Archive — Places that hold the original paper, and that will copy it for you if you write.
Vladimira Nazora 3, 52000 Pazin, Croatia www.dapa.hr
The Pazin State Archive holds the parish registers of central Istria. Two letters to this family, of 26 April and 24 June 2021, enclosed the certified copy of Josip Defranceschi's 1863 baptism and prints from the Status Animarum of Gallignana for the households of Antonius and of Giovanni Battista.
MKR župe Gračišće 1841–1899, entry 23 of 1863Status Animarum, DVD 18, ZM34K 217, M01071656Status Animarum, DVD 18, ZM34K 217, M01072071Church books ZM34K-214 and ZM34K-215 — Gologorica, Gračišće and Cerovlje
They charge for research and will search, certify and post a named record. The two 2021 requests cost 117 and 124 kuna including overseas postage.
Bad Arolsen, Germany arolsen-archives.org/en
The former International Tracing Service. Holds the wartime and displaced-persons records of some seventeen and a half million people, and 79 records under this surname — many more than the family's own copy of file D-1.505. Mined to the bottom in September 2026: the Reutlingen town list of Yugoslav nationals, the wartime sickness-fund cards in their original colour, the IRO care-and-maintenance file, and the whole of displaced-persons folder DP0758 — nineteen French occupation cards for the two brothers' households, holding Petar's photograph, the day Zdravko's family sailed for Australia, and Luise's statelessness.
DP folder DP0758, reference 03010101 05 070 — nineteen cards, IRO 148.901 and 148.902Counselling card, category CB, 28.4.51, with the entries of 22.7.49, 28.4.51 and 25.5.51Carte d'identité de personnes déplacées no. 30040, issued 27 November 1946 to Lujza DefranceskiTracing and documentation case no. 349.822, reference 06030302.0.349.822, 8 documents, 1954–1984 — withheld onlinePersonal file of DEFRANCESKI, PETAR, CM/1 files from Germany (3.2.1.1), 6 documents
Access requires accepting a declaration about sensitive personal data; the account holder must do that himself. Person rows in the search results are click handlers, not links, and the page images sit on a separate server that requires a referer header. The T/D tracing case is the one substantial thing still unread: eight documents spanning 1954 to 1984, withheld online for data protection and obtainable only by written request to Bad Arolsen.
Zagreb www.arhiv.hr
The Croatian State Archive. HDA 583 is the Pisino (Pazin) marriage register in which Carlo De Franceschi signs as a witness on 13 September 1842, giving his rank as I. R. Auscultans.
HDA 583, Pisino marriages 1842–43
Ledenice, Klenovica, Crikvenica, Bakar www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2040054
The baptism of Ana Kalanj at Ledenice on 3 January 1864; the baptism of Anton Rudolf at Klenovica on 20 January 1890, which gives the parents' place of origin as Gallignana in Istria; the marriage of Nodburga Defranceschi at Bakar on 27 February 1794.
Held as scans by the family.
Comune di San Daniele del Friuli and Comune di Concesio — atti di morte
Friuli and Brescia, Italy
Italian civil death registers: Pietro De Franceschi, mason, aged 44, in the civic hospital at San Daniele on 30 March 1895; Edoardo De Franceschi, former officer of Zara, aged 48, in the same hospital on 12 August 1899; Giovanni De Franceschi, aged three, at Concesio above Brescia on 15 July 1916.
San Daniele del Friuli, atti di morte no. 19 (1895) and no. 28 (1899)Concesio, atti di morte, parte II serie A (1916)
Italy www.projectancestry.com/archives-trieste-udine-pordenone-gorizia
A guide to what each holds. Two things in it bear directly on this archive. The Archivio di Stato di Trieste holds the Austro-Hungarian military records — Trieste recruitment lists, navy recruitment lists and draft cards with service records — and the civil registers of the province for 1924–44 including the municipalities ceded to Yugoslavia in 1947. The Archivio di Stato di Udine holds the «Ruolo della Popolazione», the population rolls of 1836 and 1865, which give for each household the head, the parents' names, religion, date and place of birth and date of marriage — for the province that contains Mione and Ovaro.
Ruolo della Popolazione, Udine province, 1836 and 1865ASTr — Austro-Hungarian military and navy recruitment lists and draft cardsArchivio di Stato di Gorizia — Libri dei fuochi (household registers) 1830–1956, and Ventilazioni ereditarie 1755–1850
Data-protected records open after 75 years unless you are directly related. The state archives do not issue civil certificates. Found through a resource list the family supplied.
archive.org archive.org/search?query=Piccolo+di+Trieste
The Trieste daily from 1881, issue by issue, with the full text indexed. It reported Istrian affairs closely, which is why it carries both the reception at Umago in August 1897 with the Seghetto band on the quay and the death notice of Count Giambattista de' Franceschi in November of the same year.
2 August 1897 — «la banda di Seghetto, propri dei signori de Franceschi»25 November 1897 — «La morte di un patriota»
Searched by pairing the surname with a place; the bare surname returns too much, including a modern namesake in Trieste. Much of the run remains unread here.
Bessborough Road, Kew, Richmond TW9 4DU, United Kingdom discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk
The catalogue of the British national archive, and of some 2,500 other British archives besides. It answers JSON to anybody, with no key and no account: discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/API/search/records?sps.searchQuery=<term>&sps.resultsPageSize=<n>, returning count and a records list carrying reference, title, coveringDates, heldBy and a description. It throttles: sustained querying starts answering HTTP 202 with an empty body, and the polite response is to back off, which this archive did.
Searched for the first time on 17 September 2026 and it holds nothing of this family — the sweep and what it means. Its limit matters as much as its reach: Discovery indexes what has been catalogued down to the item, and for merchant shipping that is largely the ship and the year, so a master's name is not findable there even when his certificate is at Kew.
Discovery API, sps.searchQuery — nine spellings of the surname, 17 September 2026Aquilone: 501 records, all Admiralty musters for HMS Aquilon«De Franceschi» 3 · «Dei Franceschi» 4 · Franceschi 19 · Francesch* 42 — none of this family
First queried 17 September 2026, after David asked whether this archive had ever looked at Kew. It had not — in a year of work, not once.
archives.isula.corsica archives.isula.corsica
The online reading room of the Corsican archives: état civil, Corsica christiana, the decennial tables and the notarial series, free and without an account. Six Cap Corse communes in scope for this archive — Tomino, Rogliano, Ersa, Centuri, Morsiglia and Barrettali — with registers of naissances, mariages, décès, baptêmes, sépultures and publications de mariage.
Archives de Corse — archives.isula.corsica, 10 September 202612 NUM 4186, Tomino 1802–181212 NUM 4187, Tomino 1813–1822
Free, and unsearchable by name. No module on the platform has a surname field; the registers are browsed by commune and year, image by image, and the viewer draws each page without a plain URL to fetch. It refuses a command-line client and opens normally in a browser — the door is open and the first page reads; turning the page is the unsolved part.
archivesenligne.meurthe-et-moselle.fr archivesenligne.meurthe-et-moselle.fr
Free digitised civil registration and census for the Lorraine département. It carried the only French line this archive has followed to a birth act: the censuses of Bénaménil (1936) and Thiébauménil (1911), the Thiébauménil decennial table 1873–1932, and the 1910 birth register.
Marie Defranceschi in Lorraine — the succession table run back to the birth act, 21 September 2026
Free and open. It is also where the spelling changed: a succession table naming Marie DEFRANCESKI was worked backwards through two censuses and a decennial table until the birth act itself appeared — spelling the name differently from the document that started the chase.
archivinformationssystem.at www.archivinformationssystem.at
The catalogue of the whole Austrian State Archives — Kriegsarchiv, Marine, Adelsarchiv, Hofkammer, Justiz — searchable by a free field search across every department, with no account. It is the single largest supplier of catalogue-level records to this archive: ninety-nine records, fifty-three of them the name, and twenty people now on the roster because of it.
Archivinformationssystem — the whole Austrian State Archives, searched by name for the first time, 20 September 2026The Austrian State Archives re-run, and the default operator that hides every DefranceschiThe Vienna catalogue searched again under the spellings the stem cannot reachThe Austrian catalogue's last two spellings
Free, public, and it defaults to an operator that hides this family. The field search offers four operators and starts on «starts with», which returns 43 records for «Franceschi» and none of the De- or Defranceschi. «Contains» is the setting that works — and it still cannot match a spelling with a k or a z, so five stems are needed to cover the family: Franceschi, Franceski, Franzeschi, Franzeski, ranđesk. The last two are empty. Catalogue only — no file has been ordered, and the Kriegsarchiv's EUR 45 search fee buys what this catalogue already names to the item.
arhinet.arhiv.hr arhinet.arhiv.hr
The national descriptive network of the Croatian archives, and on paper the catalogue that would cover every state archive in the country at once.
