Fernasar / Tornasar
A family that married into our own direct line.
Maria née Fernasar, born 17 October 1832, married Antonio Defranceschi and is the mother of Josip, who took the line out of Istria to Crikvenica.
- The surname is written Fernasar in one hand and Tornasar in another. Tornasar is now retired — it appears in not one issue of the Austrian press, in no Italian surname database and in no Croatian census return, while Fernasar is printed three times and placed at Gračišće. The reading stands as Fernasar; see below and the search log. (The two hands are both real: a register entry of 1862 was read «Maria Tornasar», and that reading is kept as a reading.)
- A related puzzle sits beside her: a marriage recorded 25 November 1856 with an eldest son born 6 August 1856, three and a half months earlier.
Found, and placed — in a First World War casualty list, which is a kind of record this archive had never once opened.
Three spellings were tested against the Austrian press. «Tornasar» returns nothing at all — not one issue, not one living bearer — and the second reading this archive carried for a year can be retired. «Fernasar» returns three issues, and two of them are Austro-Hungarian casualty lists, which print a man's name, rank, regiment, home commune and year of birth.
«Verlustliste», 6 May 1916:
> Fernasar Josef, Inft., k. k. LIR. Nr. 5, 10. Komp., Istrien, Pisino, Gračišće, 1884; kriegsgef., Merw, Gebiet Transkaspien, Rußland.
Josef Fernasar, born 1884, of GRAČIŠĆE — infantryman of the 5th Imperial-Royal Landwehr Infantry Regiment, 10th Company, taken prisoner and held at Merv in Transcaspia, which is now Mary in Turkmenistan. The list gives province, district and commune: Istria, Pisino, Gračišće. That is Maria's own village, named in a printed record, fifty-two years after she married out of it.
«Nachrichten über Verwundete und Verletzte», 14 December 1914:
> Fernasar Josef, Jäg., FJB. Nr. 20, 1. StbsAbt., Pisino [I]strien, 1883, Hufschlag a. d. r. Ferse, Vereinshilfsspital Nr. 2 in Kassa.
A Josef Fernasar of the Pisino district, born 1883, kicked by a horse on the right heel and in the auxiliary hospital at Kassa. Whether this is the same man is not settled: the name, district and rough age agree, the unit and the year do not. One record says Jäger of Field Battalion 20 and 1883; the other says infantryman of Landwehr Regiment 5 and 1884. Men changed units and clerks mis-copied years. Two cousins would look exactly the same.
The third issue, Il Giornaletto di Pola of 8 December 1914, has not been read.
And «Fornasar» — 49 issues, overwhelmingly the same Pola paper — remains the commoner form of what is very probably the same Friulian name: fornasâr, the man who works the kiln. That step is still an inference.
The surname is now placed at Gračišće and the question changes. It is no longer where were the Fernasar but how do they connect to Maria, born there on 17 October 1832. Josef of 1884 is two generations below her. The Gračišće status animarum — the household books this archive has already read frame by frame for its own family — will have the Fernasar households on the same pages, and nobody has looked for them. Then Il Giornaletto di Pola, 8 December 1914, which is the one Fernasar issue still unread; and the Gračišće register image for Maria's own entry, which would settle the letter the priest actually formed.
Austrian Istria — the Küstenland
- Who held it
- Habsburg from 1797 (Venetian before it), the Austrian Littoral from 1849, Italian 1920, Yugoslav 1945, Croatian 1991.
- The registers
- Državni arhiv u Pazinu, and the parish books on FamilySearch film.
- Beyond the registers
- ANNO (Austrian National Library newspapers) and ALEX (the imperial Hof- und Staatshandbuch) for anyone who held office; the Vienna Kriegsarchiv for conscripts. This is the branch the archive knows best.
- Where this archive stands
- ALEX is behind a security check that will not clear for this archive. It has never been read.