Every Town in Istria

Corrected. This row said the parish begins in 1666. It begins in 1628. «Alì 21 Decembre — Elena fiola di Francescho di Franceschi et di Eufemia sua consorte» — Svetvinčenat, Births 1589–1646, image 58, read at full magnification. Thirty-eight years earlier than anything below, and thirty-three years before Moncalvo di Pisino, which this archive had treated as the family's first Istrian appearance. It was missed by two sweeps because its place field says only «Croazia, Austria». The whole finding, and the method that found it, are on <a href="/lines/#svetread">the reading page</a>. What follows is still true of the 1663–1708 book and is left as written. Colotta De Franceschi, born 10 October and baptised 24 October 1666. Fioretta, born 18 November, baptised 22 November 1666. Franceschina, 1667. Mattia, 1669. Anto and Giacomo, 1671. «Piero De Francesich», February 1672 — the surname already being pulled into a Slavic shape. Giovanna, 1673. Mattio, 1674. Zuana, 1688. Batista and Flora, 1692. Two children of this name were carried to the font at Svetvinčenat in a single autumn, five years after the family's first recorded appearance at Moncalvo at the other end of Istria. The 1734 household book was not the beginning; it was already the third generation.

Brhan, working the protocols of the Sanvincenti notaries, named «D.no Vittorio De Franceschi» among the Carnian landholders, a «Gasparo De Franceschi, carnico pure lui», and the kinswomen Pasqua and Antonia named in Maria Zanco's will. All four surface in the register sweep independently: Vitorio Defranceschi, born 1758, buried 8 November 1812; Victorius, born 1845, died 25 May 1897; Gasparo, Gaspari, Gaspero and Gaspo De Franceschi across the eighteenth century; Pasqua, and Pasqua Vitoria, born 16 December 1773; Antonia. Two entirely different classes of record, produced by different clerks for different purposes, naming the same household.

Eight records in four years, and the names are Habsburg-official names, not Istrian peasant ones: Anastasius Defrancoschi, born 1789, dead 5 March 1793; Liberatus Franciscus Xaverius, born 1791, dead 14 February 1792; Conraddus Vincentius, baptised 22 February 1793; Liberatus Maria Xaverius; Maria Leopoldina; Vincentius Defranceski. Two infants buried in thirteen months. This is a family that arrived, buried two children in the county town and moved on — and it stands at exactly the place and period of the unidentified «Count Damian de Franceschis» this archive has been carrying as an open question.

Marija Defrančeski, 1884–1971. Milan Defrančeski, 10 February 1923 – 24 May 2001. Milka Defrančeski Kirin, 1918–1990. Dragutin Defranceski, 1925–2004. And Zdenkica Defrančeski, 1943–1945 — a child of two, buried in Zagreb in the last year of the war. The Croatian spelling of this surname is not a scribal accident and it is not only in the newspapers: there are people under stones with it.

Gioannes Maria De Franceschi, born 1581, died 20 March 1645, buried at Omiš. Then Mandalina, baptised 14 November 1634; Nicolaa, 12 January 1644; Francesco, 1 August 1657; and Nicolo, born 1626, buried at Split on 18 May 1716 at ninety. A Dalmatian line of the name running from the year the Venetians finished the walls of Omiš to the eighteenth century, and no connection to Istria has been shown.

Francischina, 7 November 1620. Catterina, 15 November 1621. Franciscu, 23 February 1625. Joannem Antonio, 6 September 1626. Gioanna Victoria, 19 April 1628. Maria, 9 September 1632. Zuane, 13 April 1632. The clerk writes «de Francesco» in the 1620s and «de Franceschi» by the later 1620s — the surname settling into its form inside one register.

Bakar does not appear here, because the town groups were built before the Bakar correction and Bakar was not one of them; the separate Bakar query stands at twelve people over three generations and is published on its own page. Gologorica returns one record and Gračišće none — not because the family was not there, which the parish books prove it was, but because those registers are not in this index. An index sweep measures what has been indexed. It is a map of the record, not of the people.

The same query was run against FamilySearch's persona search with the place parameter set to Vižinada, Draguč, Dubrovnik, Vodnjan, Rovinj, Gračišće, Kaštelir, Ližnjan, and to «Zzzznowhere» and «Atlantis». Every single one returned the same total: 3,652. q.anyPlace is a relevance boost, not a filter. It changes the order of the results and nothing else. A place it does not recognise is silently ignored and you get the whole set back, with no error and no warning.