ARHiNET (arhinet.arhiv.hr), retried as a provider for the research map, 15 September 2026
It does not resolve, and has not on either attempt. Neither https://arhinet.arhiv.hr/ nor the plain-HTTP form answers at all — not a 403, not a redirect, no connection; ara.arhiv.hr is the same. Twice tried, twice nothing recorded. Pazin's own list stays the only Croatian archive catalogue in the research map, and it is the only one that admits which volumes are not digitised anywhere.
asudine.beniculturali.it www.asudine.beniculturali.it
The state archive for Friuli, and the holder of the Carnic notarial series. Notarile antico B. 2979 — Franceschi Gio. Batta, notary at Mione, protocols 1737–1783 — is the single most promising unread body of paper for the Carnic question, because a village notary's protocols name the households a register only baptises.
Archivio di Stato di Udine, Notarile antico B. 2979
Not yet requested. It needs a letter, not a search box.
collections.arolsen-archives.org collections.arolsen-archives.org
The online collections of the International Center on Nazi Persecution at Bad Arolsen — displaced-persons files, registrations and transport lists, free and without an account. It produced the Dignano and Bolzano documents, the 1949 sailing and the word «apatride», and, under the spelling this archive had not tried, a further body of records.
Arolsen Archives online — Anka Nera, and the 79 Defranceski recordsArolsen Archives — the 1949 sailing and the word «apatride»Arolsen Archives online collections, 21 September 2026
Free, and spelling-sensitive. It timed out on 10 September and answered on 21 September. Seventy-nine records stand under DEFRANCESKI; the -schi spelling is a different search again. A negative here is worth recording: Anka Nera returns nothing at all under Defranceski, and neither the Oreščanin nor the Geiger searches match her — seventeen Oreščanin records, fifty-five Geiger, none hers.
crikvenica.hr www.crikvenica.hr
The registry office holding the Crikvenica death register for 1943, which is the document that would settle one of this archive's open deaths.
Matični ured Crikvenica — death register 1943
Closed under the hundred-year rule and not public until the 2040s — but open to a direct descendant on request. A prijepis, the full transcript, must be asked for by name; the ordinary izvadak gives only date and place and would not answer the question. Letter drafted. Two further routes to the same fact: the parish death book, and the 1964 census of war victims at the Croatian State Archives.
dazd.hr www.dazd.hr
The state archive at Zadar, approached through its Prijamni ured (reception office) for the Dalmatian files.
Državni arhiv u Zadru (DAZD) — Prijamni ured
Not refused — a form is required, as at the other Croatian archives. «Molimo Vas da popunite zahtjev za traženu dokumentaciju. Već poslani mail ćemo priložiti zajedno s popunjenim zahtjevom.» — they will attach the original enquiry to the completed form, so the description of the file does not have to be written twice.
memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr
The French defence ministry's military personnel and casualty databases, together with the Grand Mémorial and the Légion d'honneur files — the obvious route into the French-side Defrance and Franceschi-Delonne names.
Mémoire des Hommes, Grand Mémorial, Base Léonore
Not searched. JavaScript applications with no reachable interface from here. Listed so that the gap is visible rather than silent.
museudaimigracao.org.br museudaimigracao.org.br
The Hospedaria de Imigrantes enrolment registers at São Paulo — the arrival record for the Brazilian cluster, and the natural companion to the Veneto departure region the My Maps gave.
Museu da Imigração / Hospedaria de Imigrantes, São Paulo, 21 September 2026
It was broken, and on 27 September 2026 it answers. Every query returned HTTP 500 on 21 September; six days later the same form returns 184 records for the surname stem. The rows are substantial, not an index stub: Nome, Sobrenome, Nacionalidade, Idade, Chegada (the arrival date), Parentesco (CHEFE for a household head, SOZINHA for a woman travelling alone), Família (a family number that groups a household across the register) and Livro. The family number is the valuable field — it is what turns a list of arrivals into households. Nothing has been harvested yet, and the 184 include Franceschini and other names the stem catches, which are a different surname and must be separated before anything is counted.
ppmhp.hr ppmhp.hr
The Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral at Rijeka — the obvious holder for anything on the Fiume shipmasters of this name.
Pomorski i povijesni muzej Hrvatskog primorja, Rijeka
The public search returns nothing for any spelling, and this is not a negative worth trusting. The interface is script-driven rather than searchable from here, and the museum holds 75,000 objects in 48 collections of which the digital fundus is a fraction. The museum should be written to.
recordsearch.naa.gov.au recordsearch.naa.gov.au
The free Australian federal archives catalogue, and the source that closed the question David asked about the child on the General M B Stewart: he is Anton Mario De Franceski, born 21 August 1944 at Reutlingen, Zdravko and Ruža's only child. Eight items of the name are catalogued, among them A11534, 58–60 (1948), the household file carrying all three dates of birth, and B44, V1978/151 and V1978/152, Zdravko and Ruža's naturalisations.
National Archives of Australia — RecordSearch, NameSearchNational Archives of Australia — are any of the eight items digitised?
Free to search, and none of the eight is digitised. All eight have to be ordered, and two are still marked «not yet examined», which means an access decision before a copy. Catalogue-level certainty, file-level nothing — the distinction this archive keeps insisting on, in its clearest form.
stadtarchiv.reutlingen.de stadtarchiv.reutlingen.de
Reutlingen's city archive and its photograph database, worked for the German years. It identified Hermann Sauer as a motor-vehicle firm at the Südbahnhof / Eninger Landstraße 79, holding the MAN agency and running a filling station in the Marktstraße, and photographed the Sauer brothers' Autohaus in the Tübinger Straße in 1935.
Stadtarchiv Reutlingen — photograph database
Free, and it answers about places and firms rather than people. This is the kind of source that turns a line on a form — an employer, a street — into somewhere that can be seen.
web.archive.org web.archive.org
Used for one job: to save the family's own Google Site at defranceski.com before it is switched off. A CDX query for every URL under that host returned two successful captures — the site root of 1 January 2022 and the home page of 11 July 2025.
The Wayback Machine — everything under sites.google.com/defranceski.com
Nearly empty, and now filled. Family Trees, The People, The Places, The Map and The Name were never captured by any crawler. The lesson generalises: a site nobody links to is a site the Wayback Machine has not got, and waiting for it to have done the job is not a preservation plan.
chan.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr chan.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr
The series in which the Napoleonic titles of Defrance and of Franceschi-Delonne are registered — the French ennoblements that the old site pointed at and that bear on the arms question.
Archives nationales — BB/29, First Empire letters patent
Named, not read. The old catalogue host is superseded by the Salle des inventaires virtuelle and the link is kept as the citation the old site gave.
patrimonioculturale.regione.fvg.it www.patrimonioculturale.regione.fvg.it
The regional cultural-heritage catalogue for Friuli Venezia Giulia. It holds drawings connected to this family's historians — illustrations for «L'Istria nobilissima», material around Caprin's «Il Trecento a Trieste» (1897), and a headpiece drawn for Camillo's Arcadia essay of 1929–30.
Patrimonio culturale FVG — the drawings
Free, and only half read. The individual sheet records remain unread.
records.nsw.gov.au www.records.nsw.gov.au
The New South Wales passenger indexes, free to search. They gave the earliest Australian appearance of the name: an arrival on 6 January 1893 — a sailor passing through, not an emigrant.
NSW State Archives — passenger lists
Free, and it fixes a date this archive had wrong by two generations. The surname reaches Australia in 1893 at sea, and does not settle there for another fifty-seven years.
villaruzic.hr www.villaruzic.hr
A private Rijeka archive and house museum, approached over the Hotel Therapia at Crikvenica — where Hedviga Blažević is said to have sung, and to have met Ivan Defranceski.
Hotel Kvarner Palace, Crikvenica — the former Hotel Therapia
A full and generous answer, and the answer is that the paper is gone. Martina Riedl of the Kvarner Palace — the former Therapia, Austrian-owned since 2004 — replies that almost nothing survives from the period asked about. The story stands where it stood: as testimony, uncorroborated, and now with the hotel's own archive formally eliminated as a route to it.
Portal — Open gateways to whole bodies of scholarship or press — free, and the ones that actually let this archive in.
hrcak.srce.hr hrcak.srce.hr
Free, open, and the place where Croatian scholarship on this family actually lives. A search for «De Franceschi» returns twenty-three items including the three NSK collection papers, the Kobler correspondence in three parts, and reviews of Camillo's history of the County of Pazin in its 2023 Croatian translation. «Gologorica» returns seven, «Gračišće» thirteen — among them the parish chronicle, the urban development of the town, the altar of the Madonna of Mercy, and the last Habsburg emperor's visit on 6 April 1918.
