Meanwhile…
Nobody in your family lived in a bubble. While they were being born and getting married and sailing away, other things were going on — and quite a lot of those other things are the reason they went.
So every block below shows the same stretch of time four ways: what your family was doing, who was in charge of the ground they were standing on, what was happening everywhere else — and then, along the bottom, what they were up against. That last row is usually the answer to “but why did they go?”
One village. Seven countries. It never moved.
Gračišće is a stone village on a hill in Istria, about four hundred people. Your family lived there at house 5 and house 19. In the time this website covers, the village stayed exactly where it was and was ruled by seven different countries — six of those changes in under two hundred years. Nobody packed. The border moved.
Read it left to right. If you had been born at house 19 in 1900 you would have been Austrian, then Italian at twenty, then under German occupation at forty-three, then Yugoslav at forty-five, and Croatian at ninety-one — without once leaving the street.
The oldest names anybody has
This is as far back as ten families and seven archives can reach. Past this line there are certainly people, and no names for them.
Your family
- 1697Franco Antonino is born at Briatico, in Calabria. He is the oldest person anybody in this whole website can name.
- 1644The priest at Gologorica starts a book of baptisms. Somebody had to start writing things down, or none of this would exist.
- 1605–1647Villages are built on purpose in the Senj mountains for families running from an invading army. Your family is put there deliberately, to hold a frontier.
Who was in charge
- IstriaAustria — and it had been Austrian since 1374
- Senj and the coastthe Frankopan lords, then the Croatian crown
- the bottom of Italythe Kingdom of Naples, ruled from Spain
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- 1620The Mayflower sails for America.
- 1666The Great Fire of London — 136 years before George Kolbe was born a few streets from where it started.
- about 1680The last dodo dies.
- 1687Isaac Newton writes down how gravity works.
What they were up against
Priests with pens
Almost everything known about this century comes from one kind of object: a parish register. A man in a church, writing your family down in Latin, by hand, because it was his job.
Your family
- 1711The year cut over a doorway on the square at Gologorica — on a house nobody has yet proved is ours.
- 1751Robert D'Arcy is born in Yorkshire.
- 24 Oct 1767A priest at Arienzo picks up a pen and writes Pasquale Falco into a book. That page still exists.
- 1787Giovanni Battista is baptised at Gologorica on 13 August. He grew up to be a farmer at house 5.
- 1788Petrus Jacobus Booyzen — the first Booyzen with a real date.
Who was in charge
- Istriastill Austria, the whole century
- the Capea Dutch trading company, until the British took it in 1806
- Australianobody from Europe at all, until 1788
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- 1770Captain Cook sails up the east coast of Australia, past where Brisbane is now.
- 1783The first hot-air balloon goes up, in France.
- 1788The First Fleet lands at Sydney — the same year one of your ten families gets its first real date. Australia and the Booyzens start counting in the same twelve months.
- 1791Mozart dies, having written music since he was five.
What they were up against
The century everybody got on a boat
Four of the ten families crossed an ocean in these sixty years, in ships with no engines. If the wind stopped, they stopped.
Your family
- 7 Dec 1802George Augustus Kolbe is born in Soho, London.
- 1819–20He sails on the Nautilus at sixteen and turns seventeen at sea. 133 days without setting foot on land.
- 1825Antonio is born at Gračišće. He became a stonecutter — lapicida, in the register.
- 1825–27A D'Arcy child is born at Chatham in England, and the next at Parramatta in Australia. That gap is the crossing.
- 1836Three men are sent to chart an empty bay. One of them is family. The bay is now Melbourne.
- 1851Willem Hermanus is born in South Africa.
Who was in charge
- IstriaNapoleon takes it in 1805, keeps it ten years, then Austria takes it back
- the CapeBritain, from 1806
- Argentinaits own country, from 1816
- Italynot a country yet — it becomes one in 1861
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- 1804The first steam locomotive runs. Trains change everything, including who your family is — a railway later kills the town of Senj.
- 1815Waterloo. Napoleon is finished, and Istria goes back to Austria.
- 1837Victoria becomes queen at eighteen.
- 1859Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
What they were up against
Two countries are invented, and one town dies
In this stretch Italy becomes a country, Australia becomes a country, and a railway line quietly destroys the trade your Croatian family lived on.
Your family
- 1857Josip Papić is baptised at Senj. He carried other people's goods over a mountain on packhorses.
- 1859Tonka is born up on the crooked road, in house 136.
- 1873A new railway bypasses Senj completely. Everything that used to go over the mountain now goes by train, somewhere else. The whole town's work vanishes.
- 1882Pablo Armando Lerena — Bob — is born at Rosario, on the Paraná.