Vižinada and Draguč return the same records, in the same order. They cannot be told apart by this route at all. Dubrovnik returns exactly what no place parameter returns — the unfiltered head of the list. f.recordPlace is a genuine filter, but it rejects plain town names: Vodnjan, Rovinj and a numeric place id all return 0, and a name with spaces is refused outright — «Filter value for term=record_place must not contain whitespace». No working place filter was found on this endpoint.

It does not invalidate the sweep's positive counts. The method here already compensated: for each place the top hundred were pulled and kept only if the record's own place text actually named that town. That check is what makes the numbers above mean anything, and it is why they were published as weight, not population. It does sharpen the blanks. Thirty-nine places returned nothing, and this page already said a blank proves nothing because those registers are browse-only and unindexed. There is now a second reason: the search can only ever see what ranks into the top hundred of a re-ranked list of 3,652 records. A blank is a statement about ranking, not about a province. And it retires a queue item. This archive was carrying «Vižinada — 53 records, unread». Those records are on DGS 005497893, which is the Vodnjan baptism film, and they have now been read: they are the eight Vodnjan households. The item was a ghost of the two-parish reel.

Resolve each record to the film it sits on, then ask the catalogue what that film is. That is what produced this archive's ninety-three-parish list, and it is what found Vodnjan. With one caution learned the same day: a film can carry more than one parish, and the catalogue answers a film-number query with the first creator on the reel. Resolve to the film, then read the item list — not the film heading. (doc — every claim on this page was produced by running the queries and is reproducible)

q.fatherSurname was found this morning. q.motherSurname works the same way, and it is the field the married-out daughters live in — a child with its father's surname, its mother entered as a De Franceschi. It returned 218 records the surname search had never seen. And every record carries FS_DIGITAL_FILM_NBR — the DGS film number — whether or not it carries a place. The place is optional. The film never is.

Looked up one film at a time in the catalogue, 396 of the 727 town-less records resolve to a single parish: Svetvinčenat 102 · Pula 83 · Dubrovnik-Grad 47 · Sv. Dujam, Split 46 · Rijeka 31 · Split-Veli Varoš 15 · Labin 10 · Nerežišća on Brač 10 · Dubrovnik-Pile 9 · Rovinj 7 · Barban 6 · Kastav 6 · Vižinada 5 · Split-Stari Grad 5 · Imotski-Glavina 4 · Split-Bol 4 · Vrsar 3 · Poreč 3. Dubrovnik is the surprise. Fifty-six town-less records between the city parish and Pile, against the twenty-two and sixteen the parish table has carried. And the Split parishes together hold about seventy. Neither city is on any lane of the branch chart.

The remaining 331 cannot be resolved by film number, because one microfilm can carry two or more parishes' books. This archive learned that in September and wrote it into the correction itself — «remembering that a film can carry more than one parish». What is new here is only the size of it: 005497884 carries Svetvinčenat and Petar u Šumi. 005497893 carries Vižinada and an unnamed State Archive item. 005494211 carries two Split parishes; 005494036 carries four; 005494037 carries seven. So the film number is a fast first pass and not an answer — which the September note already said. The improvement is to stop relying on remembering: resolve the ark to the book waypoint rather than to the film. An image is bound into exactly one book and a book belongs to exactly one parish, so the ambiguity never arises instead of having to be caught.

Film 005497893 carries 112 town-less records of the name. Its catalogue creator is «Rimokatolička crkva, Župa Vižinada». Tested image by image against Vižinada's own books: two of the hundred and twelve are Vižinada's. The other hundred and ten are on the second item bound onto the same reel — the books this archive established in September are Vodnjan's. Had these been assigned by the film's catalogue creator, as would have been the obvious thing to do, 110 records would have been filed under the wrong parish, forty kilometres away. That is the same reel, and the same mistake, that produced «Vižinada, five households 1816–1844» — a finding this archive published and then had to withdraw as a ghost.

