Say Your Name
One person, written down six different ways by six different clerks. Type a given name and see every form the same human being would have been entered under across four centuries of registers.
This archive's owner puts it best: my own father can be Ivan or Giovanni or John. One man, three registers, three languages, no change of person.
A name you have looked up is a link you can send. The address bar follows the search — ?n=Gregorio — so a card can go to a cousin, an archivist or a mailing list and open on exactly what you were looking at. There is a Copy link button above every result.
That is not a curiosity, it is the central difficulty of the work. A Josip in a Croatian register, a Giuseppe in an Italian one and a Josephus in a Latin one are the same name, and an index that treats them as three people will never join a family up.
Seven columns, and two kinds of cell. A form printed plainly is one this archive has actually met in one of its own records. A form marked like this° is a lookup aid — the correct form in that language, and the right thing to type into a Hungarian or a German index tomorrow, but not something this archive has yet seen written down. 427 of the 645 forms below are attested; 218 are aids. Nothing here decides that by hand: a script looks every form up in the records and the build refuses if the marking drifts.
This page said, until 17 September 2026, that every form on it came «from the forms that actually appear in these registers — not from a dictionary». Thirty-one per cent of them did not, there was no Hungarian column at all, and dozens sat under the wrong language — Antal and Ilona filed as Italian when they are Hungarian, Božo and Tomislav filed as Italian when they are Croatian.
73 names · 655 forms · 429 met in these records, 226 as lookup aids.
And then there are the slips
A form in the six columns above is a language's form of a name: a different people saying the same thing. A slip is not. A slip is one clerk, once — a J read for an I, an r read for an n, a Z heard as a K — and it matters more, because a language form can be looked up and a slip can only be recognised. Every one below is a spelling this archive actually met in a document, with the document named.
| Written | Meant | Who | Where it is written |
|---|---|---|---|
| JVAN | Giovanni | Ivan Defranceski, born 24 or 25 June 1925 at Crikvenica — David's grandfather | Arolsen Archives, the War Time Card File 2.2.2.1A German clerk's J for a Croatian I, on the card that says where he was made to work. |
| KDRAVKO | Zdravko | Zdravko Defranceski, born 1921 | Arolsen Archives, the War Time Card File 2.2.2.1A K read off a handwritten Z. |
| ZDRACKO | Zdravko | Zdravko Defranceski, born 1921 | Arolsen Archives, the same card fileThe same man, indexed twice, wrong both times and differently. |
| ZORAFKO | Zdravko | Zdravko Defranceski, born 1921 | NAA B78 — «YUGOSLAVIAN/DEFRANCESKI ZORAFKO», arrived Melbourne per General M. B. Stewart, 13 April 1949How Australian officialdom wrote him from the day he landed. It put a second memorial on him at Horsham. |
| Zdrafko | Zdravko | Zdravko Defranceski, born 1921 | NAA A2571, alien registration 76418A fourth spelling, in a fourth office, of a man who was naturalised as Zdravko. |
| Roza | Rosa | Ruža Defranceski, born 13 February 1922 at Fužine | Commonwealth of Australia Gazette. Periodic, No. P2, 16 February 1979, page 66The list that made her an Australian. Arolsen had already written her Rose; the register at Fužine will say Ruža. |
| Helenả | Elena | Helena Defranceschi, wife of Valentino of Fiume | the FamilySearch index of the Fiume baptisms, XQMQ-HGYH and its fellowsNot a clerk at all — an indexing artefact, a stray hook on the final a. It is why a name search misses her. |
| Vitnio | Vittorio | an infant son of Domenico Defranceschi, buried at Svetvinčenat 24 April 1815 | FamilySearch 6B47-9H9Q, read from the burial registerVitorio, with the r read as n. This table used to call it an Italian form of the name. |
| Valentio | Valentino | Valentino Defranceschi of Fiume, as father | FamilySearch X9D5-3CK4, the 1757 entry for his daughter MariaA dropped n. The same man is Valentini, Valentinus and Valentino on his other children's entries. |
| Antonÿ | Antonio | «Gioannis Antonÿ» in the Rijeka registers | the Rijeka baptisms, read on DGS 004679931The ÿ is the clerk's ligature for a double i — Antonii, the genitive. It is a letterform, not an English spelling, and it was filed here as English. |
Four of the ten are one man. Zdravko Defranceski was written ZORAFKO by the Australian shipping clerk who took him off the General Stewart in 1949, Zdrafko by the office that registered him as an alien, and KDRAVKO and ZDRACKO by the two German hands that indexed the same wartime card. The Gazette that naturalised him in 1978 got it right. The cost was real: the shipping spelling put a second memorial on him at Horsham, and it took a correction to take it off again.
Why it matters, in one example
The Rijeka registers hold three households that looked like three different families, because the father's name was written Giovanni Antonio in one, Gioannis Antonÿ in another and Zuane Antonio in a third. Reconciling the given names merged them into one. That single change moved the earliest documented Rijeka household back by decades. See the household explorer, where the reconciled forms are what you are searching.
The forms this does not cover
Diminutives and household names — Bepi, Checo, Nane, Toni, Ivo — appear in speech and occasionally in a burial entry, and a few are listed above where a register actually used them. Saints' second and third names, which Austrian registers piled on (Valentinus Franciscus Xaverius, Joannes Nepomucenus Aloysius Paschalis), are kept whole in the records and only the first is reconciled.
And the surname does the same thing
De Franceschi, Defranceschi, Dei Franceschi, Defranceski, Defrančeski, De Franceski, Franceschi. Nine spellings, one family — and the spellings move with the border, not with the bloodline. See The Name.
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →