The Other Emigration

Everything below was found in a single day on a commercial index, during a two-day trial. None of it is a claim of descent. It is a record of where people carrying these surnames went, what they gave as the village they had left, and who they named as kin — because that last field is what will eventually separate ours from not-ours.

The Žubrinići went twice, and the spelling tells you which

Search Zubrinich and you get 191 records, almost all Australian. Search Zubrinic — the unanglicised form — and you get a different 119, almost all American. Anybody searching one spelling has been missing the other entirely.

Prozor is emptying, and this archive stops just before it happens

Six people leave one village in five years — and the archive's own record of that village ends before any of them were born.

And the Kalanji went to the mining towns

Eighty-one migration records for a family this archive holds 216 people of — and it records no Kalanj emigration at all. They sail 1891–1914, peaking in 1907, 1909 and 1913, into Leadville, Colorado; Calumet and Houghton, Michigan; Highland Boy, Utah; Duluth, Chicago, Akron, Reno; and British Columbia.

The caution comes before the finding. Split the given names and they fall in two: Ivan, Joso, Mate, Mile, Miko, Luka, Ana, Kata, Marica — and Božo, Đuro, Stevan, Sava, Todora, Milica, Jovan. The second column is not the naming pool of Catholic Klenovica. Kalanj is also a Serbian surname in Lika, and the Krajina sent its own emigration to exactly these towns in exactly these years.

Reading seven of the manifests gave four different home villages — Brinje, Plaščica, Kurjak, Velgovica — none within forty kilometres of another. Kalanj is a regional surname, not one household.

Of which exactly one matters. Brinje is the parish this archive's own 1864 baptism names for the Klenovica Kalanji — and following that single word inland is what corrected the family's origin. Kalanj →

What this is worth, and what it is not

• One person has actually been placed. Mate Žubrinić of Prozor 50, born 29 December 1867, sailed to New York in 1911 aged 43. His record here previously stopped at his birth.
• One household is fully documented and belongs to nobody here. Ivan Zubrinic, born 30 June 1888 at Otočac — sworn on a Brooklyn naturalisation — who sailed to Baltimore in 1907, whose wife Kata and sons Juraj and Josip followed in 1932, and who died in New York in 1963. This archive holds an Ivan born 16 August 1887 at Otočac and a Stjepan born 1888. He is neither.
• Nothing has been added to the tree. Every name above is recorded as what a document says, not as a relative. Method →
• And the ask has changed because of it. The request to Gospić asked for marriages across a district. It now asks for the Otočac baptisms for Prozor, 1875–1895 — one volume, one village, twenty years, and a whole generation restored.

And a third country, which nobody had looked at either

The passenger lists gave three Žubrinić women sailing from Liverpool into Saint John and Halifax between 1926 and 1930 — and UK outbound lists do not name a Croatian village, so the trail stopped there. The graves pick it up.

Six Zubrinich burials at Timmins, Ontario — the gold-mining town in the Cochrane District — and one at Thunder Bay:

Nikola Zubrinich, 1892–1938 is the earliest of them, and the 1928 Liverpool–Halifax arrival was a Nikdla Žubrinić. That is a suggestive pair of facts and nothing joins them — but a mining town in northern Ontario is exactly the kind of place a Lika family went, and it is the same choice the Port Pirie branch made when it went to a smelter.

Three countries, one pattern. Lead at Port Pirie, steel at Whyalla, silver at Broken Hill, gold at Timmins, and the Pennsylvania coalfield at Johnstown. Nobody in this family went anywhere green.

Port Pirie → The Žubrinić fragments → What they did →

And a third American stream, which went to a city

A passenger manifest gives a residence and one relative. A petition for naturalization gives an exact birth date, an exact birth place, the spouse's birth date and every child's — a household in one row, sworn before a court. And in that collection alone the birth place is indexed, so for the first time this archive could search by where somebody came from instead of by what they were called.

18 people born at Senj, Otočac or Brinje. Every row below was confirmed by opening the transcript — the search itself is fuzzy enough to return Greek names for a Croatian village.

Thirteen of the fourteen are metropolitan New York. Only Mike Mukulino, the oldest of them — born 1858 — went anywhere else, and he went to Boston.

The fourteen, and which of them a register could confirm

Every one carries a birth date to the day, which is the single thing that can be carried back to a parish book and tested. This archive knows which years of which parish are on film, so it can say per person whether the baptism is readable — and the answer is 5 of 18.

Otočac births are filmed 1834–1858 and every one of these seven was born after 1888, so not one of them is reachable. Senj runs to 1894, which puts five inside it to the day.

«Birth country» is not evidence, and the same town proves it

Senj, written by American clerks across thirty-seven years, in the applicants' own words:

Rukavina and Hammerschmidt filed in the same year, about the same town, and named two different countries. It is not the empire at the date of birth and not the empire at the date of filing. It is what the man in front of the clerk said his country was — and in 1928 two men from Senj did not say the same thing. One of them volunteers the province: Hrvatska.

So the transcribed birth place is the evidence on these records and the birth country is noise. The same holds at Otočac — Hungary in 1927, Austria in 1931 and 1941, Jugoslavia in 1937, Yugoslavia in 1957. Five countries, one town, one lifetime.