Svetvinčenat

«Alì 21 Decembre — Elena fiola di Francescho di Franceschi et di Eufemia sua consorte fu batezata da me piovano sopra deto. Fu compare s.r Zan Piero Quelo. Comare Chiara consorte di Tomaso Ostricich.» Svetvinčenat, Births 1589–1646, image 58, read off the film on 13 September 2026.

Until that morning this archive dated the family here from 1666 — Colotta in October, Fioretta in November, two children to the font in one autumn. The 1628 entry puts a whole household here a generation and a half earlier, with a wife, a daughter and two godparents out of the parish's own gentry. It is a settled family, not an arrival.

It also reorders Istria. The earliest dated occurrences ran Labin 1615, Moncalvo di Pisino 1661, Svetvinčenat 1666. They now run Labin 1615, Svetvinčenat 1628, Moncalvo 1661 — and the sentence this archive wrote about the family reaching Svetvinčenat five years after Moncalvo has it backwards by thirty-three.

It is one entry, though. The 1589–1646 book holds one De Franceschi record in fifty-seven years; the 1568–1588 book and the 1581–1623 marriage book hold none. And nothing joins Francescho to the Nadal, Batta, Anto, Andrea and Gaspo of the 1660s and 70s — thirty-eight years is one long generation or two short ones, and no entry says which.

Across six of its nine parish books the parish yields 118 indexed records of the name, from 1628 to 1887. Nineteen are marriages, eight of them daughters marrying out. One name recurs at both ends: a Quelo stands godfather in 1628, and a Quelis — Andriana, wife of the canon Ottavio — stands godmother to Nardo's son in 1707.