Search «De Franceschi» with the space, not «Defranceschi» — the fused spelling returns mostly Croatian rheumatology papers by an unrelated co-author. Hrčak was reachable directly where ResearchGate, Geneanet and WikiTree all served this session a bot check. Searched exhaustively for «franceschi» in September 2026: fourteen distinct articles, listed on the search register.
anno.onb.ac.at · data.onb.ac.at anno.onb.ac.at/anno-suche
Full-text searchable historic Austrian newspapers, free and without registration. Istria was Austrian until 1918, so the Istrian press is in it. A search for «Defranceschi» returns 722 issues. Narrowing works: «"De Franceschi" Gallignana» returns eight, «"De Franceschi" Moncalvo» six, «"De Franceschi" Gologorica» three, and «"de Franceschi" Pisino» a hundred and thirteen. Worked through in September 2026 for the Gallignana, Moncalvo and Gologorica sets; the Pisino set is unread.
722 issues on «Defranceschi»8 issues pairing «De Franceschi» with Gallignana, 1893–1901«L'Eco di Pola», 14 January 1893 — Carlo's career obituary«Il giovine Pensiero», 18 January 1893 — his birth, and Don Ramiro's letter from Pisino«Il giovine Pensiero», 25 January 1893 — the humble cemetery of Moncalvo«Il Popolo Istriano», January 1895 — the riot at Gallignana«Naša Sloga», 13 April 1900 and 25 March 1909 — the Croatian paper on Gologorica
The search interface is an Angular application, but it is backed by a plain JSON endpoint, and page images come from the library's own IIIF service without a bot check — so issues can be read at full resolution. The legacy page viewer sits behind a Cloudflare challenge and was left alone. Reading is by OCR run on the page images. The engine available here has no Italian model, so it is being run in English on Italian type: it locates a passage reliably and transcribes it imperfectly. Quotations taken from ANNO on this site are marked as OCR readings, and any word the scan broke is bracketed rather than guessed. Still to do: «"de Franceschi" Pisino», 113 issues. The «Naša Sloga» issues that matter have now been read: where the presentation manifest returns 404 the IIIF image endpoint still serves the pages, which is how 25 March 1909 was recovered.
data.onb.ac.at is ANNO's permalink host, not a second body. An issue opens at http://data.onb.ac.at/ANNO/<id> — edp18870903 is L'Eco di Pola of 3 September 1887, igp18960111 Il giovine Pensiero of 11 January 1896. The Il giovine Pensiero hits cluster in January across 1893, 1894, 1895 and 1896, which looks like an annual notice rather than four stories — the kind of pattern a hit count hides and a date list shows.
dlib.si www.dlib.si
Free and open, and it holds runs of the Austrian Littoral periodicals — including Kandler's «L'Istria» of 1846–52, which Irma Huić cites for Gračišće. A surname search returns Slovenian notices of the family's scholarship: Camillo's «Chartularium Piranense», his «I castelli della Val d'Arsa», and a review of Carlo's history of Istria.
Reached without a bot check. Its value here is the periodicals rather than the notices; L'Istria has not yet been read for this family.
archive.org archive.org/search?query=Defranceschi&sin=TXT
Not only the scanned books. The Archive's full-text index reaches inside them, and inside long runs of newspapers and journals that matter here: «Il Piccolo» of Trieste from 1881, «La Patria del Friuli» and the «Giornale di Udine» for Carnia, and the complete «Atti del Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno», the scholarly journal of Istrian history. Searching the surname alone returns 2,435 documents and is useless; paired with a place it becomes a finding aid.
«Defranceschi» + Gallignana — 92 documents«De Franceschi» + Gologorica — 48 documents«Defranceschi» + Mione — 181 documents«Defranceski» — 117 documents
Swept in September 2026. The search endpoint behind the site answers plain requests, so the sweep can be run by term and by place rather than page by page. Much of what the bare surname returns is a modern Italian mathematician and OCR noise; every hit used here was opened and read.
hungaricana.hu · free, no account hungaricana.hu/en
Free and unblocked, with full-text OCR across the Hungarian state accounts, the parliamentary papers, the Austro-Hungarian military and naval rank lists, and the National Archives of Hungary map and plan collection. First used here on 13 September 2026, and it should have been used years ago: Fiume and Bakar were Hungarian crown land, so the officials of those two towns are in Hungarian state records and not in Austrian or Croatian ones.
263 hits on the surname. It is the source that turned the Regii of the 1849 Bakar baptism from a guess into a family of Habsburg maritime officials.
Képviselőházi irományok, 1872, XV. kötet, 1872-650, p. 106 — Defranceschi Ferencz révkapitányÁllami zárszámadás 1888, 1894, 1898, 1900 — Defranceschi Francziska, kegydíjMNL T 62 No 1642, orig. E 96 Tricesimalia 1827, 4:51 — Bauriss, Buccari salt office, by Anton DefranceschiMilitärschematismus des österreichischen Kaiserthumes, Wien 1854, 1855, 1856 — Defranceschi Valentin, Marine-Direktion PolaRangs- und Eintheilungs-Liste der k. u. k. Kriegs-Marine, 1894–1909 — Defranceschi Julius
Icarus — International Centre for Archival Research, Vienna data.matricula-online.eu
Digitised parish registers for the German, Austrian, Slovenian, Luxembourgish, Swiss and South Tyrolean churches. It holds no Croatian registers at all, so Senj and Karlobag are out of reach here, and its Italian section is Bozen-Brixen only, so Carnia is too. It cannot be searched by surname — the search is by place and diocese. Its value to this archive is the Koper diocese, whose 198 parishes include Šturje in the Vipava valley.
Koper diocese, 198 parishes including Šturje, Ajdovščina, Vipava, Podnanos, Col, Budanje, Vrhpolje
Index — Aggregated name indexes: useful for finding a person, never sufficient for proving one.
United States vital records, aggregated sortedbyname.com/letter_d/defranceschi/index_1.html
127 entries drawn from the Social Security NUMIDENT and death files, state marriage and death indexes released through ReclaimTheRecords, and Ellis Island passenger manifests. Three American clusters: an Istrian one in New York, a Friulian one at Torrington and Waterbury in Connecticut, and a coal-country one in Harrison County, West Virginia. The New York group includes Basilio Defranceschi and his son Dario, born at Gallignana in 1937 — the first family this archive can trace from Gračišće to America.
Dario Defranceschi, b. 26 September 1937 at Gallignana, son of Basilio and Maria L. Rovina, d. 29 January 1991Basilio Defranceschi, b. 29 September 1909, d. 15 June 1994, New YorkJoseph Defranceschi, b. 12 March 1892 at Trieste, son of Anthony and Makia Valhart
Free. Cloudflare-protected against plain fetching; it loads normally in a browser. No page exists for the Defranceski spelling.
cemla.com cemla.com/buscador
The index of arrivals at Buenos Aires, and the obvious first door for the Argentine branch of the diaspora.
CEMLA (Argentine immigration) — passenger records
Blocked by a bot check, which has not been circumvented and will not be. The link is kept because the body is real and the block is itself the finding: the Argentine arrivals remain unsearched, not searched and empty.
ciseionline.it www.ciseionline.it
The Genoa emigration database, cited across the literature as the route into Italian departures for Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada and Australia.
CISEI — Centro Internazionale Studi Emigrazione Italiana
Gone. cisei.it is now a parked domain serving an ad redirect; the database is off the open web and every citation to it in the literature is stale. Recorded so that nobody follows those citations again.
corsicagenealogie.com www.corsicagenealogie.com
A Corsican genealogical society's index to the registers of 226 communes, used to test whether the Corsican Defranceschi are connected to this family.
Corsican records — RHFC register index, 226 communes
They are not, and that is the finding. Four Defranceschi baptisms at Tomino in Cap Corse 1843–56, a second cluster at Levie and Sartène in the far south, and 132 Defranceschi births in the whole of France 1891–1990. Nothing whatever connects them to this family, and the honest position is that these are unrelated houses sharing a patronymic.
familyhistory.bdm.qld.gov.au www.familyhistory.bdm.qld.gov.au
The free historical index to the Queensland civil register, searched to test whether any of the Australian arrivals went north.
Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages — historical index
Nothing, under any spelling, in 167 years of the Queensland register. DEFRANCESKI zero; DEFRANCESCHI zero; FRANCESCHI two, and neither is this family — Joseph Franceschi, who married Menichina Amedei in 1877, and Jacques Ange Franceschi, a Corsican-French name. A strong negative: the index is complete for the period and the controls behave.
findmypast.co.uk www.findmypast.co.uk
A paid British index, and after the Austrian catalogue the most productive single source this archive has used. It holds the American half of the family in documents — the 1930 census with three of the Eleven in one Brooklyn flat, Joseph's certificate of arrival (Martha Washington, out of Trieste, 11 October 1910, aged eighteen), Albina's 1928 petition in her own words («I emigrated from Genoa … on the vessel Conte Rosso»), and Frank Schinkopan's 1920 declaration giving his birth at Pisino. Its British newspapers hold a whole chapter nobody knew was there: between 1865 and 1878 a master of this name commands Austrian ships in the Black Sea grain and Bristol Channel coal trades — the Natalia, the Rachel, the Peppina Luigia, the Aquilone.
