Open Questions
Written down so they can be worked on, and so no reader mistakes a gap for a fact. Each one says what would actually close it.
The most valuable thing anyone can send this archive is a correction. The second most valuable is a document that closes one of these.
1. Who were Ljubomir's parents? — ANSWERED
This was the archive's central doubt: the join at generation three rested on a man with no document. The Senj marriage register of 8 December 1920 names the groom's parents outright — Juraj Blažević and Tereza r. Žubrinić — and confirms Ljubomir's birth as 1 March 1892. It was attached in the family tree the whole time and absent from the GEDCOM export.
1b. Who was Juraj Blažević's father? — a house number, and a second witness
Four more registers were read in September 2026 and the man is no longer a bare name.
He has an occupation and a house. His son Marijan's baptism, 12 April 1895, enters him as “Jurko Blažević i Tereza rođ. Žubrinić, selj.” — peasant — living at Smokvica kbr. 114.
That house is a zadruga, not a household — this archive's own correction. Toma and Terezija Pećanić are recorded at Smokvica 114 in 1882 and 1884, and Toma was born at Br. 114 in 1838. But a control document — the 1890 baptism of Frane Blažević — puts Pavao Blažević, son of Luka, at Smokvica 114 as well. Luka and Toma's father Anton are both sons of Ilija, so Pavao and Toma are first cousins, and the number covers an extended-family compound. It places Juraj in Ilija's kin-group; it cannot name his father. The zadruga →
And a second register names the couple. Anka Blažević's marriage to Pavao Kosina on 20 November 1919 gives her parents as Juraj Blažević i Tereza r. Žubrinić — independently of the 1920 entry for their son Ljubomir.
And the house is now written out in full. Antonija “Tonka” Blažević's marriage to Ginro Babić on 1 December 1912 enters her parents as “††Toma i Tereza Blažević, poljodjelci iz sela Smokvica kbr. 114” — not a number in a baptismal margin but the household stated in plain Croatian, both of them marked dead. That is a fourth independent document for house 114 and the first to name Toma and Tereza together with the number. It hardens the household the whole argument stands on; it still does not name Juraj's father.
September 2026 — and the patronymic turns out to be deliberate. Reading the 1888 baptism of Pavao's daughter Terezija, also at Smokvica 114, gives a godfather called Ivo Blažević sin Matin — son of Mate. So two different men named Ivo Blažević stood godfather at this one house within seven years, told apart only by their fathers' names. That is why the priest bothered with a patronymic at all: there were several Ivo Blaževići about, and “sin Tomin” in 1895 is a distinction he chose to draw, not a formula. It also shows the compound from the outside — one house number holding Toma's children, Pavao's children, Jurko's children, an Ivo son of Toma and an Ivo son of Mate.
September 2026 — and the godparent column says it plainly. Four baptisms at Smokvica 114 have now been read, and the godparents are drawn from two distinct Blažević sibling-sets:
1888 Ivo Blažević sin Matin · Anica Tomljanović
1894 Šime Pećanić · Mara Blažević Matina
1895 Ive Blažević sin Tomin · Marija Blažević ćer Tomina
1896 Nikola Blažević · Ana Krpan kći Ilijina
Mate's children and Toma's children, both standing at the same house, plus a Pećanić — Toma's wife's family. That is what a zadruga looks like from the godparent column: one number, several fathers, and the children of one brother standing for the children of another. It still does not name Jurko's father; it does make the compound something you can see rather than infer.
It is still not the sentence that says so. What would give it: Jurko's own baptism in the Sv. Jakov Krmpote register, or his marriage to Tereza Žubrinić before 1892. Two of his children, Marijan (1895) and Ruža (1897), have no marriage recorded anywhere — and every marriage entry re-names the parents, so those are two more chances at the same answer.
