25 jobs
None of these people were kings or presidents. They cut stone, led packhorses over a mountain, rolled cigars, sewed suits, trained racehorses, helped draw the map of a place that became a city, and filled in an enormous amount of paperwork.
Some of these jobs were written down in Latin, because that is what the priest wrote in. Where we know the original word, it is here too.
They made things with their hands
The parish clerk wrote his job in Latin. It means somebody who cuts stone — with a hammer and a chisel, by hand, all day.
His son, and the register calls him a skilled stonemason. Later on he went to work in a factory instead.
He made clothes in London, on Conduit Street just off Bond Street. And not on his own — he had a business partner, and his will told them to keep the shop open for fourteen more years after he died.
She worked in the tobacco factory at Senj, rolling cigars. So did the man she married when she was twenty-one.
They moved things about
One of the carriers of Senj. He loaded packhorses and took goods up the Vratnik pass, over the mountains and into the interior, then brought grain and timber back down.
When he got older he kept an inn instead — on the very same road he had spent his life walking up and down.
Hedviga's father went to sea, and fished. By his lifetime the packhorse trade over the mountain was finished, because a railway had taken it away.
It means somebody hired by the day — you turned up, and if there was work you got it, and if there was not you did not. He was born in house 114 in a mountain village and died down in Senj.
He drove a cab in Northam, in Devon. The census taker wrote it down as “cab driver, retired sergeant.”
He worked for the South African Railways and Harbours — the company that ran the whole country's trains and ports.
They grew things
Another Latin word from a parish book. He farmed at Gračišće, in house number 5.
And his father, and his father, and his father. Nine generations of Falcos worked the same green valley in Italy.
In 1879 his marriage record calls him a Boer — a farmer. By 1905 it calls him a mason. Something took the farm away in between. The family has always said it was burned down in a war, and those two words are the first real evidence that they were right.
They worked with horses
His passport says it in one word: Trainer. He had his own stables in Cape Town and taught boys to be jockeys.
By the time he died he did not just train them — he owned them. That is what his death certificate says.
Before the cab, he was a sergeant in the cavalry — a soldier who fought on horseback. So both sides of that marriage lived by horses.
Tex rode as a top jockey for twenty-two years. Gavin Lerena is a champion jockey in South Africa today.
They were soldiers — and one drew maps
An officer of the 39th Regiment of Foot. His job on the voyage to Australia in 1826 was guarding the convicts.
He commanded the Royal Engineers at Chatham — the part of the army that builds bridges, forts and roads.
In 1836 the Governor picked three men to go and chart Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra River. He was one of them. The city of Melbourne is there now.
He preached across the Orange River. But when his estate was written up after he died, somebody put his job down as agriculturist — a farmer.
They worked at desks
He died when his youngest son was nine, and everything in that family changed the same week.
In the Railway Department in Brisbane — the person in charge of all the paperwork for the trains.
Thirty-two years at the same company, ending as State Sales Manager. When he retired he wrote them a letter saying exactly which day he expected his cheque to arrive.
And one of them sang
She sang at the Hotel Therapia in Crikvenica, the grand seafront hotel where people came to take the sea cure. This is the only job on this whole page that no document anywhere records — every other line here came out of a register, a certificate or a factory book. This one is only remembered. Which is worth noticing: two hundred years of paper can tell you a man cut stone, and still never tell you that somebody sang.
🔤 One word worth knowing
Trhonoša. It is not just an old word for “worker”. The trhonoše were a particular trade in one particular town: the men of Senj who carried goods over the Velebit mountains on packhorses. Senj existed because that was the place where the sea met the road. When a word like that turns up in a register, it does not only tell you what somebody did — it tells you where they lived and why the town was there at all.
🇮🇹 And a gap worth naming
Not one job is recorded for any of the four Italian families on RFM and MJM’s side — not for the Mazzas, the Prostamos, the Arenas or the Polistenas. Nearly six hundred people in that archive and no occupation against any of them. It is not that they did nothing. It is that nobody has read the records that would say what.