A family chart for the Dalmatian branch, running from an envoy of Pope Urban V to the middle of the twentieth century. Three of its people were already in this archive under other sources, and they match.
Out of Venice, as soldiers
Seventeen generations · Venice to Perinuša · 1318 to 1948
This line is drawn from the family's own chart, «Rodoslovno stablo obitelji Franceschi», and it is banded by how much of it can be tested. The medieval half is the family's account of itself. From the seventeenth century down, independent records found for this archive agree with it.
the Republic — where the chart begins
Zara · notary, archivist, the salt office of the port, six generations of civic office
Almissa · where the baptism registers start naming them
Omiš — where the register begins to agree with the chart
taken from the Ottomans, and given to the man who took it
the mills and the tower of the arcibeg Čaušević, on the Vrljika
What each joint will bear
Eight households at Omiš between 1639 and 1887 — and one of them is another one, counted twice. They are set out in the order the index produced them. This is the parish evidence that sits underneath the family's own seventeen-generation chart, gathered independently of it; where the two touch is marked.
The oldest Dalmatian household. Margarita baptised 4 March 1639. The index gives this couple a span of 1639 to 1867, which is not a marriage but a collision — a later record of the same two common names swept in with the earlier ones.
Franco and Lucretia, three children, one of them a Zuanne born 24 May 1646 — the same forename as the head of the household above, in the same town in the same decade.
Gerolimo and Elena, two daughters, no year on either. Gerolimo is the name the nineteenth-century households give their first sons.
Seventeen children in twenty-three years — the largest household in this archive. Giovanni Giuseppe Maria first, on 29 December 1854; the names run four and five deep, Rados Niccoló Maria, Giovanni Girolamo Andrea Felice.
This is the household above, counted twice. Six of these seven children are the same named individuals as in Francesco and Maria's list; the place differs only in language, Almissa being the Italian for Omiš; and the mother's surname differs by one letter, De Caralipeo against De Caralipco. The seventh, Carlo Paolo Michele Maria, appears only here — so the true household is not seventeen children but eighteen.
Giovanni and Maria Ipsich, seven children, overlapping Francesco's household by fourteen years. Their first, Girolamo, was born and buried in 1860.
Niccoló and Teresa, five children, beginning with Riccardo Feligiano Maria on 9 June 1873.
A second Giovanni, with Giovanna Baucich — and Baučić is the surname the family's own chart gives to Ivan's wife in the generation of 1829–1895. The made chart and the parish index touch here, and this is the clearest place they do.
The Omiš marriage register. Three men of the name fathering in the town at the same time in the 1860s and 70s, with first sons called Girolamo and Niccoló, is the shape of brothers — and one line in a marriage book would say whose sons they were. It would also test the chart's Ivan × Ivanica Baučić against the index's Giovanni × Giovanna Baucich, which is the single most useful thing anyone could do for this family. And the two hundred and eight years between 1646 and 1854 are simply unread, not lost.
This is the second of the five families, and the only one that arrives with a commission rather than a bundle. It is also the one with the longest paper tail and the thinnest verification: a great deal of it comes from a family chart and from the Croatian nobiliary literature, and where that is all there is, this page says so.
They are cittadini originari — the hereditary civil class of the Republic, below the patriciate and above everyone else, from which the permanent chancery was staffed. In the middle of the fifteenth century Marco Antonio de Franceschi is secretary of the ducal chancery and a member of the consiglio nobile. The family is allowed Venetian and foreign titles, the county among them. Inferred — from the nobiliary literature, not from a document read here.
Niccolò acts for Guillaume Grimoard — the future Urban V — in the negotiations between Louis I of Anjou and the Republic. By a charter given at Buda on 8 March 1359 Louis receives him into the hereditary Hungarian-Croatian nobility with arms, for estates around Zadar. Every Zadar and Omiš descent in this archive traces to him. The family no longer holds the charter; the claim rests on the nobiliary literature and on the family's own 1838 submission.
In the second half of the sixteenth century Francesco de Franceschi (1520–1598) is sent from Venice to Omiš as a member of the town senate, and is named in the parish books. From that point the family runs in two places at once — Zadar and Omiš — and the literature is explicit that the two nurtured their ties for centuries. The foundation plaque of 1584 on his house at Omiš is the oldest object in this archive.
Toma de Franceschi is admitted to the Zadar city council by hereditary right and sworn in 1714, appointed public notary in 1722, and works forty years — running his office in «Illyrian», that is Croatian, as well as in Italian. His son Ivan Krševan follows him into the same office. In 1838 the family submits its documentation and genealogy to the Austrian commission on nobility and is entered in Heyer von Rosenfeld's register of the Dalmatian nobility, printed at Nuremberg in 1873.
