Parish Books

This site has been describing the Udine holding as «Stato civile (civil only) 1806–1815» — the Napoleonic registers. The collection is 1806–1815 and 1871–1911. The second half, sixty years of civil registration after Italian unification, has never been looked at here.

The province breaks down into 627 comuni, and Ovaro is not one of them. Neither is Mione, Muina, Ovasta, Luint, Liariis, Chialina, Agrons nor Cludinico — every Val Degano name was checked.

But Colza is there, and Colza is a frazione of Ovaro. It holds a complete Napoleonic set for 1806–1812: births, deaths, marriages, marriage banns and the indexes to all three. Twenty-five volumes.

Whether Mione and Muina are written inside those volumes is a question the images can answer and the index cannot — the record API's place filter is ignored, so it returns the same 2,201 people whatever place you give it. The volumes are linked below — but the images are restricted and cannot be opened from a desk. Colza was the first thing tried on 14 September and the viewer answered «Image Restricted». Settling Ovaro now means a Family History Center, an affiliate library, or the Archivio di Stato di Udine itself. The twenty-five volumes are named and numbered, which is what the request needs.

And then Antenati answered it. The Archivio di Stato di Udine has published its own registers on the Italian state portal, free and open: Ovaro has 271 of them, and fifty-nine are catalogued under Mione's own name. Nati, Morti, Matrimoni, the marriage pubblicazioni and the allegati, running from 1806 to 1871 and beyond. The volumes FamilySearch will not show are on Antenati for anyone to open. See the Search Register for the 14 September entry.

Comeglians — the seat of the Gorto canton — carries the marriage allegati for 1807 to 1815, nine volumes. Those are the documents behind one of this archive's load-bearing findings: the allegati are what pushed the Mione family back to a Giovanni Battista de' Franceschi already dead by 1789. They were read from the Archivio di Stato di Udine; this is the same material, openable from a desk.

The collection indexes 2,201 people called Franceschi. Of the first eleven hundred, sampled by the search's own ranking, the Carnian communes barely appear — five entries in all. The bulk are lowland Friulian families: Lauzzana and Colloredo di Monte Albano (209), Udine (129), Muzzana del Turgnano (114), Bertiolo (101), Magnano in Riviera (46).

Most of the Franceschi in the Udine registers are not this family and are not from the mountains. That is worth saying before anyone absorbs two thousand strangers into a Carnian pedigree.

Registers of every denomination from the whole territory of Croatia, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth, plus Roman Catholic books from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Filming began in 1985 with the HDA's own collection HR-HDA-883 and was then extended outward to every other holder — state archives, church archives, parish offices, civil registry offices and monasteries. Most of it was shot in the HDA's central photographic laboratory, and part of it in the microfilming laboratory of the Državni arhiv u Pazinu — the same laboratory that answered this family's letter in 2021.

Because it filmed the matični uredi — the civil registry offices that took custody of the parish books after 1946 — as well as the parishes and the archives. The registry office copy of a parish register is the same book, and it was not subject to the same restriction. That single difference is the whole gain, and it is worth years.

The finding aid returns, for each volume: place, denomination, kind of register, period, holding institution, the roll signature (e.g. ZM-34J/251), the topographic mark (M-5976), and whether a digital copy exists. It does not show images. Material is read in the HDA reading room — digitised rolls on the reader computers, the rest on microfilm readers, maximum ten units a day — or ordered by e-mail to info@arhiv.hr quoting place, kind, period, roll signature and topographic mark. Copies are charged for by the published tariff.

Crikvenica, Status animarum, twentieth century. Roll ZM-34J/251, topographic mark M-5976, Župni ured Crikvenica, digitised. A Status animarum is a household census: it lists a house, its head, his wife, and every child under them with a birth date beside each name. It is the book that gave this archive the whole of Gračišće house 24 — the midwife, the mason and the eleven children — in one opening. A twentieth-century Crikvenica volume should hold Josip Defranceschi's household on the Kvarner in the same form, and if it does it answers the ZO…, the POLD… and the Ruža of the monument in a single page, without ever needing the missing baptisms.

Crikvenica, marriages 1909–1947. Roll ZM-34J/362, mark M-6957, Matični ured Crikvenica, digitised. Ruža Defranceschi, born 1903, married a Jarmacki and died in 1939. Her marriage falls squarely inside this book, and a Croatian marriage entry of that period names both parents of both parties. One line settles whether she is Josip and Ana's daughter.

Crikvenica, deaths 1909–1928. Roll ZM-34J/363, mark M-6958, digitised. If the POLD… born 1901 died young, he is here — and the death column would give his age and his parents. The register also runs through the influenza of 1918 and the whole of the first war.

Crikvenica births 1897–1908 are in neither collection. Either that volume was never filmed, or it did not survive. If the three books above do not answer the question, the remaining step is the parish office at Crikvenica itself, or the Rijeka archdiocesan archive — a letter, not a search.