Findmypast — Travel & Migration, surname «defranceschi»Findmypast — full subscription, every category, every spellingFindmypast — keyword «Gallignana», «Pedena», «Pisino»Findmypast — the images, through the IIIF image serviceFindmypast British & Irish NewspapersEngland & Wales censuses 1841–1921 — «an old Cardiff family», testedThe 270 passenger transcriptsThe esodo arrivals, 1947–1957
Paid. David took a one-month full subscription on 16 September 2026, and it ends. Transcripts and images are behind it; nothing is bought record by record. Its negatives are as useful as its hits: «Gallignana» returns ten records in the whole database and three are this family's; «Gallignana» in the British newspapers returns zero; the deaths of Bruno and Gerda are not in it, so their dates stay on the gravestone and the naturalisation papers. «Pisino» returns 915 articles and every one is OCR noise — «early rising» mis-set, and a brand of stove polish.
geni.com www.geni.com
A collaborative tree site, carrying the Obitelj Franceschi / de Franceschi noble-family project that David's old site linked to.
Geni — the Obitelj Franceschi noble-family project
Blocked by Incapsula bot protection, not circumvented. The project is named here because the old site pointed at it; none of it has been read, and nothing in this archive rests on it.
gradskagroblja.hr www.gradskagroblja.hr
Zagreb's municipal cemetery register, free and searchable, and unusually informative: thirteen burials of the name, some carrying the parents' names. Milan Defrančeski (d. 2001, aged 78) and Dragutin (d. 2004, aged 79) are entered as children of «GRGO I MARIJA» and «MARIJA I GRGA» — two brothers naming the same father, and that father is the Grga of David's old notes.
Gradska groblja Zagreb — the city burial register
Free and open. A burial register that names parents does work a death index cannot, and this one closed a relationship rather than merely recording a death.
jusp-jasenovac.hr www.jusp-jasenovac.hr
The Jasenovac Memorial Site's published list of named victims of the Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška camps, free and searchable by surname. Searched on the surname and on both of Anka's married names.
JUSP Jasenovac — the named victims list, on the surname and on both married names
Nobody of this name is in it, in any spelling, and Anka is not in it under either married name. Defranceschi 0, Defranceski 0. A negative that had to be established rather than assumed, and one this archive would rather have stated than left hanging over a family that lost people in those years.
wikitree.com www.wikitree.com
A collaborative single-tree site, approached for profiles under this surname.
WikiTree — profile search
Blocked by a bot check, not circumvented.
natiintrentino.it www.natiintrentino.it
The Trentino provincial index of parish baptisms, which would cover the Trentino spellings of the name.
Nati in Trentino
Behind an operator login — «accesso dell'operatore» — and the public site search returns «Nessun risultato». Not circumvented. A written request to the Servizio coesione territoriale at Trento is the route.
Publication — Books, articles and dissertations — including several written by members of this family.
Parenzo, 1879 archive.org/details/listrianotestor00frangoog
The family's own historian on his own country: 524 pages, published at Parenzo by Gaetano Coana and dedicated «alla gioventù dell'Istria». Read here end to end in September 2026 from the Internet Archive's scan. It is the source for the Seget estate's chain of owners and the Cretan origin of that branch, for the whole shape of the diocese of Pedena in which Gallignana and Gologorica sat, and for the 1764 roll of colonist families on the Seget lands. It is also, and importantly, silent about Carnia.
p. 363 — the Seghetto and Giuba estate, Cuchich 1604, Valier 1623, and the de Franceschi «emigrata dall'isola di Candia»p. 363–364, footnote 3 — Giambattista de Franceschi, deputy to the Imperial Council, and the roll of 30 April 1764p. 484 — the parishes of the diocese of Pedena, and the chapter at Gallignana with its archpriestp. 173 — the disputed appointment to the pieve of Gallignana, 1324–1335p. 328–329 — the siege of Gallignana, May 1617p. 205 — Francesco Claj, priest of Gallignana, and the Croatian translations, 1 January 1563
Free and complete online, which the archive had not realised. The OCR text layer is poor — accents garbled, words split at line ends, footnotes badly mangled — so page references above are approximate to the printed pagination shown in the scan, and anyone quoting should open the image.
«Lettere di Carlo De Franceschi a Giovanni Kobler»
Atti e Memorie della Società Istriana, 1928
The letters in which Carlo, about 1873, sets out what his family believed about itself: that it came from Carnia and settled in Istria «intorno al 1700»; that De Franceschi still lived at Mione and Muina; that his trisavolo Giambattista built the 1711 house at Gologorica; and the blazon of the family arms.
The single most important narrative source in this archive.
Held. A copy is in this project's source
library: texts/1978 Kobler - Memorie per la storia della citta di Fiume (Atti Rovigno 3) FULL TEXT.txt
Camillo De Franceschi, «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino»
ed. Carlo de Franceschi, Venice 1964
Carlo's son on the county the family lived in — still the standard work. With his editions of the Labin statutes, the Piran chartulary and «Gli Artizoni di Parenzo».
Some of the primary sources Camillo used were destroyed in the Second World War and its aftermath. For those documents his articles are now the only witness.
Unione degli Istriani www.unioneistriani.it
The armorial of Venezia Giulia. Its entry «Franceschi (De) — Pisino, Moncalvo, Pola» names Carlo and Camillo and gives the family's arms; a separate entry covers the Seghetto, Capodistria and Umago branch, and others the Capodistria and Ližnjan families.
Blasonario_D.pdfBlasonario_F.pdf
The blazon of the Moncalvo arms is credited to «(C. de F.)» — Carlo himself — with Benedetti and de Totto supplying the tinctures. It formalises his testimony rather than confirming it independently.
Petar Puhmajer, «Stancija de Franceschi u Segetu kod Umaga»
Ministarstvo kulture RH, Zagreb 2019, ISBN 978-953-312-048-5
The conservation monograph on the Seget estate: how it was bought from the Valier in 1720, how the house was built and rebuilt, and the two Istrian branches.
Held. A copy is in this project's source
library: articles/2015 Prostor 23 - (Puhmajer, Seget stancija).pdf
storia&ricerca, issue 134, 23 May 2020, Rijeka www.lavoce.hr
The Italian-language daily of Rijeka on the Seget estate: the county in Crete, the 1538 defence of Calus, Lemiores and Sabionera, the shipwreck of 1669, the hundred thousand ducats of 1716, the library of four thousand volumes and its destruction, and the arms on the tympanum. Photographs by Gianfranco Abrami.
Where it and the Blasonario disagree on a date, the armorial is preferred and the difference is stated.
Deborah Howard, «Titian's Portraits of Grand Chancellor Andrea de' Franceschi»
The life of Andrea de' Franceschi, born 1473, Grand Chancellor of Venice from 15 September 1529 until his death in 1552, buried at Santi Giovanni e Paolo — his embassies, his will and its five codicils, and the Titian portraits he left his nephew.
Josip Banić, «Venetian Istria in the Embrace of a Nascent Dominium (c. 1381 – c. 1470)»
Doctoral dissertation, Central European University, 2021
A modern historian's verdict on Camillo: one of three figures who «tower» over Istrian medieval studies, and the only surviving witness to sources lost in the war. Quotes Egidio Ivetic that for medieval Istria one must rely on Benussi, Carlo De Franceschi and De Vergottini.
Rovinj www.crsrv.org
Catalogues the paintings in the chapel of Stancija Seghetto — formerly Villa De Franceschi — and records their poor condition; and a Pentecost whose patron Antonio Alisi identified as «un de Franceschi nobile di Seghetto».
Libellarium 15 (2), 2024, pp. 25–46 — University of Zadar doi.org/10.15291/libellarium.4520
The paper that told this archive its subject's library still exists. Written by the librarian of the Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica in Zagreb who catalogued the collection. It establishes that the books and family archive of the De Franceschi of Gologorica reached the NSK after 1945, stood unprocessed for over fifty years, and now hold 2,480 catalogued items under the shelfmark PDF — Poklon De Franceschi — together with fourteen boxes and seven folders of family archive containing Carlo's and Camillo's manuscript drafts, the family correspondence, estate papers, photographs and an album.