1c. Who was Milka's first husband? — ANSWERED
Zvonimir M. Vukelić, gostioničarski pomoćnik — innkeeper's assistant — born 13 January 1883, married at Senj on 4 November 1907 (marriages p.294 no.30). He died in 1915, aged thirty-two, leaving Milka a widow at twenty-eight. Their children Miroslava “Mica” Vukelić (1907–1993) and Josip Vukelić (1913–2004) are Hedviga's half-sister and half-brother — and were in the tree all along. Milka's life →
1d. How did Zvonimir Vukelić die in 1915? — and a correction
This archive proposed the Austro-Hungarian casualty lists, reasoning that he was thirty-two in the second year of the war. That reasoning was probably wrong. The tree places his death at Senj, in his own town, and gives his occupation as gostioničar, bankar — innkeeper and banker, a considerable rise from the gostioničarski pomoćnik who married Milka in 1907. A man who dies at home, in a settled trade, is not a Verlustliste entry.
His baptism has since been read: born 13 January 1883 at Senj, baptised 25 February, son of Petar pl. Vukelić — plemeniti, noble — and Lojza. Milka married into a titled family and was widowed out of it at twenty-eight.
The Senj death register for 1915, and nothing else. The casualty lists are behind a subscription for uncommon surnames and are, on this evidence, the wrong book.
1e. Which came first — the wedding or the child?
Milka and Zvonimir married on 4 November 1907 by episcopal dispensation, with the banns read once on 3 November rather than three times. Their daughter Miroslava was born in 1907. A dispensation, a one-day wedding and a child in the same year make a familiar shape — but the register does not date the birth, and this archive does not claim to know.
Weakened 13 September 2026. The Senj marriage of Martin Kosina and Angjelika Boras, 12 January 1888, carries the same shape: dispensed by the Senj ordinariate on 7 January, banns read once only on the 8th, married on the 12th. He was 47 and she 30, and there is no suggestion of anything in it. A single dispensation in this diocese looks like ordinary administrative practice, not evidence — so this question rests on the birth date alone, and that is exactly what is missing.
2. How did Oto Blažević die?
Two accounts in the same note, from two named relatives: a snakebite, and killed in the war in Slavonia with no known grave. A photograph of the family grave now corroborates the second witness in its checkable parts — Oto's name is on the stone, and Leo and Katica were added later exactly as she described. It still does not establish the cause. The full page →
3. When did Santou Codron leave Rhodes?
Born on Rhodes in 1913; alive in South Africa to marry Hedviga about 1973. The island's Jewish community was deported on 23 July 1944 and roughly 150 of 1,615 survived. Whether he left before the war — as ~2,000 Rhodes Jews did, for the Congo and Rhodesia — or survived the deportation is not known here, and the difference is enormous. The full page →
4. Is the Port Pirie branch the same Žubrinić family?
Now traceable three generations back from the emigrant: Ivan Žubrinić (1860–1930) → his father Joannes, b. 19 June 1837, Forest Ranger → Elias “Ilija” (1806–1845) → Casparus (1767–1829). And there it stops: in the tree, Casparus's parent is a node literally named “Brothers of Casparus (It Seems) Žubrinić” — a researcher's guess written into the structure. Nothing joins the two lines — and as of 13 September 2026 it is possible to say exactly what the apparent join is made of. Walk Casparus upward and the chain reads: Casparus 1767 → “Brothers of Casparus (It Seems)” → “C Žubrinić Xubrinich Zubrinic” → “Žubrinić Zubrinix Xubrinic Zubrinic Otocac”. The second is a researcher's note. The third is an alphabet — one of eighteen nodes whose entire given name is a single letter, holding everyone whose name starts with it. Ninety-two people are attached that way.
Walk Toma upward and he stops at a bare node called Žubrinić after one step. So the two lines meet in a filing system and nowhere else.
