toscano carried Paolo's son to the font. That proves no relationship and is not offered as one. It is a measure of the distance between the two families in a village of a few hundred people: close enough to stand godfather.

This archive has spent three attempts on whether Brenci, Prencis, Crencis, Brenis, Brunis and Brencis are one surname. Here is the form written by a parish priest, in Latin, in 1792, about a Mione family — and it is Prencis, matching the Friulian house-name «in cjasa da Prences».

It does not prove the six civil spellings are one name. It does put the P-form in the earliest and most careful hand of the six, which is the opposite of what the 1806 «Brenci» suggested. See the six spellings.

Image 6 is Lucia Santa de Canova's own baptismal extract: born 12 May 1793 at the fourteenth hour, daughter of «S.r Egregio Osvaldo Antonio De Caneva» and «D.a Lucia Colinassio», baptised at S. Vigilio by Don Antonio Colinassi. Image 8 is her consent act of 14 June 1815, made before her widowed mother Lucia Colinassi — and it calls Paolo «il vivente Paolo de Franceschi», alive in June 1815, and «possidente», where the marriage act calls him a carpenter.

Her age does not quite fit. Born 12 May 1793 she was twenty-two at the wedding; the act says twenty-three. One more for the pile of ages that are worth about three years either way.

And 1807 takes a wedding with it. The index says Osvaldo married Valentina Prencis on 6 August 1807. Without the act there are no parents, no ages, no trades, no witnesses and no signature — the five things every other act on this page has given up.

The church kept its own registers before the French came and went on keeping them afterwards. Anything the civil registers do not have, Gorto may. That includes the generation above Paolo and Osvaldo — the one that would have to meet the weavers' list of 1679 for this line to close.

The family has stood in that churchyard and photographed the stones. Nobody has yet asked for the register inside, and the errand is now written.

Ovaro's marriages run 1806, 1807, 1808 … 1815 with no hole at all. The registrars of the Val di Gorto kept 1807 the way they kept every other year; the system did not fail that year. Mione's volume existed and is not in the archive — and Mione's own index, compiled in 1810, quotes an act out of it with a date and two names.

That changes the question from «did anyone marry at Mione in 1807» — they did — to «where is the book», which is a question an archivist can be asked. It also raises a cheaper possibility: the Ovaro 1807 allegati survive (an_ua679993), and a Mione couple marrying at Ovaro would leave their papers there.

Set the six official forms against it and they stop looking like six surnames: Prences → Prencis (the vowel Italianised) → Brencis (initial P heard as B) → Brenci and Brenis (the s and the c falling out) → Brunis (the vowel gone too) → Crencis (P heard as C). Every one is a single consonant or vowel away from the Friulian.

That is an argument from the shape of the name and nothing more. It is offered as inf, not doc.

Ovaro closed it. The marriage act of 15 June 1815 writes Felice Santo's mother as «Anna nata Brencis» — a B with the -encis ending of the P-form. A second comune, a second clerk, and a spelling that sits across the line the archive had just drawn. The two clusters were one cluster and the line was mine, not the records'.

Anna is Paolo's wife, at Mione and again at Ovaro in 1815. Giovanna is the wife of a Paolo De Franceschi in the Ginut file, whose house carries the by-name. Valentina is what the marriage index calls Osvaldo's wife on 6 August 1807; Cattarina is what the birth act calls her on 15 October 1810.

Valentina and Cattarina may be one woman renamed or two women married in turn, and the archive holds both readings open under the form «Valentina, or Cattarina». Anna and Giovanna are separate people. What the six spellings cannot do is tell them apart — only the forenames do that, which is why the surname is now recorded with its act and never on its own.

So the index records a wedding whose act is not in the archive. That is worth holding on to: the 1807 gap is a gap in the books, not in the year. Things happened in 1807 and were written down; what is missing is the volume they were written in.