The Second Name

This page exists because a question got a bigger answer than it asked for.

Question 5 asked whether Antić and Papić were one family or two, and whether Papa was a surname or something else. The answer is that Papa is a nadimak — a house by-name — and the surname it sits beside is Antić.

But the evidence turned out not to be about this family at all. Reading the registers at full resolution in September 2026 found the same construction 32 times, across 19 surnames and 5 parishes, over 217 years and at least three different priests' hands. Papa is one instance of a system.

The scribes underlined them

8 of the 32 phrases are underlined in the register itself. Not the archive's emphasis — the priest's.

That is what makes this a finding rather than a guess. A scribe who underlines Antich Papa, Lonzarich Franich and Jellichich dictis Jurešina on his own pages is not writing down two surnames by accident. He is marking a convention he expects a later reader to need — and two hundred years later, that reader is this archive.

Where a connecting word is used it is dictus, vide, vulgò, dictis, dicti, aliter, adoptatus — Latin for otherwise, called, and in one case adopted. Often there is no word at all and the two names simply run together.

Every phrase read

What it is for

A village where forty households share nine surnames cannot be run on surnames. The by-name is the thing that tells which Antić you mean.

It is the same job the house number does at Smokvica, and the same job the patronymic does at Otočac — Ivo Blažević sin Tomin against Ivo Blažević sin Matin, two men of one name told apart by their fathers. Three devices, one problem.

And at Grižane in 1738 the census does it a fourth way: Juraj car Vulin, Matij car Jurišin, Lovro car Mikulin — of Vule, of Juraj, of Mikula — and one household identified purely by marriage, Mikula … Blaškovicha zet, Blašković's son-in-law.

A by-name can eat a surname

The Antići are the proof. Watch the same family across five documents:

By 1885 the priest at Senj writes only the by-name, and every descendant after him is written Papić. The house name became the family name in three generations, and the registers caught it happening.

Does this matter to the other six archives?

Six sibling archives share a family tree with this one. On the names, no. Of the ten surnames carrying a by-name here, exactly one — Papić — appears in any sibling archive's surname list, and that archive is this one.

On the method, quite possibly yes. The Defranceschi archive covers Istria · Kvarner · Carnia — and Kvarner is the same coast: Krk, Vinodol, the parishes whose priests wrote aliter and underlined it. A convention this consistent across ten surnames and three parishes is unlikely to stop at the edge of one family's records.

Recorded as a negative result rather than left as an open loop. Nothing has been changed in another archive on the strength of it.