Yesterday's note said Šterna is not among the filmed parishes this archive has walked, and left it needing a different route. It needed one film number and one test. Film 005497888 carries the records and its catalogue names two parishes on the reel, Šterna and Šumber. Matched image by image: Šterna eleven, Šumber none. And they are a household. Gio Batta De Franceschi × Zanetta Gravisi behind two entries in the marriage book of 1723–1820; their son Bortolo and his wife — Zannetta, Zanetta, Giovana, Giovanna in four hands — baptising Felice Anto 1778, Mariana 1786, Federico 1794, Catarina 1797, and burying a Francesco in 1787; then Gio Batta and Maria with Federico Felice Antonio 1807 and Cattarina 1809, and a Bartolo buried in July 1819. And one of them was already here, unplaced. «Mariana De Franceschi, b. Feb 1786, of Bortolo De Franceschi and Giovana» is an accepted row in this archive's register with an empty place field. It has a place now: Šterna. She is not the Mariana of Krbune — that one is bearing children from 1832 to 1843, which this one would be doing at fifty-seven. The throttle that stopped this an hour earlier lifted; the test took two calls and a pause between them.

«Alli 12 9bre 1777. Cepich. Cargna. Bortolo figlio del q. Gio: Batta de Franceschi dalla Cargna, Diocese d'Udine, ha contratto legitimo Matrimonio coll'Ill.ma Sig.a Zanetta Gravisi figlia dell'Ill.mo Sig.r Marchese Nazario della Villa di Cepich di questa Pieve…» Šterna's marriage book, page 39, read off the film at full magnification. This archive has said, in print, that no entry anywhere gives an origin: «Not one entry in fourteen years of baptisms says where these people came from. No «da Carnia», no «di Mione». The Carnian identification of this household rests entirely on the company it keeps.» Here a priest writes it in the body of the entry and again in the margin. Carnia, and the diocese of Udine, which is Carnia's diocese. The bride is a Gravisi — the Capodistrian marquisal house, her father named as the Illustrious Signor Marchese Nazario of Cepich. A man out of Carnia whose father is already dead marries a marquis's daughter; the Bishop of Cittanova, Gio: Domenico Stratico, certifies his free status because no Istrian parish could, and the three readings of the banns are waived. It corrects this archive twice over. Zanetta Gravisi was published that morning as Bortolo's mother; she is his wife. And the «second marriage» the index promised is an archivist's pencil finding-aid slip filmed with the book — which happens to confirm the reading word for word. Both corrections are on the corrections page; the household is on Šterna.

«Die 24 huius — Ego qui supra baptizavi Mariam filiam legitimam Francisci de Franceschi et uxoris eius Marinę. Patrini fuerunt Hilarius Celin[?] et Jacoba eiusdem…» Pazin, Births 1582, 1614–1624, 1645, 1643–1685, read at full magnification. This archive's earliest Pazin record was 1791. This is 1684 — a hundred and seven years earlier, and it is a household: a father, a wife, a legitimate daughter, two godparents. Why it matters more than its age. Kobler has a Giovanni Battista reaching Fiume from the County of Pazin «intorno al 1740», and that departure has never been looked for at the departing end. A De Franceschi family is now documented in the county town fifty-six years before the date Kobler gives. That is not proof of a connection and is not offered as one. It is the first time the question can be asked of a real household instead of an assumption. Inferred And the index has it wrong twice. It transcribes the surname as «De Francesch», dropping the -i that the page plainly writes; and it puts Jacoba — a godparent — into the mother's field. The mother is Marina.

The lines chart has carried these three, with Šterna and Draguč, as «the Poreč hinterland» — the largest piece of Istria the archive can document and cannot yet explain. Three of the five now explain themselves, because the same people are in all three books. Mattio, whose son is buried at Vižinada in 1750. Giulio (Julius) De Franceschi × Maria Ceselin — also written Sesalin and Cedelini — whose son Francesco Napoleone is baptised at Vižinada on 7 September 1818, whose daughter Catharina is baptised at Kaštelir in 1829, and who is himself buried at Kaštelir on 19 September 1854, entered as «Giulio Defranceschi, of Mattio». Francesco Napoleone then appears at Kaštelir with a wife, Maria Radojković, and three children — Aloisia 1859, Josephus 1862, Margarita 1869. And the second household: Angelus Defranceschi × Lucia-Antonia Rodella, whose son Julius is baptised at Kaštelir on 29 January 1866 — and buried at Tar on 9 March 1870, aged four. Angelus himself dies at Tar on 23 April 1895, aged sixty-seven. The Tar page on this site was written yesterday from the Tar entries alone, and could not say where the child was born. Kaštelir says. Inferred — the join is by name, date and parish adjacency, not by a document that names both places