But they are born a year apart in one small village. Casparus 14 January 1767; Toma 1768, at Šumećica 2 — and the 1834 Frontier baptism this archive has read is at Šumećica 24. A surname held by ~312 people on earth, two men born a year apart in the same hamlet. The Frontier →
4b. What killed Elias Žubrinić and Ana Untersinger in 1845?
Both are given 1845: he was thirty-eight, she thirty-seven, and they left seven children between about one and fifteen — including the eight-year-old who became the Otočac forest ranger and fathered the Port Pirie emigrant. Two adults dying in one year suggests an epidemic or a famine in 1840s Lika rather than coincidence. The tree gives no day, no cause and no source.
4d. Which Maria Orešković, and was there a second wife? — NO SECOND WIFE, THREE MEN
Answered 13 September 2026, from the tree's own structure. With the surname fold fixed — it had been excluding 63 Žubrinići — the question comes apart cleanly.
Ahnentafel 20's children are a coherent set: Nicolaus 1834 · Daniel 1837 · Francisca 1840 · Maria 1841. Four children in seven years at Otočac. That is one marriage, contracted about 1833, behaving exactly as a marriage should.
And the tree holds a second Michael — Michael Miho Michaël Žubrinić, married to Maria Marković, whose children are Theodorus 1841 · Josephus, 16 March 1845 · Marta 1849 · Magdalena 1852.
That is the entry this archive read. The Otočac baptism of 16 March 1845 — Michaël et Maria Žubrinić nata Marković, the one that made this question suspect a second wife — is his, and the tree has held him all along.
What went wrong is a filing error. The 1845 scan is tagged to ahnentafel 20. This archive read it, found a wife née Marković where it expected née Orešković, and invented a second marriage to explain the difference. There was no second marriage. There are at least three men of the name — the third being the ††Mate Žubrinić i Marija rodj. Orešković named at the 1910 marriage as parents of Nikola, b. 1880, who is also wrongly hung on ahnentafel 20, thirty-nine years after that coherent set ends.
The Otočac marriage register around 1855–70 would name that couple outright. And a small tidy: Josephus 1845 is in the tree twice, both entries dated 16 March 1845 — one baptism recorded as two people.
4c. Can the Žubrinići be joined into one family? — NO, NOT FROM HERE
Both numbers this question was built on were wrong, and the answer changes with them. The tree holds 422 people of the name, not 232 — the surname fold split on a bracket but not a slash, so Žubrinić / Xubrinich never matched. And they resolve into 90 loose ends, which is high for a reason the old figure never named: 92 people hang off an A–Z index, eighteen nodes whose whole given name is a single letter.
Of the 90 loose ends, 79 are bare names — no date, no place, nothing to search on. Four have both. So joining them is not the largest piece of work outstanding here; it is work that cannot be done from this archive at all, and saying otherwise was the mistake. The fragments, counted →
5. Are Antić and Papić one family or two? — ONE, and a by-name explains it
The tree's own structure answers most of this. Of 15,643 people there are 7 Antić and 117 Papić, and they never interleave: no family anywhere contains both an Antić and a Papić child. The two names touch at exactly one point — Georgius Juraj “Jure” Antić Papić, ahnentafel 12, born at Selce on 11 March 1838, who is entered carrying both surnames and the word Papa. Every one of the nine cross-name parent-child links in the tree is a child of his. Everything above him is Antić; everything below is Papić.
So this was never a question about two families. It is a question about one join — and the register says what happened at it.
Ahnentafel 24's baptism, Vrbnik, 14 March 1806: patre Joanne, Matre Marthæ Antich Papa, nomine Josephum. The family is Antić. Papa is its house by-name — underlined by the scribe exactly as he underlines Loncsarich Franich and Antich Dudin on the same page. A nadimak, the device that tells one household from another where a village shares a surname, doing the same work as the house numbers at Smokvica.
