Pazin

«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, baptism of 24 March 1684, read off the film at full magnification on 13 September 2026.

Until then the earliest record of the name at Pazin here was 1791 — two elaborate Latin names, Conraddus Vincentius and Liberatus Francus Xaverius, in a single household. This is a century earlier and it is a family: a father, a wife, a legitimate daughter, two godparents standing.

Its weight is not its age. Kobler has a Giovanni Battista reaching Fiume from the County of Pazin «intorno al 1740» — the sentence the whole Fiume argument hangs on — and nobody has ever looked for that man at the end he left from. There is now a documented De Franceschi household in the county town fifty-six years before the date Kobler gives. That is not a connection and is not claimed as one; it is the first time the question can be put to a real household rather than to an assumption.

The index gets this entry wrong twice. It transcribes the surname as «De Francesch», dropping the -i the page plainly writes, and it puts Jacoba — a godparent — into the mother's field. The mother is Marina.

Seven indexed records in all, six of them ours, 1684 to 1859. Six volumes of parish book, the oldest opening in 1582, and only one page of them has been read here.