The Names

What they mean

X wrote the sound Ž

The Žubrinić name appears in this tree in eight different spellings, and they are not errors. They are three successive orthographies for one unchanged spoken name.

The direct ancestors are entered under both at once — Nicolaus “Nikola” Žubrinić (Xubrinic), born at Otočac on 24 January 1834, and his father Michael “Mate” Žubrinić / Zubrinic / Xubrinich, born 1811. Whoever built this tree was reading across all three systems, which is the right instinct.

The given names change language too

These registers were kept in Latin, and then in Croatian. The same man is Joannes in the book that baptised him and Ivan in the one that married him — and a fair number of entries decline him into Joannem or Joannis, because a priest writing baptizavi Josephum is writing the accusative, not the name.

So the archive's own register was splitting people from themselves. A reader searching Ivan was shown 42 of them and not the other 46. Of 29 canonical given names in this material, 35 appear under more than one spelling.

The register's search box now folds all of this: type Joannis and you get every Ivan; type Tonka and you get every Antonija; type Georgius and you get Juraj and Jure. The table is built from the names actually present in the data, not from a list of what Croatian names might be, and it lives in tools/given_names.py.

Forty people in this archive are named after a case ending

These registers are narrative Latin, not forms. A priest writes baptizavi Josephum — “I baptised Josephus” — and filius Josephi — “son of Josephus”. Those endings are grammar. Transcribed literally into a family tree, they become names, and the tree acquires a man called Josephum who was never called that by anyone.

42 of the people published here carry one — 20 genitives, 18 accusatives, one dative and one ablative — and 8 of them are direct ancestors of Hedviga.

The other 34 are collateral and are flagged on their own pages.

Nothing has been renamed. The tree is the authority on what the tree says, and this archive's job is to note where what it says is a grammatical artefact rather than to quietly correct it — the person pages carry the note, and the search folds the forms together so that Josephum and Josip find each other.

What the surname-origin websites say about Žubrinić is invented

Because Žubrinić is rare, it is exactly the kind of name that the automated “meaning and origin of your surname” sites fill in with confident fiction. One of them, consulted for this archive, produced the following — and it is worth setting out, because somebody researching this family will find it.

What can honestly be said is small. The name is a standard -ić patronymic built on a stem Žubr-; which personal name or nickname stands behind that stem is a question for Croatian onomastic scholarship, and this archive has not found an authority that answers it. Everything else on this page is counted, not guessed. Method →

And then the name emigrates

When the family leaves, the spelling forks permanently — and the two forks can be counted separately.

The two lists do not overlap by a single country. The diacritics are not decoration; they are a border. And the seven in South Africa are on the same continent this family's own line ended up on. The Australian branch spells it Zubrinich →

Distribution, as counted

Figures from Forebears, which builds on national statistical and electoral registers. They are good for orders of magnitude and for relative density; they are not a census.

How the tree writes them, and where

A spelling is not a fact about a family. It is a fact about the room the name was written down in — which parish, which clerk, which language the register kept its columns in. Set each spelling beside the place and the year it clusters at, and the variants stop looking like noise.

Seven women on the direct line have no surname at all

Not an unknown surname — no surname. The register gave a Christian name, the husband's full name, and nothing else. Every one of the seven is a woman, and each is a dead end that no amount of reading further back can pass.

One of them, ahnentafel 87, is entered in the tree literally as Maria ? — the question mark is part of the name as stored. She is the mother of a direct ancestor and there is no more of her than that.

This is not a gap in the research. It is the shape of the record: a Catholic parish register of this period names a bride's father when it can and drops her family name when it cannot, and a woman who married in from another parish frequently arrives with a first name only. Where the line stops at a woman, it usually stops for this reason. What actually ends each line →

Two names the tree could not assign to a family

Distinct from a spelling variant: here the record names two different families and cannot choose between them.

• Luca Papić or Perpic — Open her siblings are written Papić, which looks like an answer until you check the father: he is a record called “Senj — Unknown To be Sorted Papić”, a sorting bucket. Those siblings were grouped by whoever compiled the tree, not by a register. It suggests Papić and proves nothing.
• Maria Kostelacz / Jergovic? — Open she appears only as a wife, with no parents and no siblings in the tree, so there is no structure to settle it against.

Neither has a page of her own; both surface in the relation lists of people who do. Neither is resolved. The first case is the more instructive one: a household in this tree can be an editorial convenience rather than a family, and a surname inherited from a sorting bucket would be this archive's own invention rather than a finding. How the buckets are excluded →