Giovanni — «Zuane» — de Franceschi (1673–1741) leads local volunteers from Poljica by way of Vrulja to the siege of Imotski in 1717; after three days two hundred German and two hundred Swiss mercenaries with cannon and as many horse from Sinj join them. Imotski and Vrgorac are taken, and the border between Dalmatia and Bosnia is fixed where it still runs. The Republic pays him in the estates of Arslan-beg Čaušević — land, houses, a mill and a tower on the Vrljika, at the place called Perinuša. Andrija Kačić Miošić put the campaign into verse. In the church at Poljica, before the altar, there is an old family tomb with the arms carved on it.
Giovanni de Franceschi (Omiš 1810 – Zadar 1862) — professor, historian, essayist, travel writer, editor of the monthly «La Dalmazia» at Zadar; bishop's chancellor, honorary canon of the Split diocese, and a schoolmaster. He is remembered for the poem Dalmatinska vila of 1844, and in his own paper he argued for an enlightened cosmopolitanism. He is the point at which this family stops being soldiers and becomes writers.
The nobiliary de is stripped from the Omiš–Imotski family by decree of the Napoleonic administration. That is why the descendants of a count are called plainly Franceschi today, at Split and at Imotski, and why the surname distribution in modern Croatia looks nothing like the eighteenth-century record. Not drift, and not a clerk: law.
Almost everything above is the family's account of itself, corroborated by the Croatian nobiliary literature. The two hard things this archive has found on its own are the foundation plaque of 18 June 1584 and — new in September 2026 — D. Nicolò Defranceschi holding a state vineyard at Vrisovec in the «Gazzetta di Zara» of 4 August 1840, which is set out below. The obvious next test is the Zadar notarial fond: Toma worked in it for forty years, and it will either carry this family or it will not.
Croatian nobiliary literature: plemstvo.hr on the Franceschi, resting on Čoralić in the «Hrvatski biografski leksikon» vol. 4 (1989) for Toma, Gracin ibid. for Giovanni of «La Dalmazia», Dujšin's «Zbornik plemstva» (1938), Heyer von Rosenfeld's «Der Adel des Königreichs Dalmatien» (Nuremberg 1873) and Laszowski (1925). The family chart «Rodoslovno stablo obitelji Franceschi», held by David Defranceski. The 1584 plaque and the 1840 gazette are read here directly.
Six things out of the branch's own keeping — five photographs and the descent chart the top of this page is built from.
The chart is titled Rodoslovno stablo obitelji Franceschi. Read from the bottom it starts at Zadar — a notary, a municipal archivist, an officer of the port salt-house — moves to Omiš with an admiral, and then holds there as posjednici, landholders, for three hundred years.
| Generation | Dates | What the chart records |
|---|---|---|
| 01Niccolò | 1318–1362 | Oratore del Papa Urbano V — envoy of Pope Urban V |
| 02Francesco | 1342–1400 | Consigliere del Re Ludovico d'Ungheria — counsellor to King Louis of Hungary |
| 03Stefano | 1394–1438 | Notario della città di Zara — notary of Zadar; wife Aquilina |
| 04Tommaso | 1436–1496 | Archivista municipale della città di Zara — municipal archivist of Zadar |
| 05Francesco | 1460–1512 | Saliera di porto di Zara — the salt office of the port of Zadar; wife a contessa Grisogono |
| 06Tommaso-Francesco | 1484–1536 | Colonnello |
| 07Francesco | 1520–1598 | Consigliere di Serenissima |
| 08Gasparo | 1562–1609 | Admirale; wife a contessa Zanon |
| 09Pietro Antonio detto Perini | 1588–1661 | posjednik — landholder; wife M. Dešković |
| 10Francesco | 1608–1660 | posjednik; wife Lucrezia |
| 11Girolamo | 1622–1695 | posjednik; wife Elena Coltroni |
| 12Giovanni il Zuane | 1673–1741 | Colonnello Governatore; wife Francesca Cvitanović |
| 13Antonio | 1723–1791 | posjednik; wife a contessa M. Cambj |
| 14Pietro Antonio | 1757–1803 | Serdar i posjednik; wife Katarina Dorić |
| 15Antonio | 1801–1877 | posjednik; wife D. Radmilović |
| 16Ivan | 1829–1895 | posjednik; wife Ivanica Baučić |
| 17Antonio | 1874–1948 | posjednik; wife Antica Radišić |
Six points where the chart and independently-found records touch. This is the test of a family tree: whether it survives contact with sources it was not drawn from.
Carlo De Franceschi's history and the Imotski monograph both record a Gaspar de Franceschi at Omiš in 1590, owner of the warship Vascello and later admiral of the fleet. The chart gives him dates and a wife.
The same dates, to the year, as the Zuane Ivan Franceschi who sheltered six hundred Imotski refugees from January 1715, raised 250 men, took the town in July 1717 and was granted the Perinuša estate.
