Milka
Hedviga's mother is the best-documented person in this archive: a birth entry, two marriage entries, a gravestone and a factory. Her life can be told almost entirely from records, and it is not the life the family tree describes.
The tree carries Milka Lucia Papić as the wife of Ljubomir Blažević and the mother of seven. The registers carry a woman who was married twice, widowed at twenty-eight, and spent more than forty years in the same tobacco factory — going in as a floor worker and coming out supervising it.
Born 9 October 1886
| Name | Milka Lucia — zakonita, legitimate |
|---|---|
| Born / baptised | 9 October 1886, baptised 17 October |
| Father | Josip Papić, trhonoša — a load-carrier |
| Mother | Tonka rođ. Prpić |
| Godparents | Josip Glavičić, also a trhonoša, and Ivka Filipović |
| Baptised by | the chaplain (kapelan) at Senj |
| Later annotation | The margin was written up again when she died — the register records the death entry and the date 7.9.1971, endorsed at Senj 30.9.1971. |
Both her father and her godfather are trhonoše — men who carried other people's goods on their backs for a fee. That is not a coincidence; it is a social world. In a port town whose port had died, the porters knew the porters.
First marriage, 4 November 1907
Aged twenty-one, she married Zvonimir M. Vukelić — and nothing in the family tree's account of her had ever mentioned it.
| Date | 4 studenoga (November) 1907, Senj |
|---|---|
| Groom | Zvonimir M. Vukelić, gostioničarski pomoćnik — innkeeper's assistant. Born 13 January 1883. Bachelor. |
| Bride | Milka Papić, radnica u tvornici duhana — a worker in the tobacco factory. Born 9 October 1886. Unmarried. |
| His parents | Petar Vukelić, gostioničar — innkeeper, marked deceased — and Vica |
| Her parents | Joso Papić, gostioničar and Tonka rođ. Prpić |
| Witnesses | Kolomán pl. Vukelić, a broker at the tobacco factory, and Franjo Olivieri, merchant |
| Banns | Married by episcopal dispensation, with the banns read once — on 3 November, the day before the wedding — instead of the usual three times |
The one-day dispensation is worth noticing without over-reading. Her daughter Miroslava was born in 1907. A hurried wedding and a child in the same year is a familiar shape, but the register does not date the birth and this archive does not claim to know which came first.
Two children, and a widow at twenty-eight
The Vukelić children
Miroslava “Mica” / “Nana” Vukelić (1907–1993), who married Rahamin Levi (1904–1984) of Pirot; and Josip Vukelić (1913–2004), born at Senj.
They are Hedviga's half-brother and half-sister, and they were in the tree all along — invisible to the first build of this archive only because a sweep of somebody's ancestors never walks sideways.
1915
Zvonimir Vukelić died in 1915, aged thirty-two, in the middle of the First World War. Milka was twenty-eight, with a girl of eight and a boy of two.
Nothing in this archive says how he died, and 1915 is a year in which a man of thirty-two might die many ways. Open questions →
Second marriage, 8 December 1920
Thirteen years after the first wedding and five years after the death, she married Ljubomir Blažević, a sailor. The register enters her under her married name: Milka Vukelić, udova — widow.
She is still radnica u tvornici duhana. Thirteen years on from her first marriage entry, the same job, the same words. The full entry →
Seven children followed, of whom Hedviga was the fourth, born 3 August 1926 — and Oto, who did not come home from the war.
The factory, over a lifetime
| 1907, aged 21 | Radnica u tvornici duhana — worker, per the marriage register |
|---|---|
| 1920, aged 34 | Radnica u tvornici duhana — still a worker, per the marriage register |
| Later | Supervisor of workers at the cigarette factory, per the family tree — at Ul. Stjepana Radića 4, “now a textile factory” |
| And beside her | Anka Blažević (1893–1953), her husband's sister, a radnica in the same factory |
This is the only career progression documented anywhere in this archive, and it belongs to a woman. In a town where the men are recorded as day labourers, porters and sailors, the steady wage was hers. Why there was no other work →
7 September 1971
She died at Senj, aged eighty-four, and is on the family stone as MILKA BLAŽEVIĆ rod. PAPIĆ ✳ 1886 † 1971 — under her maiden name, not the Vukelić name she carried into her second wedding, and beside the son whose body was never found. The grave →
What is still missing. Zvonimir Vukelić's death entry for 1915, which would say how she was widowed; Miroslava's 1907 birth entry, which would fix the order of wedding and child; and any record of what Milka did between 1915 and 1920, alone with two children in a town with no work.