- 1892Two Arenas marry each other at Scilla, under the castle.
- 1895The Hotel Therapia opens at Crikvenica. Hedviga sings there fifty years later.
- 1901Carmine Antonio Falco is born at Arienzo — the man who eventually moved the whole family to Australia.
Who was in charge
- Italybecomes one single country in 1861. Before that, the Falcos and the Mazzas lived in different countries.
- Australiabecomes one single country in 1901
- Croatiastill Austria–Hungary, and will be until 1918
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- 1869The Suez Canal opens and the journey from Europe to Australia gets much shorter.
- 1886Somebody finds gold on a farm. The city that grows on it is Johannesburg — where, sixty years later, two of your families meet. The city is younger than several people in this website.
- 1895X-rays are discovered. Ten years later there is an X-ray machine in the hotel your great-grandma sang in.
- 1903The Wright brothers fly for twelve seconds.
- 1912The Titanic sinks.
What they were up against
The bit where the world goes wrong
Two world wars in thirty-one years, and this family is standing in the middle of both of them. This is the stretch where things happen to people instead of people doing things.
Your family
- 1920Milka marries Ljubomir at Senj. She is thirty-four and already a widow; she rolls cigars in the tobacco factory.
- 21 Apr 1925Michele Mazza steps off the Palermo at Brisbane. He is sixteen and he is on his own.
- 1925Ivan is born at Crikvenica.
- 1926Hedviga is born at Senj, on 3 August.
- 21 Oct 1941Ivan starts work in a German factory, aged sixteen. He did not choose to go. He got home again, and the family carries on through him.
- 1945Oto Blažević dies, aged twenty-two, in the last year of the war. His name is on the wall grave at Senj.
Who was in charge
- Istriabecomes Italy in 1920 — and the government makes people change the spelling of their own surnames
- Istria, againoccupied by Germany 1943–45, then Yugoslavia
- Croatiathe empire it belonged to for 544 years simply stops existing in 1918
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- 1914–18The First World War.
- 1928Penicillin is discovered by accident, in a dish somebody forgot to wash up.
- 1936The first proper television broadcasts.
- 1939–45The Second World War. Every single one of the ten families is somewhere inside it.
What they were up against
Everybody leaves
In fifty years, all ten families end up on a continent none of them started on. Most of that happens in one twelve-year burst after the war.
Your family
- 1948Ivan and Hedviga leave Croatia for Africa. It took them three countries to stop moving: Botswana, then Zimbabwe, then South Africa.
- 17 Jun 1949Antonino Polistena sails from Naples on the Surriento.
- 4 Oct 1949Sebastiano Mazza sails from Genoa on the Toscana.
- 1949Catherine Booyzen marries Nuno Lerena in Johannesburg. South Africa marries Argentina.
- 1957The Falcos sail for Brisbane, and Francessco Prostamo sails on the Roma — two of your families crossing the world in the same twelve months, neither knowing the other existed.
- Apr 1975Hedviga comes into South Africa from Zimbabwe. It is the one date in that whole journey that is written on a document.
- 1995Ivan dies at Senj — back in the country he started in, which nobody else in this story managed.
Who was in charge
- CroatiaYugoslavia until 1991, then Croatia. The village never moved. The country changed its name again.
- South Africaunder apartheid until 1994, when everybody could vote for the first time — while your family was living there
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- 1953Everest is climbed.
- 1969People walk on the Moon. Hedviga was 43 and watching from Africa; Ivan was 44.
- 1989The Berlin Wall comes down.
- 1994South Africa's first election where everybody could vote.
What they were up against
And then you
Three hundred and thirty years after Franco Antonino was born in a small town in Calabria, ten separate families arrive at the same address.
Your family
- 2001Hedviga dies at Johannesburg on 30 October — the same date her husband died, six years later to the day.
- 2015A wedding in Brisbane on 19 December. Her twin sister married the other pair's dad too, and ten families became one lot of cousins.
- 2025A plane from Johannesburg lands at Brisbane. The last journey in the entire story, and the only one you were all alive to see.
- nowFour cousins in one city, holding all ten of these families between them.
Who was in charge
- everywhere in this storyfor the first time ever, all of it is one country away instead of an empire away
Meanwhile, everywhere else
- yoursWhatever happens next goes in this row. Somebody will read it in a hundred years and want to know what it was like — so it is worth writing down.
🌍 Why this page exists
Because “1873” means nothing on its own. But “a railway was built and it went the wrong way and a whole town lost its work and your family had to find something else to be” — that is a thing that happened to people. Almost every move in this website has a reason sitting next to it in one of these rows.