16 family words
Every one of these is written down somewhere in your family's papers — in Croatian, in Latin, or in Afrikaans. Some of them name a job that does not exist any more.
A carrier. Not just any worker — one of the men of Senj who loaded packhorses and took goods over the mountain pass. A whole trade in one word.
The wind that comes down off the mountain at Senj. Not a breeze. It can push a lorry over.
A day labourer. You turned up in the morning, and if there was work you got it, and if there wasn’t you didn’t.
A sailor. Ljubomir’s job, once the packhorse trade had gone.
A stonecutter. This is what the priest wrote next to Antonio’s name, because parish books were kept in Latin.
A farmer. Same book, same pen, one generation earlier.
“The state of the souls.” A book where a priest listed every household in his parish — who lived in which house, and when they were born, married and died.
Short for quondam Joannis — “son of the late Giovanni”. Two words that joined two houses and proved a family.
“Eighty-nine.” A priest wrote the year in words as well as numbers, and when the two disagreed, the words won.
The red-and-white chessboard on the Croatian flag. Look at the two Croatian flags at the top of the tree — that little checked square is it.
The people who founded the mountain villages this family came from, after fleeing an invading army in the 1600s.
A death notice. A form the family filled in when somebody died, listing their parents and their children — which is why so much of the South African side is known at all.
An innkeeper. What the carrier became when he got too old to walk over the mountain.
“Foot of the mountain.” The village the Mazzas come from is Piedimonte Etneo — the foot of Etna. Italian place names are often just a plain description of where the place is.
The town the Arenas and Polistenas come from. In very old Greek stories, Scylla was a monster living on this exact stretch of water, opposite a whirlpool called Charybdis.
“The seventh.” Mary Septima Taylor was her parents’ seventh daughter, and they named her after the fact.