2,480 items: 138 serials and 2,341 monographs, 1503–1945«pronađena izbačena iz ormara i razbacana po kući» — found in 1945 thrown out of the cupboards and scattered about the houseGiulio De Franceschi, painter, Rijeka 1856 – Gologorica 1942Seventeen stamped ex libris of Tomaso Luciani (Labin 1818 – Venice 1894)217 of 2,341 books carry any ownership mark — the family used signatures, never a bookplate
Open access and free. The ResearchGate copy is behind a bot check; the journal's own PDF at morepress.unizd.hr is not. In Croatian, with an English abstract.
Held. A copy is in this project's source
library: articles/2024 Marin - Oznake vlasnistva Knjiznica obitelji De Franceschi, Libellarium 15(2).pdf
Arhivski vjesnik 67 (2024), pp. 189–211 doi.org/10.36506/av.67.7
The published inventory of the family archive, shelfmark PDF 2.337 — fourteen boxes and nine folders, described box by box by the three librarians who arranged them. It is the document this archive was about to write to Zagreb to ask for. Among what it lists: the household accounts of Gologorica for 1925–26 and 1929–30; a lease of the second floor of the house to the parish priest in 1907; the photograph album; five boxes of correspondence including Carlo's «Lettere archeologiche a Pietro Kandler»; the personal papers of Carlo, Camillo, Gian Pietro and Giulio; and the architect's plan of the family chapel in the cemetery at Gologorica.
Shelfmark PDF 2.337 — 14 boxes and 9 folders, material from the 18th century to 1943Box 6 — the photograph album, and «Maria De Franceschi, Parenzo, 187[?]»Boxes 7–11 — «Lettere archeologiche a Pietro Kandler»; Camillo to his sister Faustina, 1886–1893Box 12 — «Cappella della famiglia di Carlo de Franceschi nel cimitero di Moncalvo di Pisino», by the architect Giuseppe HirschFolder 6 — «Nelle fauste occasioni delle nozze Maria De Franceschi — Luigi Salamon, Pola, 25 ottobre 1897»
Open access at ojs.srce.hr. Croatian, with an English abstract. Found through Crossref after ResearchGate refused this session.
Held. A copy is in this project's source
library: archives/2024 Marin Jurisic Matijaca - Arhiv obitelji De Franceschi NSK Zagreb, Arhivski vjesnik 67.pdf
Vjesnik historijskih arhiva u Rijeci i Pazinu XXI (1977), XXII (1978), and part III hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/187555
Kobler's side of the correspondence — the letters Carlo was answering — edited and published in three parts. Sixteen years of letters between two men who, Jelinčić notes, never managed to meet. It contains Kobler's inventory of the Defranceschi households of Fiume, his question «È forse Lei un Discendente?», and the record of Valentino Defranceschi, come from Carnia and made a citizen of Fiume in 1739.
Valentino Defranceschi, «venuto dalla Carnia», citizen of Fiume 1739; the Chapel of St Helen, 1764; his tomb in the Duomo, epigraph 1785Giovanni Antonio De Franceschi, doctor of law and municipal chancellor, d. 1727Giovanni Battista Defranceschi, come from the County of Pisino about 1740
Open access on Hrčak, free. Italian letters with a Croatian editorial apparatus.
Held. A copy is in this project's source
library: articles/1977, 1978 and 1981 Jelincic - Korespondencija Kobler-De Franceschi I-III, VHARP 21, 22, 24.pdf
Vjesnik istarskog arhiva 32 hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/494160
The parish chronicle of Gologorica for 1892–1918, as kept by the parish priest Ljudevit Žváček — on the national-political, moral-religious, economic-social and ethnographic life of the village. Žváček is the same priest to whom Giulio and Camillo de Franceschi let the second floor of their house in 1907. Croatian, with Italian and English versions of the article.
Open access on Hrčak — but Hrčak serves a «Confirm you're not a robot» check to this archive's browser and HTTP 418 to a fetcher, so it has NOT been downloaded. ⚠ This entry previously claimed the PDF was held at articles/…; there is no such file and no such directory. Corrected 29 September 2026. It is a click for a person and it covers 1892–1918, which is exactly the window item 160 needs.
Miroslav Bertoša, «Gologorički De Franceschi: između etosa i etnosa»
in «Etos i etnos zavičaja», Čakavski sabor, Pula – Rijeka 1985, pp. 177–253
Seventy-six pages on the De Franceschi of Gologorica by one of Croatia's leading historians of Istria — «between ethos and ethnos», on a family that was Friulian-Carnian in origin and Italian-national in politics, in a village that was Croatian in speech. It is the standing scholarly account of the household this archive's Gologorica registers reconstruct, and it is the source Trogrlić leans on for the statement that the family settled there in the seventeenth century.
«furlansko-karnijske obitelji De Franceschi, koja se naselila u Gologoricu još u 17. st.» — quoted by Trogrlić«Wallungen der Akkulturation» in the second half of the 19th century — Bertoša's conclusion, as reported by Daniela Simon (2024), who points to pp. 225 and 228
Still not read by this archive. It is a 1985 book chapter and not online; it would have to come from a Croatian library or by interlibrary loan. Daniela Simon's 2024 monograph cites it as «Bertoša, Miroslav: Etos i etnos zavičaja, Pula/Rijeka 1985, S. 177–253, insb. S. 225, 228», which is the sharpest pointer we have to the pages that matter. It remains the most important single thing still unread.
Prostor 23 (2015) 2, pp. 208–221 — Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/220895
The first study anyone has made of how Gračišće grew — the family's own parish. It locates the bishop of Pedena's palace in the village, and the Salamon palace built facing it; and its source list points at the Franciscan cadastre of Gallignana of about 1820 at Trieste, and at the published urbaria of the County of Pazin of 1498 and the sixteenth century.
«Gotovo istovremeno nasuprot biskupskoj rezidenciji gradi se palača Salamon»ASTr, Catasto franceschino, Distretto di Pisino, Comune di Gallignana d'Istria, foglio IV sezione IV
Open access on Hrčak. Its Franceschi citations are all to Carlo's book of 1879 and Camillo's of 1964.
Croatica Christiana Periodica IV (1980), no. 6 archive.org/details/izvjestaji_picanskih_biskupa_svetoj_stolici_1589-1780-ivan_grah_1980
Every report the bishops of Pićan (Pedena) sent to Rome between 1589 and 1780, summarised from the Vatican archive. Pedena was the diocese of Gallignana and Gologorica, and the bishop was the temporal lord of Gologorica from about 1600. The reports give the lordship, the colonus tenants and what was done to them, the diocese's revenue, the names and ages of the clergy, and the replacement of the Glagolitic liturgy with Latin.
Bishop Zara, 1606 and 1614 — lordship of Gologorica «lately» acquiredBishop Aldrago, 1770s — «gospodar Gologorice, Škopljaka i Tupljaka»1656 and 1661 — Juraj Kukurin, parish priest of Gologorica, aged 52The fifteen colonus families of Tupljak, sold for sixty florins of tax
Free full text on the Internet Archive. The De Franceschi in its footnotes are Carlo and Camillo, cited as authorities; no member of this family appears in the text itself.
Udine, Forum, 2010 archive.org/details/ferigo-le-cifre-le-anime
The collected demographic history of Carnia by the historian who did the work on its migration. It quotes the headmen's return of 1679 in full — the document this archive's whole Carnia argument rests on — and states that the men listed in it are weavers. It also traces the «strada dei furlani» into Istria from a weaver's-shop purchase at Montona in 1511 and a Carnian's will dictated at Pedena in 1540.
p. 100 — «da Mione, Zuane De Franceschi con un suo fiolo, Zuane d'Erman: questi tre nell'Istria, luogo imperiale»«onde dire cargnel in Istria equivaleva a dire tessitore»The 1679 return covers only the imperial county and undercounts
Free full text on the Internet Archive. Ferigo died in 2007; this is the posthumous collection.
Prace Komisji Językowej nr 17, Polska Akademja Umiejętności, Kraków 1930 archive.org/details/kpbc.umk.pl.Magazyn_236_09_HD_007_181344
A dialect atlas of Slavic Istria with six maps, made by a Polish Slavist in the 1920s. Both of this family's parishes are survey points: Gologorica as I, 3 and Gračišće as I, 2, a — different dialect groups. It records actual words from each. It also states, against the assumption this archive had been carrying, that Moncalvo is the older name of Gologorica and the Slavic name replaced it around 1102.
Gologorica (Moncalvo di Pisino I 3) — pp. 27, 49, 60, 68–9, 72, 130Gračišće (Gallignana I 2a) — pp. 6, 18, 51, 60–3, 65–6, 131p. 130 — «nazwę Gologorica zamiast dawniejszej Moncalvo»The Čepić dialect wedge, cut off from its centre by the Istro-Romanian villages
Free on the Internet Archive, from the Toruń university library copy. Written in Polish; the dialect data are in Małecki's own phonetic transcription and are quoted here as printed.