This matters. The Imotski monograph derives the name Perinuša from a Perinović family of Zadar brought in as stewards. But the by-name «Perini» is in this family's own direct line a century before Imotski — which is a simpler reason why Kačić Miošić sang of the hero of 1717 as «Perinović Ive».
Independently reconstructed for this archive from the FamilySearch index: a Francesco Franceschi and Maria Caralipeo at Almissa with eleven recorded children between 1854 and 1877 — the largest household in the whole reconstruction.
Also in the index: an Antonio Franceschi and Antonia Radmillovich at Almissa.
Four generations hold Zadar offices — notary, municipal archivist, port salt office. The received family account lists «Zadar → Rijeka and Bakar» as one of its four directions; this chart says Zadar is where the Dalmatian line came from.
| 1670s | Matteo 1670–1739 and Francesco 1675–1725 |
| 1789–1810 | Girolamo b. 1789 and don Giovanni 1810–1882, beside Antonio 1801–1877 |
| 1826–1844 | Frane 1826–1896 (wife M. Caralipeo), Nikola 1835–1914 (wife Theresa), Josip 1844–1904 posjednik (wife a countess A. Grubišić), beside Ivan 1829–1895 |
| 1879–1893 | Josip 1879–1941, Emil 1886–1960 (mr. ph.), Dinko 1887–1893, Stjepan 1887–1927 (wife Stefania Lelas), Ante 1893–1936 (wife Dijaković) |
| 1922–1934 | Leo 1923–1925 |
Family chart held by David Defranceski, «Rodoslovno stablo obitelji Franceschi» — the Omiš line. Twenty generations, 1318 to 1992.
The Austrian National Library's newspaper search reported nine issues carrying both «Defranceschi» and «Buccari». Its page viewer is behind a bot check this archive will not answer, so David fetched the oldest of the nine himself: the Gazzetta di Zara of 4 August 1840, eight pages, the official gazette of Dalmatia. One occurrence of the name, and it is in exactly the right district.
An avviso of the Imperial-Royal Pretura d'Almissa — the magistracy of Omiš — dated 6 July 1840 and signed Gio: Maria Ipsich, Pretore, announcing the sale of state property by public auction in the Pretura's office on 16, 17 and 18 September 1840 at ten in the morning. Four lots, all vineyard or arable, all at a place called Strane in Vrisovec, and each listed with the tenant who held it. The second lot: «Un terreno vignato, chiamato Strane in Vrisovec, dell'estesa di vreteni 2 circa, tenuto a colonia al quarto da D. Nicolò Defranceschi. La voce fiscale è di fi. 8 k. 20.» — a vineyard called Strane at Vrisovec, of about two vreteni, held in colonia at the quarter by D. Nicolò Defranceschi. Fiscal value 8 florins 20 kreuzer.
The colonato, the Dalmatian sharecropping tenure: the colono works the land and renders a share of the crop, here a quarter, to the owner. So Nicolò Defranceschi was not the owner — he was the working tenant of a state-owned vineyard, and the state was selling it out from under him. His neighbours in the same list are the heirs of Matteo Benković, Gian Francesco Pavišić and a Radmillović, and none of them carries an honorific. Only Defranceschi is given a «D.» — Don, or Dominus — which in a Dalmatian public notice marks a priest or a gentleman among peasants.
Almissa is Omiš. This page has the Dalmatian family at Omiš from Francesco the Venetian's foundation plaque of 1584, and follows it to Imotski and Perinuša after 1717 — but almost everything it holds for the nineteenth century comes from a family tree rather than a document. Here is a Defranceschi at Omiš in 1840, named, with a plot of land, a tenure, a valuation and a date, in the official gazette of the province. He is the first of them this archive has found in print rather than in a pedigree.
This issue also carries Buccari — but in a wholly unconnected notice, from the magistrate of «la libera città marittima e commerciale e distretto porto franco di Buccari», dated 7 February 1840, at the instance of one Maria Carina. The two words are pages apart and have nothing to do with each other. Which means the search that produced «nine issues on Defranceschi and Buccari» was matching the two words anywhere in the same issue, not together — and a gazette prints notices from every district in the province. The Bakar lead is therefore much weaker than it looked, and the other eight issues should be read expecting coincidence rather than a household.
«Gazzetta di Zara», anno IX, 4 August 1840, eight pages — the official gazette of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, printed at Zadar. Retrieved from ANNO (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) by David Defranceski on 8 September 2026 and filed in this project's library; the text layer read here is the library's own.
The same book gives the Zadar end of this line something it has never had: a building. Antoljak, listing the houses of the great Zadar family Grisogono, writes that the Cerineo-Lucio-Grisogono building originally belonged to the family «Grisogono-Franceschi», and that a further «palača Ferro-Grisogono-Franceschi» stood «na uglu koji čini Široka ulica s nekadašnjom ulicom dei Papuzzeri» — on the corner where the Calle Larga meets the former street of the slipper-makers.