The parish table on this page gives Draguč 25 records, 1784–1851. The September filter test had already shown that Vižinada and Draguč return the same records in the same order, and suspected the Draguč figure was Vižinada's set counted twice. It was. Draguč's three volumes were fetched and every image ark in them tested against the pool: zero. The twenty-five were never there. Five more come back empty on the same test, and these are now tested blanks rather than untested ones: Kanfanar (four books — and it adjoins Svetvinčenat, where the family is thickest), Tinjan, Roč (ten books from 1651), Novigrad (twenty books from 1662), Marčana.

The table at the head of this page names the Pula cluster's people as «Natale Mattio, Angelo, Vitorio, Elisabetta, Irene De Franceschi», 1778–1890. Read by image, Natale Mattio, Vittorio, Elisabetta and Irene are all in the Fažana register, not Pula's — children of two households four miles up the coast. Vittorio De Franceschi × Stella Tamborin (written Etella, Steffa and Samburin in four different entries) baptise Perina in 1810, Vittorio in 1813 and Natale Mattio on 21 April 1816. Giuseppe De Franceschi × Giovanna Beluzzi baptise Elisabetta in 1810 and Irene on 13 October 1816. Fažana has forty-two records, all of them ours — more than any Istrian parish except Ližnjan, Pula and Svetvinčenat, and it has been drawn on this site as a single dot reading «Baptisms and deaths at Fasana through the 1810s».

Vrsar, 1670–1686. «Luca De Franceschi, son of Francesco De Franceschi and Giacoma», baptised 11 August 1670. Giacoma buried 1683. A Marga «of Francesco» buried 19 August 1686. Francesco himself buried 26 November 1686. Five entries; a marriage, children, a widowing and a death, and then the name stops at Vrsar. Rovinj, 1722–1728. Mattio De Franceschi × Elisabetta baptise Martino in 1722 and Benedetto on 23 October 1726. Isabetta is buried on 4 December 1728 and Matto on the 27th — three weeks apart. And this archive already holds that 27 December entry from another direction: «Ob.to di Matt.o de Franceschi da Dignano». So the man buried at Rovinj at Christmas 1728 and described from outside as from Dignano had been living there long enough to baptise two sons, and buried his wife three weeks before he died. Inferred — that the Isabetta of 4 December is the wife and not a daughter

The register page on this site carries a queue of twenty-six De Franceschi women who married out and are attached to no household, with forty indexed children hanging off them. Every one of those rows has an empty place field — that is precisely why they were never worked. The image test places one of them. Krbune is a single-volume parish of 124 images in the County of Pazin, four kilometres from Gologorica. Its book holds Mariana De Franceschi and her husband Vincentius Marziol with five children between 1832 and 1843 — Maria, Rosaria 1833, Franciscus 21 November 1836, Anna 16 November 1839, Antonia 17 March 1843 — plus four more entries where the couple stand as godparents to other families' children. She looked like several women because the index spells her husband four ways — Marziol, Marizo, Marjas, Marjiol — and her own name Mariana, Marianna and, in the Croatian orthography of the 1830s, «Marianna Defrančeški». One woman, one village, eleven entries. And the village matters: Krbune is inside the County of Pazin, the same small country as Gologorica and Gračišće, where this archive's own line lives.