Rovinj–Rovigno / Trieste, 1970– ; 53 volumes archive.org/search?query=%22Centro+di+ricerche+storiche%22+Rovigno
The scholarly journal of Istrian history, published by the Italian research centre at Rovinj. The complete run from 1970 to 2024 is free on the Internet Archive, along with the monographs of the Collana degli Atti. It edits and prints archival material — parish registers, cadastres, town statutes — as well as articles, which is why a marriage entry from Valle in 1795 naming a De Franceschi of Gologorizza is findable in it.
vol. 3 (1972) — the registers of Valle; the marriage of Piero De Franceschi of Gollogorizza and Anna Bembo, 22 January 1795vol. 3 (1972) — Moncalvo as a nineteenth-century name for Gologorizza, and the confusion with Golaš near Vallevol. 4 (1973) — Cervani and Ettore De Franceschi on depopulation in Venetian Istriavol. 15 (1997) — «La popolazione dell'Istria nell'età moderna»
Downloaded in full (53 volumes, about 75 MB of text) and searched in September 2026. The bulk of «De Franceschi» hits are citations of Carlo and of his son Camillo as authorities; the scan reported here filtered those out and looked only for the surname standing near this family's places.
Atti del Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno, vol. XXXIV (2004), pp. 473–494 archive.org/details/AttiRovigno34-2004
Twenty-two pages on the exact migration this family made, built from the parish and notarial books in the state archive at Pazin. It names the Cargnelli, distinguishes the pedlars from the home weavers, shows them buying vineyards in the eighteenth century and being written down as «D.no» for the first time — and lists a Dominus Vittorio De Franceschi among the Carnian landowners of Sanvincenti.
«D.no Vittorio De Franceschi, D.no Valentin Lupieri, D.no Antonio Fabris» — Sanvincenti, later 18th c.The D.no title as a mark of new stratification among Carnian immigrantsDescendants of Gio. Batta Giorgis of Mione still at San Pietro in Selve in 1945
Free on the Internet Archive as part of the complete run of the Atti.
Collana degli Atti del Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno, n. 15 (1997), 450 pp. archive.org/details/RovignoAtti-15-1997
The standard demographic history of early-modern Istria, counting hearths province by province from 1508. It gives Gallignana at a hundred and fifty hearths in 1508 — equal largest in the Habsburg county with Pisino — the collapse of the 1520s, and the trebling by the urbarium of 1571 that is the shape of the repopulation.
1508 hearth count — Gallignana and Pisino, 150 hearths each1531 — Pisino down from 150 to 861571 urbarium — Gallignana 258 families, Pedena 60 to nearly 2001510 and 1615–17 — Gallignana holds against Venice both times
Free on the Internet Archive. The underlying hearth lists and urbaria are Ivetic's sources; none has been consulted directly here.
Rovinj–Rovigno, 1991– archive.org/details/LaRicerca42-43
The centre's bulletin, shorter and more local than the Atti. Numbers 42–43 of December 2004 carry a survey of the noble estates of the Umago country, half of it on the de Franceschi of Seghetto, built from the archives of Trieste, Pazin and Rijeka: the Venetian war pension of 1674, the walled estate, the library of three thousand volumes, the tenants' brass band, the brickworks that stamped its bricks, and the tomb with the family arms in the cemetery at Umago.
nn. 42–43 (2004) — the de Franceschi of Seghetton. 60 (2011) — the Vinodol chamber administration seated at Cirquenizzan. 67 (2015) — the reprint of Joso Defranceski's book on the war camps
Free on the Internet Archive.
Histoire Bd. 218, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2024 — open access, CC BY www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839471548.pdf
A monograph on cultural hybridity in Istria in exactly the decades this family's last Istrian generation lived through, built largely on «Naša Sloga» and on the Trieste and Pazin archives. It gives the scholarly account of Carlo De Franceschi's politics, of his son Camillo's, and of Giovanni Battista de Franceschi's three terms in the Vienna parliament — including a Croatian Party demand that his 1885 election be annulled.
Carlo as the first to warn that the Istrian Slavs sought political realisation, and lifelong for their «necessary and unavoidable assimilation»The 1848 interpellation for Italian as the sole official and school languageKlana, May 1870 — the relief money taken back to the LandesausschussJohann de Franceschi in the Reichsrat 1873–79, 1879–85, 1885–91The demand to annul the Vodnjan election of 22 May 1885 — AST-LDL-AP (1891) fasc. 138Bertoša 1985 on Gologorica, pp. 177–253, esp. 225 and 228
Free from the publisher as a PDF under a Creative Commons licence. Written in German. Brought to this archive's attention by the family, September 2026.
Held. A copy is in this project's source
library: printed/2024 Simon Daniela - Die bedrohte Ordnung der Vielfalt (open access).pdf
Caracas 2002, revised 2012; on ResearchGate www.researchgate.net/publication/317624821
A Venezuelan historian's history of the Corsican Franceschi of Ersa in Cap Corse, from Pietro Franceschi (1694–1771) to the emigration to Venezuela by way of the French Caribbean. Ninety pages, and not one line of it touches Istria — which is what makes it the answer to the Corsica marker on the family's own map.
Rovinj 2009 crsrv.org
Cites Camillo De Franceschi throughout as the authority on Pula, and yields his Pula bibliography — including «Testamenti polesani del secolo XV con alcuni cenni sulle antiche casate patrizie di Pola», sixteen fifteenth-century wills he transcribed.
«Istra iz pera Nobilea» — Pietro Nobile's Istrian drawings
Croatia, exhibition and study volume
Camillo De Franceschi bought the Nobile drawings for the Provincial Library in 1934 and 1941 from heirs at Koper; Giulio De Franceschi appears as an illustrator of monuments; and the author reports finding the ex libris «De Franceschi – Seghetto» on books in that library's holdings — the Seget house's own library.
Istra kroz stoljeća I/1, Pula–Rijeka 1979; full text at idoc.pub idoc.pub/documents/krizman-1979-anticka-svjedocanstva-o-istri-6nq981771plw
Every Greek and Latin writer who mentions Istria, with commentary. Cites Carlo De Franceschi eleven times and places the ancient Alùon between Pićan and Gologorica.
Sveučilište u Splitu, Filozofski fakultet, 2025; open access repozitorij.ffst.unist.hr/islandora/object/ffst:5139
The best single study of the Dalmatian family: origins, genealogy to the eighteenth century, noble status, arms, the conquest of Imotski, and the Perinuša and Opačac estates.
Ferdinand Šišić, «An Abridged Political History of Rieka (Fiume)»
Imprimerie Graphique, Paris 1919
Written for the Paris Peace Conference, with a documentary appendix of Fiume's election papers — including the protocol of 20 April 1871 signed «Frco Defranceschi».
«Građevinar» 64 (2012) 6, pp. 515–522 hrcak.srce.hr
An architectural survey of Gologorica: the house of 1711 with its arms, inscription and relief of Christ, and the benefice held on lease by the De Franceschi from 1772 until 1848.
Linked to Hrčak, the repository <em>Građevinar</em> is published in.
Koper 2024 hrcak.srce.hr
On the votive record at Sveti Petar u Šumi — and, in its source list, the Gologorica parish archive: baptisms 1691–1763 and deaths 1646–1777, held in the parish.
Linked to Hrčak, the repository <em>Acta Histriae</em> is published in.
Nakladni zavod Hrvatske, Zagreb, July 1946; scanned on Scribd www.scribd.com/document/580941415
The ethnic cadastre of Istria taken to the peace negotiations. 664 pages. The source behind this archive's count of twenty-five Defranceschi families in Istria on 1 October 1945; identified, not yet read.
Vjesnik kr. hrvatsko-slavonsko-dalmatinskog zemaljskog arkiva 18, Zagreb 1916, p. 1 — free on Hungaricana library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/CroatianStateArchives_AV_I_18_1916/?pg=8
A correction to a source this archive leans on. Kos publishes twenty original parchment charters from the State Archive in Vienna (repertory 3), previously unpublished and unused, on the ministerial family styling itself «de Pisino» — and says plainly that his purpose is «izpolniti in marsikje popraviti Franceschijeva izvajanja o genealogiji pazinskih gospodov»: to fill out, and in many places correct, Camillo De Franceschi's conclusions on the genealogy of the lords of Pazin.
Camillo's Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino is on this archive's shelf and is cited across the site. So on 14 September 2026 every statement on this site touching the medieval lords of Pazin was checked against it. Nothing this archive claims depends on the part Kos corrects: the «de Pisino» were the ministeriales of the counts of Gorizia, a different family entirely, and what this site takes from Camillo is his work on the De Franceschi themselves and on the county's later history. The warning stands for the future rather than the past.