A double-barrelled house name in Zadar means a marriage, not a merger: a Franceschi daughter or son married into the Grisogono, and the palace carried both names afterwards. The Grisogono are one of the oldest patrician families of the city — Heyer von Rosenfeld starts their genealogy at a Grisogono de Grisogoni in 1290. This archive does not know which Franceschi. It knows that in Zadar the name was attached to two buildings on the main street, and that is more than it knew this morning.
Antoljak's footnote 155 reads: «O toj porodici v. članak Famiglia Franceschi, Il Rammentatore zaratino, Lunario per l'anno 1859, Zara, 30.» — On this family see the article «Famiglia Franceschi», in the Zadar almanac for the year 1859, p. 30. An article devoted to the Franceschi family of Zadar, printed in 1859, in a serial this project has never touched. It is one page. It is the single most findable unread thing this archive now knows about, and it sits in the Znanstvena knjižnica Zadar or the Državni arhiv u Zadru.
Footnote 156 sends you to Giuseppe Sabalich, «Guida archeologica di Zara», at pages 375–377, 470–471 and 497–498 — the archaeological guide's own account of those buildings. Sabalich is on the Internet Archive. Footnote 157 is Heyer von Rosenfeld's «Wappenbuch des Königreichs Dalmatien», Nürnberg 1873, which is the same armorial that admitted this family's Zadar branch to the Dalmatian nobility.
doc — for the palace names and the 1859 citation, which are Antoljak's own text. inf — for reading the double name as a marriage. Nothing here connects the Zadar Franceschi to the Carnian family this archive follows.
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →
Found 13 September 2026 in a Croatian archival journal digitised on Hungaricana — and it is a kind of record this archive has never held before. Not a baptism, not a pension: a surveillance report.
Kad je 1867. pokrenut humoristički list «La Trappola» Namjesništvo je izvjestilo Ministarstvo unutarnjih poslova 19. rujna (501 IX 2/2 1097) da je urednik Valente Defranceschi egzaltirani talijanaš koji je bio činovnik knjigovodstva u Zadru, ali je 1859. pobjegao u Italiju i zaposlio se u talijanskoj vladi. Vratio se kad je proglašena amnestija, ali se nije odrekao svojih nazora. Ipak nije mu se moglo zabraniti izdavanje nepolitičkog lista. No već u prvom broju lista pojavio se članak «Il Sogno» u kojem se omalovažava hrvatski narod i drugi članci u kojima se napadaju neke ličnosti. Osim toga Defranceschi čita talijanski list «La Perseveranza» koji mu šalju iz Italije.
When the humorous paper «La Trappola» was started in 1867, the Governor's Office reported to the Ministry of the Interior on 19 September that its editor, Valente Defranceschi, was an exalted Italian nationalist, who had been a clerk in the accounting office at Zadar, but who fled to Italy in 1859 and took employment with the Italian government. He came back when the amnesty was proclaimed, but had not given up his views. All the same, he could not be forbidden to publish a non-political paper. Yet already in the first issue there appeared an article, «Il Sogno», disparaging the Croatian people, and others attacking particular persons. Besides which, Defranceschi reads the Italian paper «La Perseveranza», which is sent to him from Italy.
1859 is the whole point of the date. That is the year of the Second War of Italian Independence — Magenta, Solferino, Austria's loss of Lombardy. A Habsburg accounting clerk who leaves his desk at Zadar that year and turns up working for the government on the other side has not emigrated. He has defected, in wartime, and the amnesty that let him home says so.
And then he came back and started a comic paper. The state could not stop him, because the paper was registered as non-political; so it did the next thing, and wrote down what he printed and what he read. The detail that he takes «La Perseveranza» from Milan is a police detail — somebody was noting his post.
It is a different kind of source, and that is the finding. Everything this archive holds for the nineteenth century is sacramental or fiscal: who was baptised, who was buried, who drew a pension. This is the first time a De Franceschi appears in the record because the state was watching him. Political-police fonds are large, indexed by name, and almost entirely unworked for this surname.
Zadar, not Istria and not the Kvarner. He belongs on this page because Zadar is this line's ground — the family chart puts six generations of Zadar civic office behind the Dalmatian house, and Toma de Franceschi was notary of the city for forty years to 1762. Valente is a hundred years later and nothing joins him to any of them. He is documented, he is of the name, he is in the right town, and that is all.
The journal is a summary. The file itself has a number — Namjesništvo/Luogotenenza, 501 IX 2/2 1097, 19 September 1867, with a related 1866 item at 493 IX 2/3 63 — and the fond is at the Državni arhiv u Zadru. A surveillance report of that period will normally carry the subject's age, birthplace and family, because that is what the police wrote down. It is the single most likely document to give Valente a father.