Who They Married

Šojat is a family, not a by-name

This archive recorded Sojat as the by-name the tree attaches to one Blažević household — reading it as a nadimak like Papa on the Antići. That was wrong.

The Šojati are a Krivi Put family with fifteen people, dates and a place of their own. Marko Šojat, born 19 April 1801 at Krivi Put, died 4 February 1871, with five children whose births and deaths are all recorded — Šimun 1819, Marija 1825, Matija 1828, Mate 1830, Martin 1831. One of them is entered at a place called Sojat Dol 54 — a valley named after the family.

And they married the Blaževići nine times.

So Blažević (Sojat) in the tree is almost certainly a household known by the family it married — which is how a nadimak is born, and the opposite of what this archive said. The mechanism was right and the direction was backwards.

Untersinger — a German name inside the Frontier

Seven people, and unusually for this archive they are a complete three-generation household with dates: Lucas Untersinger → George, born 25 March 1787, died 1848, married to Helena → five children, Rosalia 1802, Ana 1807–1845, Michael 1810–1840, Lucia 1827, Eva 1839.

Ana Untersinger married Elias “Ilija” Žubrinić, and they both died in 1845, leaving seven children — the event question 4b suspects was an epidemic in Lika.

A German surname in Lika is not an accident. The Military Frontier was administered from Vienna and its officer, forestry and clerical grades were staffed from across the monarchy. A Žubrinić marrying an Untersinger in the 1820s is a Frontier family marrying into the administration of the Frontier — which fits the six salaried posts this family held.

What would test it: the Otočac registers for George Untersinger (1787) and his father Lucas, and whether either is entered with a rank or an office. If the Untersingers arrived as Frontier staff rather than as settlers, the entry will say so.

Kostelac — six marriages into one household

Fifteen people, and six of them married Žubrinići: Stephanus married Barbara Žubrinić; Maria Kostelacz, Juliana Kostelacz and Maria Kostelac each married a Joannes Žubrinić; Martinus married Francisca Žubrinić; Michaël married Lucia Žubrinić. A seventh, Mande Kostelac, married a Sekula.

Two consequences. Three women of one surname married men of one name — which is exactly the soil in which the Michaël Žubrinić confusion grew, and a warning about how little a name identifies here.

And one couple is in the tree twice. Stephanus Kostelacz + Barbara Žubrinić and Stipan Kostelac + Bare Žubrinić are the same marriage under Latin and Croatian forms of both names — and both versions carry a daughter born 19 April 1849, entered once as Lucia and once as Luce.

Orešković and Sekula — an adoption, and why question 4d was hard

The 1835 Otočac baptism of Maria Catharina enters her father as Marcus Oreskovich, adoptatus Sekula. The tree explains it: Marcus Orešković, born 18 April 1809, is the son of Vitus Sekula. He was born a Sekula and carries Orešković.

Then he married a Sekula — Lucia, born 14 April 1815, daughter of a different Sekula household — and two of their sons carry both surnames at once: Franciscus Orešković Oreskovic Sekula (1844) and Petrus Orešković Oreskovic Sekula (1846).

Born one name, living under another, married back into the first, and passing both to his children. That is the same machine as Antich Papa becoming Papić — a surname changing hands over three generations — running in a different family at the same time. The names →

Kosina — a Slovenian merchant who walked over the mountains

The family Anka Blažević married into in 1919, and the family that lost Pavao in the 1943 raid, are not Croatian. Their Senj marriage of 12 January 1888 gives Martin Kosina's origin as Kranjska, župa sv. Martin kod Krainburg — Carniola, the parish of St Martin near Kranj, in what is now Slovenia.

He was a trgovac, a merchant, and 47 when he married the 30-year-old Angjelika Boras, a šilica — seamstress. The entry names only his mother, Gertruda Kosina, posjednica — a woman of property, with a German name and no husband recorded.

Two generations later the family was Senj's. Martin's sons Pavao and Antun married four days apart in November 1919, both entered trgovac like their father; Pavao was killed in the air raid of 8 October 1943; and the grave that carries him was restored by the family in 1991 with a priest's cross against it. Senj, 1943 →

The Boras side held office: Josip Boras, gradski stražar — city guard — and the witness Ivan Boras, kr. pomorske straže nadstražar, senior officer of the royal maritime guard.

What these five have in common

None of them is on the direct line. All four change what the direct line means.

• Repetition is the signal. Nine Šojat marriages, six Kostelac, four Orešković. A single marriage tells you two people met; nine tells you two villages were one community.
• Names move between families. Šojat becomes a Blažević by-name; Sekula becomes an Orešković surname and then both; Papa becomes Papić. Three separate instances of one mechanism, and this archive has now caught all three.
• And it is why identification keeps failing. When four Oreškovići marry four Žubrinići, a name and a surname identify nothing at all. What cannot be true →