And Camillo had said so himself. Kos quotes him: «con la scarsa messe di notizie che ci fu dato raccogliere intorno alla famiglia in discorso, non siamo purtroppo in grado di stabilirne la compléta e sicura genealogia» — with the scanty harvest of information we were able to gather about the family in question, we are unfortunately not in a position to establish its complete and certain genealogy. The family's own historian, declining to close a genealogy he could not prove. This archive has no better sentence for what it is trying to do.
Vjesnik 18 (Zagreb 1916), Sveska 1, p. 1 — Dr Milko KosTwenty unpublished parchments, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Vienna, repertory 3Camillo De Franceschi, «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino» — corrected in part
Family — What the family itself holds: photographs, charts, a reunion album, and a website.
«The DeFranceschi Family Tree Album»
printed for the first family reunion, Crystal Springs Resort, 7–9 September 2012
The American branch's own history and chart, headed «started by Antonio DeFranceschi 8/6/1856 – 10/23/1924 + Maria Valhart 4/6/1867 – 1945». Eleven children, five countries. Also the description of the arms carved on the 1711 house at Moncalvo.
Assembled from Anton Rumac's handwritten notes and a cassette tape made by cousin Bruno. Its compiler says plainly there will be errors; where it can be checked against registers, it holds.
Held. Printed album held by the family
The family's MacFamilyTree file
held by the family
A database of 284 people, 114 families and 211 recorded events, with 247 photographs, catalogued and captioned by the family; last written 18 November 2021. It is the source of every portrait on this site of the Crikvenica house and of three photographs of graves. Read again in September 2026 for the parts of it that are not pictures: two ancestral lines behind Hedviga Blažević that appear in no other source here, the occupations of three generations, and one sentence of testimony about the Crikvenica house.
Toma Žubrinić, born 1768 — the deepest maternal ancestor in the fileToma Blažević, 27 January 1838 – 26 July 1907, and Tereza PećanićRuža Hreljac, 13 February 1922 – 30 January 1996, of Lovre Hreljac and Dragica VlahovićMilka Papić — «Cigar Roller / Maker»Josip — «He built this house himself, for his family, but was lost due to family greed.»
Family testimony, not register evidence, and it carries the marks of it: dates that are days and months without years, a child filed under the wrong parents, a woman given her mother's death year. Where it conflicts with a register — Zdravko's death year, Josip's wife — the register is preferred and the conflict is stated on the page. Names of living people are not published.
Held. An application file held by the family
the family's own site sites.google.com/defranceski.com/defranceski/home
The roster of significant persons, the account of the four Croatian lines, the collected blazons, and the descent chart that first set out the line from Giovanni of Gologorica to Brisbane.
This archive absorbs its content rather than duplicating it; its hosted images are token-gated and could not be fetched, so equivalent public-domain works were sourced from Wikimedia Commons instead.
The Omiš and Seget photographs
held by the family
Studio portraits of the Omiš branch — Josip and Anna with baby Ante, Zane, Frane, Anton «Toni» of 1932 — and seven photographs of the Seget villa: the 1843 façade, the tympanum with its carved arms, the crenellated tower, the rustic range and the well.
Held. Photographs held by the family
The family's own survey of the Val Degano — Ovaro, Mione, Muina, Agrons
Photographed on the ground by the family, autumn 2026
A drive up the valley the archive had only ever read about, and a walk through the cemetery at the Pieve di Santa Maria di Gorto with a camera. Eleven gravestones carrying the surname, three war memorials with it, the provincial interpretation panel at the Chiesa di Sant'Antonio in Mione, and two landscape views. Every inscription on this site from that survey is transcribed from those photographs.
Agostino De Franceschi, b. 26 July 1822 — the oldest legible stoneSebastiano Soravito De Franceschi 1852–1936 and 1889–1958, two men of one nameMuina war memorial, inaugurated 22 August 1920 — De Franceschi Vittorio and IsidoroMione war memorial, set 19 September 1954 — De Franceschi Egidio among seven civilians killed 1–2 November 1944
Primary evidence, photographed first-hand, and the first material on this site about Carnia that was not read at a distance. What the stones cannot give — ages, parents, house numbers — is in the Ovaro civil registers and the pieve's own books.
Held. Photographs taken on the ground by the family, autumn 2026
The family's own survey of Istria — Gologorica, Gračišće, Seget, Umag, Crikvenica
Photographed on the ground by the family, 2026
A drive through the places this archive had only read about, with a camera. The Defranceschi palazzetto at Gologorica with its builder's tablet, its Madonna relief and its carved coat of arms; Carlo De Franceschi's grave in the village cemetery with the names and dates of his wife and four of his children; the Stancija de Franceschi at Seget with the lion in its pediment; the canopied tomb of the de Franceschi di Seghetto at Umag; and what is left of the family grave at Crikvenica.
The builder's tablet: «GIO: BATISTA DE FRANCESCHI FECCE FARE PER SE ET HEREDI SVOI»The arms on the house at Gologorica — cross, two arrows, pomegranate — matching Carlo's private blazon«CARLO de FRANCESCHI, STORIOGRAFO DELL'ISTRIA, STRENVO ASSERTORE DELL'ITALIANITÀ DELLA SVA TERRA, MDCCCIX–MDCCCXCIII»Maria Micheli, wife of Carlo — Pisino 1828, Parenzo 1880The lion and star of the Seghetto branch, on the house pediment and on the tomb ironwork
Primary evidence, photographed first-hand. Where a carving is worn the reading is stated as a reading and the doubt is left visible. Several of these photographs answer questions this archive had put on its research log the same week.
Held. Photographs taken on the ground by the family, 2026
Cheryl Lerena, «Life After Lies» — a memoir
Unpublished typescript, about 81,600 words; the family holds the file
David's mother's memoir, written over some fifteen years. It names nobody — the surname does not appear once in the whole book and it is signed «a memoir by Mrs D» — so everything drawn from it is matched to a person by context and graded family. Read in full 14 September 2026. It supplies the sixteen years in Rhodesia, the cause of the 1969 divorce, the one account of Ivan Defranceski (1925–1995) as a living man, and the Johannesburg household. The custody case that occupies much of the book is deliberately not used here.
«He lived in Rhodesia for sixteen years before coming to South Africa»«His parents divorced when he was eighteen years old… alcohol abuse which led to physical violence»«Ivan's father embraces the grandson he knew of but meets for the first time»
Held. held by the family; not online
Online source — Other material this archive rests on.
bakar.hr www.bakar.hr
The town of Bakar's own site, cited here for «Stemmi della nobiltà di Buccari», Bakarski zbornik 2 (1996) — fifty-seven pages on the arms of Bakar's patrician houses, which bears on the arms page and on the Bakar question.
«Stemmi della nobiltà di Buccari», Bakarski zbornik 2 (1996)
Not yet obtained. The volume is a local publication and has not been found online.
google.com/maps/d www.google.com/maps/d
Two maps David built himself over years, and a primary source in their own right rather than a reference work. Imported whole from the KML: 10 layers, 1,289 pins, 56 lines, 10 polygons, 111 notes and 188 links. The 56 lines are named movements drawn by hand — «Ivan moves to Senj» and the like — which exist nowhere else. The emigration layers gave a departure region for the Brazilian cluster this archive had never had: Scorzè, Moniego (Noale), Cornedo Vicentino, Castelgomberto and Pederobba in the Veneto.
David's Google MyMaps — the emigration layersDavid's Google My Map — imported whole from the KML
A My Map dies with the account and no crawler saves one. An earlier JSON export kept the pins; only the KML kept the lines, polygons and notes. Both are now held here, which is the point of having taken them.
poskok.info poskok.info
A Croatian news site carrying a long article on the De Franceschi at Imotski from 1717 to the present, which is now the backbone of this archive's Imotski page.
Poskok — the De Franceschi at Imotski, 1717 to today
Journalism, not a register, and treated as such. It is the fullest account of the Imotski branch anyone has published, and this archive has not yet tested it against a parish book.
istra-istria.hr www.istra-istria.hr
The Istrian County's official site, linked from the old Google Site under «Regional and community».
Istra County (old site link list)
Linked without a comment on the old site, and nothing in this archive rests on it. Recorded so that the link has an owner rather than sitting in a table as a bare domain.
istria-fiume-dalmatia.blogspot.com istria-fiume-dalmatia.blogspot.com
A blog collecting Italian biographies of the Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian exile communities.
Istria–Fiume–Dalmatia, Italian biographies (old site link list)
Linked without a comment on the old site. Secondary and unfootnoted; useful for names to chase, not for statements to cite.
feefhs.org feefhs.org
A long-running gateway of East European genealogical resources, linked for its Croatia page.
FEEFHS — Croatia (old site link list)
Linked without a comment on the old site. A directory rather than a source; nothing here rests on it.
dvhh.org dvhh.org
The Danube Swabian heritage portal, linked from the old site.