Kršan holds five records, all late and all of the same kind. Anna Maria Francisca De Franceschi × Thomas Joachimus Clemens de Domazetovich — children in 1881, 1883 and 1887. Clotildis Adelaidis Defranceschi × Rudolfus Stanislaus de Domazetovich — children in 1893 and 1894. Two women of the name marrying two men of one family, inside twelve years, in a parish where the surname appears nowhere else. Whether they are sisters the register does not say. The particle on de Domazetovich says the family they married into kept one. Inferred that the two women are of one household

This page's cluster table — the first thing on it — carries «Labin, 1615–1802, Aloÿsius Defranceschi» and calls it the single earliest indexed occurrence of the surname anywhere in Istria, «sixty-four years before the Mione headmen's list». It has been quoted here since September as one of the three findings that push the surname back in Istria. Three later measurements disagree with it, and they disagree with each other only about how late Labin is. 1. The rebuilt sweep on this same page — the one written because the first method was found to match a truncated field and stop early — gives Labin / Albona, 17 records, 1789–1892. 2. The by-image test above gives 8 records of ours, 1826–1866 (six of the fourteen indexed hits being Franceschich, Francescich and Francocich, which are not this family). 3. And this archive's own register — 1,508 rows, every one carrying the id the service returned for it — holds no 1615 Labin row at all. Its only 1615 row is an Andriana Franchini, and its earliest Istrian row of the name is the Rovinj burial of 1619. And then the source of the number turned up. Every harvest file on disk was searched for the name. The only Aloÿsius Defranceschi this archive holds is born 1790, son of Mathæus Defranceschi and Osvalda Labinaz or Dominj — a Vižinada household. The Gasparo De Franceschi named beside him appears nowhere in the data at all. And Labin's own filmed volume list contains a book titled «Deaths (Umrli) 1615, 1585-1649». So the entry was: a man from the wrong parish, dated two centuries early; a man who does not exist; and a date lifted from a catalogue shelf-list rather than a record. The cluster is withdrawn. What that leaves standing as the earliest in Istria: Rovinj 1619, then Svetvinčenat 1628. Both are in the register, both have an image behind them, and the Svetvinčenat one was read off the page this morning.

Nineteen people on the roster who had no place now have one — not De Franceschi, but the men and women they married, placed through the parish whose book their children's images are bound into. Angelus Ferrarese, Laurentius Gorlato, Antonius Demarin, Flos Biasiol, Paulus Damiani, Paschalis Zanghirella, Domenico Codacovich → Vodnjan. Antonius Subiotto → Svetvinčenat. Josephus Jelčić, Joannes Sandalj, Josephus Ruman → Ližnjan. Matheus Lazaro → Pomer. Antonio Zustovich → Labin. Matteo Persich → Dubrovnik. Antonius Miccoli → Vižinada. And two of them settle something. Domenico Giachin and Sebastiano Giachin are both Vodnjan, and with them the whole Giachin knot lays out flat: Sebastiano Giachin × Domenica De Franceschi — Maria 1817, Domenica 1823, Giacomo 1824, Michaela 1828, Giuseppe 1832. Domenico Giachin × Michiela Teresa De Franceschi — Maria 1817, Maria Antonia 1818, Stefano Domenico 1821. Two Giachin brothers-in-law, two De Franceschi sisters-in-law, both households at Dignano, and the index had them shuffled together under one surname with no town on any row. And the Galižana entry was a transcription error, as suspected. Its «Giacomo Giachin, of Domenica Defranceschi and Sebastiano Defranceschi» is the same family: five Vodnjan entries all write the father Sebastiano Giachin. A father given his wife's surname by a transcriber — named as a guess yesterday, now confirmed against five rows.

One thing does not fit, and it should be said rather than smoothed. On 13 September this archive read the Vodnjan death register, book page 173, entry 41 — 20 February 1833, house 532 — and found «Michiela De Franceschi fu Giuseppe» named there as the mother of a Giacomo Giachin. That was published as the seventh married-out woman, with an inference attached: that a Giuseppe De Franceschi who died in 1830 might be her father. The index says the Giacomo Giachin baptised in 1824 is the son of Sebastiano Giachin and Domenica De Franceschi — not of a Michiela. Three readings are possible and this archive cannot yet choose between them. There were two Giacomo Giachins at Vodnjan, which in a town where the same six Christian names circulate is entirely ordinary. Or the death entry's mother was misread, and «Michiela» is «Domenica» — two words this hand does not obviously confuse, but the page would have to be looked at again. Or Michiela and Domenica are both real and both married Giachins, which the two households above make perfectly possible. What is not in doubt is that the question is now answerable from a page rather than from an index, and the page is book page 173. Open

Franceschini at Krk — nine rows, 1676 to 1742, the largest single block. Francetich at Kastav — six, 1736 to 1861. Defrančichi at Pomer — three. Franceschić and Franceschich at Skitača — two, and they are the same woman twice. Franceschin at Lovran and Lovrana — two, and those are the same place twice. Franciscolich at Lussinpiccolo. Francescon at Knin. Franchini at Grobnik, at Pag and at Oprtalj. These are not spellings of our name. They are other surnames — several of them formed from the same Latin root, in a province where that root is everywhere — and the index gathered them because the search was built to be generous. Generous is right for a first pass. It is wrong for a map.

