The Bunjevci
Smokvica Krmpotska and Krivi Put are not ancient. They were settled on purpose, in living memory of the Ottoman wars, by refugees the Habsburgs planted on an empty mountain to hold it.
Two of Hedviga's four grandparental lines — the Blaževići of Smokvica Krmpotska and the Prpići of Krivi Put — come out of villages in the Senj hinterland that did not exist in 1600. Knowing that changes what it means to say the family is “from” there.
Who the Bunjevci are
The Bunjevci are a Catholic South Slavic group whose homeland before the Ottoman wars lay in the western Balkan hinterland, around the Krmpote district near Zemunik behind Zadar. The Krmpotić clan — the largest of them — abandoned that territory under Ottoman pressure between about 1465 and 1467, and moved north and toward the coast.
They are usually described in three branches: the Dalmatian Bunjevci, the Danubian Bunjevci who ended up around Subotica in the Bačka, and the Littoral–Lika Bunjevci. This family belongs to the third.
The planting of the Senj mountain
The first organised migration to the Croatian Littoral is dated to 1605, when about fifty families from Krmpote near Zemunik were settled at Lič near Fužine. Further waves down to 1647 settled the hinterland of Senj — Ledenice, Krmpote, Krivi Put and the Senjska draga. The settlers brought the name of the district they had left: the new Krmpote in the Vinodol hills is named for the old Krmpote behind Zadar, and Smokvica Krmpotska — “Smokvica of the Krmpote people” — carries it in its surname.
This was frontier policy, not accident. The Habsburg Military Frontier needed a loyal, armed, Catholic population on the empty ground behind Senj. The settlers got land and grazing; the empire got a militia.
What that means for this family
Krivi Put 136
The Prpići are recorded at a specific house: Krivi Put 136. Thirty-five people in this tree are born at that address, including Antonija “Tonka” Prpić on 12 May 1859, baptised three days later at Krivi Put with Lucas and Anna Tomljanović standing as godparents.
House numbers are how the Frontier registers worked. A settled family is its house number for a century at a time — which is why the same address can produce four generations.
Smokvica Krmpotska, house 114
Toma Blažević was born on 27 January 1838 at Br. 114, Smokvica Krmpotska — br. for broj, number. His father Anton, his grandfather Ilija (b. c. 1790) and the two men above them are all placed in the same village.
In 1835 Krivi Put was the seat of a captain's post under Krmpote, with 98 houses and 1,246 people. That is the scale of the world these families were born into.
The zadruga at Smokvica 114
The registers do not just place this family in a Bunjevac village. They show it living in the characteristic household form of the Frontier and the settlements — and this archive only saw it after reading a document meant as a control.
| 1838 | Toma Blažević born at Br. 114, Smokvica Krmpotska |
|---|---|
| 1882, 1884 | Toma and Terezija Pećanić, seljaci, at Smokvica 114 — the baptisms of Ivan and Tonka |
| 1890 | Pavao Blažević and Marija Tomljanović at Smokvica 114 — and this Pavao is the son of Luka, not of Toma |
| 1895 | “Jurko Blažević i Tereza rođ. Žubrinić, selj.” at Smokvica kbr. 114 — the baptism of Marijan |
| 1912 | Antonija's marriage names her parents as “†† Toma i Tereza Blažević, poljodjelci iz sela Smokvica Kbr. 114” |
Luka and Anton — Toma's father — are both sons of Ilija Blažević, born about 1790. So Pavao and Toma are first cousins, and three generations of Ilija's descendants share one house number.
That is a zadruga: the South Slav extended-family household, in which married brothers and cousins live under one roof and one number and hold the land in common. It was the ordinary form of tenure in the Military Frontier, where a household — not a man — owed the regiment its service, and it survived in these settlements long after the Frontier itself was abolished in 1881.
The town does not count houses
The village registers of Krmpote and Krivi Put enter a house number against every child — Smokvica 114, Krivi Put 136, Klenovica 22, Povile 22. The town register of Senj does not.
Under the same printed column — mjesto obitavanja i kućni broj, place of residence and house number — a Senj entry says simply “Senj”. So the Papići cannot be traced through a house the way the Blaževići can, and a zadruga among them would be invisible even if it existed. That is a difference between a town and a village, not between two families — and it is worth knowing before concluding anything from the absence.
The Bunjevac identity is asserted here by place, not by document. No record in this tree calls anyone a Bunjevac. What the records give is birth in villages that were founded by Bunjevci and populated by them, bearing surnames — Blažević, Prpić, Tomljanović, Vukelić — that are standard in those settlements. That is a strong inference and it is offered as an inference. Method →