DVHH — Danube Swabian Heritage (old site link list)
Linked without a comment, and off this family's ground — the Danube Swabian settlements are not where any line here runs. Kept for completeness of the old site's record.
smrikve.com www.smrikve.com
A large privately built library of west-Istrian local history. Linked here on the other family's house at Seget — the Rome-and-Candia line that left Crete when the Turks took it in 1669, and which is not this family.
Smrikve — Seget
Substantial and useful, and about a different house. Recorded partly to keep that distinction visible: a Seget De Franceschi is not a Gračišće one.
italianparishrecords.org www.italianparishrecords.org
A guide to what Italian parish registers exist and where, linked from the map beside Antenati as the second door into Italy.
Italian Parish Records (map link list)
A finding aid, not a record set. Free, and worth keeping for the Carnic parish question, where the Napoleonic civil registers stop in 1815 and the parish books are the only thing that reaches 1742.
zminj.hr www.zminj.hr
The municipality of Žminj, whose local history carries the «Carnielli» of Istria — men described as «...ra u Karniji», many still spending part of each year back at Agrons near Ovaro, and marrying only girls from there, who stayed in Carnia while the men wintered in Istria.
Općina Žminj — the Carnielli of Istria
This is the clearest local statement of the pattern this whole archive is trying to document — a seasonal Carnic presence in Istria that becomes a settled one. Secondary, and it points straight at Ovaro, which the Antenati survey independently reached.
istriaoutsidemywindow.com www.istriaoutsidemywindow.com
Isabel Putinja's Istrian blog, carrying «A peek inside Gračišće's Salamon Palace» (2018) — photographs of the interior, and the only published look inside that this archive knows of.
Istria Outside My Window — «A peek inside Gračišće's Salamon Palace» (2018)
Photographs, credited to their author and not reproduced here. The house on Gračišće's square is the one drawn on the direct line, which makes this the nearest thing to a view of it.
istra.hr www.istra.hr
Cited for «Istrian building heritage of the Venetian era», which supplies the architectural description quoted on the direct line — and the point that Gračišće was never Venetian.
Istra.hr — «Istrian building heritage of the Venetian era»
A tourist-board page used for one architectural statement, which is checked against Huić's «Urbanistički razvoj Gračišća u Istri», Prostor 23 (2015) 2.
Bibliography — Other material this archive rests on.
cairn.info www.cairn.info
The French humanities journal platform, approached for French scholarship and for surname distribution alongside Filae and Geopatronyme.
Cairn.info, Filae, Geopatronyme
Blocked. HTTP 403 to direct requests, not circumvented. The figures it would have given were obtained by other means where that was possible.
digitalna.nsk.hr digitalna.nsk.hr
The digital collections of the Croatian National and University Library, searched in full text under both spellings. It gave the Svetvinčenat sentence this archive had not had from any register: Atti 48 (2018), of the Centro di ricerche storiche at Rovigno, on Defranceschi as the one surname that stayed in the village.
NSK digitalna — the National and University Library's full text, both spellings
Free full-text search, and it reaches scholarship no register index does. An inscription nobody here knew about came out of the same pass.
dizbi.hazu.hr dizbi.hazu.hr
The digital repository of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which supplied Danilo Klen's «Urbar Petre Pilose iz 1425. godine», Starine 58 (1980), and — unprompted — a second Klen article that this family had a title for but no journal.
Knjižnica HAZU, Zagreb — Jelena PrekratićDanilo Klen, «Urbar Petre Pilose iz 1425. godine», Starine 58 (1980), pp. 85–124
Free, and the librarians went further than asked. Jelena Prekratić of the Knjižnica HAZU identified and scanned the second article as well. The urbar itself is a negative worth recording so nobody chases it twice: it surveys Zrenj, Čepić, Šalež, Nugla and Grimalda — not this family's villages.
etd.ceu.hu www.etd.ceu.hu
CEU's open thesis repository, cited here for Kurelić, «Eagle and Lion» (2013) — excellent background on the sixteenth-century Pazin frontier and a useful Istrian place-name gazetteer.
Kurelić, «Eagle and Lion» (CEU doctoral dissertation, 2013)
Free, and a clean negative. Every «De Franceschi» in it is a citation of Carlo or Camillo as authors, not a person of the family. Six Gologorica marriages survive in the Glagolitic Boljun register 1585–1608 — Kovač, Kaligarić, Matijašić, Gašparić, Ilijašić, Sergović, Ančić, Križmanić, Gortan, Cinić — and not one of this surname, which is consistent with a later arrival.
isidore.science isidore.science
A French aggregator of humanities scholarship, searched across the «Res pro Deo» journal collection for the surname and for twenty place-names.
isidore.co «Res pro Deo» journal collection
Zero, and usefully so. Every «De Franceschi» in five gigabytes of theology is a French historian of Jansenism, a Sienese printer, or a Venetian chancery secretary — none of them this family. A large, clean negative on the scholarly literature.
journals.openedition.org journals.openedition.org
The French open-access journal platform, read here for Pomara, «An Attempted Albanian Settlement in Istria (1610–1612)», Diasporas 43 (2025).
Pomara, «An Attempted Albanian Settlement in Istria (1610–1612)», Diasporas 43 (2025)
No person of the name. Carlo De Franceschi is cited as an authority — on the depopulation of Istria, and on Poreč falling to some three hundred souls by 1601 — which is one more instance of the historian still being quoted, this time in 2025. Nothing for the family.
mhas-split.hr www.mhas-split.hr
The Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments, cited here for the 2000 exhibition catalogue «Hrvati i Karolinzi», read by OCR.
«Hrvati i Karolinzi» — the 2000 exhibition catalogue, OCR'd
No person of the name, and none expected — the catalogue is about the ninth century. The surname appears three times and every one is Camillo De Franceschi in the bibliography, cited for his 1932 and 1933 work on the early-medieval church sculpture of Pula and Sv. Ivan. Recorded because a hit count of three, unexamined, would have looked like a family finding.
muse.jhu.edu muse.jhu.edu
The Johns Hopkins scholarly platform, read here for Nova et Vetera 21:2 (2023).
«Nova et Vetera» 21:2 (2023)
One footnote, citing Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, a living French historian. Nothing else. Kept so the search is not run a second time.
scholar.google.com scholar.google.com
Used to run down two scholarly works whose titles looked as though they might touch this family.
Benedetti, «From Venice to Cairo» (2022)Bruni, «Peace at the Lily» (2018)
Both are different families, and that is why they are recorded. Benedetti, «From Venice to Cairo» (2022), concerns Andrea de' Franceschi, Venetian grand chancellor, of Cividale di Belluno; Bruni, «Peace at the Lily» (2018), concerns Francesco De Franceschi, a printer «born in Siena around 1530». Three unrelated houses carry this name in the scholarship alone, which is the standing caution of a one-name study.
academia.edu www.academia.edu
Cited for a paper on Titian's portraits of Andrea de Franceschi — a Venetian grand chancellor of a different family, and part of the standing evidence that several unrelated houses carry this name.
Academia.edu — Titian's portraits of Andrea de Franceschi
Behind a Cloudflare wall from here; not circumvented, and still owed.
min-kulture.gov.hr min-kulture.gov.hr
The Croatian culture ministry's publication series on monument protection; volume 20 (2019) is cited alongside Smrikve for the west-Istrian house at Seget.
Mala biblioteka Godišnjaka zaštite spomenika kulture, sv. 20 (2019)
Free PDF, and about buildings rather than people. Cited for the fabric of a house, not for a family.
ipd-ssi.hr ipd-ssi.hr
The Istrian Historical Society's PDF of article no. 34, linked from David's map against Ližnjan.
Istarsko povijesno društvo, članak br. 34
Free PDF, carried over from the map and not yet read against this archive's Ližnjan people. Listed so that the reading is owed rather than forgotten.
unibo.it www.unibo.it
Read in full for Zelda Alice Franceschi, a Bologna anthropologist of the Argentine Gran Chaco, because the surname and the Argentine subject together looked like a lead.
Zelda Alice Franceschi, curriculum vitae
No connection to this family. The surname is the author's own. Recorded so the same coincidence is not chased twice.
worldcat.org www.worldcat.org
Used to locate two books this archive needs and does not have: Vergé-Franceschi, «Le cap Corse: généalogies et destins» (2006), the reference work for Cap Corse families, which would settle whether the Tomino Defranceschi are in it; and Bertoša, «Etos i etnos zavičaja» (Pula–Rijeka 1985), which contains «Gologorički De Franceschi: između etosa i etnosa», the footnoted original behind the encyclopedia entry.
Vergé-Franceschi, «Le cap Corse» (2006)Bertoša, «Etos i etnos zavičaja» (1985)
A catalogue, not a text. Both books are located and neither is obtained.