On 13 September this archive drew up a round of fifteen Istrian towns to work, and put Oprtalj on it — sixteenth on the parish table, five indexed rows, a book filmed from 1815. The five rows are Andreas Vesnaver Franecich, Catharina Franceschini, Catharina Francaschini, Anna Franchini and Joannes Vesnaver Franocich. None of them is ours. The target was made out of a count, and the count was made out of a fuzzy match. The plan was wrong within the hour of being written, which is the argument for checking a list against its own rows before working it.

Of the forty-two, six carry a Franceschi form: two at Sovinjak, one at Tar, one at Pag, one at Makarska, one at Nerežišća on Brač. Sovinjak is the one worth the walk. Zuane Franceschi, buried there in 1759, son of Gio Batta Franceschi. Sebastiano De Franceschi, born and buried on 6 August 1783, son of Gio Battista De Franceschi. One small hill parish above Buzet; two sons of a man of that name, twenty-four years apart. Either a father who buried a son in middle age and another in old age, or two generations keeping the grandfather's name — which is what this family does everywhere else it can be watched. It cannot be settled from a screen. Sovinjak is not one of the parishes in the filmed collection this archive has walked, and neither is Šterna. (Corrected the same day: Draguč, named here as equally unfilmed, is filmed — three volumes — and was tested image by image on 13 September. It holds none of the name.)

The Croatian index usually gives no parish. It says «Croazia, Austria», or «Hrvatska», or nothing — which is why a year of searching produced towns only where a transcriber had happened to type one. But every persona carries the ark of the image it was read from, the digital-archive service turns that ark into a DGS film number, and the catalogue names the film's parish. Do that for every record and the map draws itself. Nine hundred and fifty-four records, 196 distinct films, ninety-three parishes. It is mechanical, it is repeatable, and it took an afternoon.

The four biggest concentrations are the four this archive already follows, in almost the order it would have guessed: Omiš 145 records from 1634, Rijeka 105 from 1626, Ližnjan 100, Svetvinčenat 85 from 1666, Pula 63 from 1659. And Bakar gives exactly five, 1772–1819 — which is the household this archive reconstructed and dated, to the year, from a different direction.

Ližnjan's hundred records begin in 1794. Not 1667, not 1700 — 1794. The southern-Istrian line's own parish is a late register, and the early southern entries this archive has leaned on are Pula's (from 1659) and Svetvinčenat's (from 1666). Pula's run is real and it is the oldest in the south; the specific 1667 and 1669 baptisms this archive called «Pula» are Svetvinčenat's. Both things are true and the page now says both.

Six places this archive has never named, and one of them is large. Vižinada — 53 records, 1790–1860. Bigger than Kaštelir and Poreč together, in western Istria between Motovun and the coast, and completely absent from this site until today. Draguč — 25, 1784–1851, in the Buzet country. Rovinj — 23, from 1619, the earliest date in the entire map. Dubrovnik — 38 across the city parish and Pile, 1741–1862, plus Orašac and the hospital: a Ragusan presence nobody here suspected. Bednja 13 from 1706 and Pregrada 7 from 1674 — the Hrvatsko zagorje, three hundred kilometres inland and older than most of Istria. And a long tail through continental Croatia and the islands: Đurđevac, Đakovo, Karlovac, Križevci, Orahovica, Lepoglava, Samobor, Petrinja, Vukovar, Nerežišća on Brač, Cres, Rab, Pag, Olib, Hvar, Korčula, Murter, Skradin.

It does not join anybody to anybody. A parish map is a map of a surname, not of a family, and this one now has ninety-three points on it precisely because the name is common. What it does is tell this archive which registers to open, in what order, and stop it guessing at place-names the index never gave. Vižinada is the first of the new ones, because fifty-three records in seventy years is a household and not a scatter.