1806 Antich Papa — surname Antić, by-name Papa
1838 ahn 12 born, carrying every form at once
1885 his son's marriage enters the father under a short form reading Papa
after every descendant written Papić
A by-name displaced a surname across three generations, which is an ordinary Croatian process, and there is now a document at three of the four steps.
And a guess, offered as one. Ahn 49, Margarita “Martha” Lončarić — the Martha of the 1806 entry — has a mother recorded as Anna Papić. A woman actually surnamed Papić marrying into this Antić household one generation before the by-name first appears is exactly how a nadimak arises: the household becomes known by the wife's family. It would explain where Papa came from. It is also a single undocumented name in a tree, and nothing here tests it — the Selce marriage of Pauli Lončarić and Anna Papić would.
5b. Two sisters born eighteen days apart
Franjka Papić and Šulka Papić are both daughters of Josip Papić and Antonija r. Prpić — Milka's parents, so both are Hedviga's aunts. Franjka's marriage register (Senj, 16 August 1914) gives her birth as 20 January 1895. Šulka's (Senj, 21 December 1919) gives hers as 7 February 1895. That is eighteen days, and they cannot both be right for full sisters.
Neither date is this archive's inference: each is written in that woman's own entry. A marriage register records what the bride said, not what the baptism book says, so either could be the loose one. They might be twins with garbled dates; one might belong to a different Papić couple, and there were at least three having children in Senj in these years.
The Senj baptism register for January–February 1895 settles it. Both entries would fall within three weeks of each other in the same book, and it would take one sitting.
5c. Four of the most important documents here are thumbnails
The median scan in this archive is 2,934 pixels wide and several are 4,500. Four are 960. They are not minor ones:
1920 · Ljubo and Milka's marriage — the entry that answered question 1
1885 · Josip and Antonija's marriage — names four direct ancestors
1907 · Zvonimir and Milka's marriage — the hidden first marriage
1859 · Antonija Perpić's birth (a) — superseded by a 3,569px copy
It is already costing readings. On the 1885 entry the groom's father's surname resolves only to a short form that looks like Papa, with no visible -ić — which is the whole of question 5. And his bride's mother, Lucia, is given a maiden name ending -pić that cannot be read at all. She is one of the seven women on the direct line with no surname, and that one word would end it.
That the 1859 birth exists at 960px and at 3,569px shows the same event reached this archive twice by two different routes — and only one of them was any good.
What the good scans have in common is where they came from. Three documents here carry a FamilySearch image identifier in the filename — 3QSQ-G99X-1QBW, 3QSQ-G99X-17PB, 3QSQ-G99X-174F — and all three are 4,500 pixels. Every 960-pixel file carries no such identifier. The big ones were pulled from FamilySearch; the small ones came by some poorer route and were uploaded to the tree as they were.
So the fix is to find these three entries on FamilySearch again and take them at full size. The registers and pages are already known: Senj marriages 8 December 1920; Senj marriages p.192 no.5, 3 May 1885; Senj marriages p.294 no.30, 4 November 1907. The fourth needs nothing — Antonija's 1859 birth already exists here at 3,569 pixels.
One known obstacle: the FamilySearch image viewer will accept a page number but does not repaint its canvas under automation, so this may need a person at the keyboard rather than a script.
1f. Twenty-two years, an emigration and a whole country
Hedviga is at Senj in April 1953, when her son Robert is born. She is next seen arriving in South Africa in April 1975, and the entry says “from Zimbabwe”. Between those two dates this archive holds nothing whatever — not a departure, not an arrival, not an address. An entire country is known only from two words on a later record.
The family remembers it as 1948, a post-war move for better and safer conditions. The record will not allow 1948: their second and third children were born at Senj in December 1951 and April 1953. But 1948 is a real year here — Ladislava “Ada” was born at Crikvenica on 5 March 1948 — and a remembered date attaching itself to the wrong event is the commonest fault in this whole archive.
So the crossing happened after April 1953 and before 1973, when she is said to have married Santou Codron. Twenty years wide, and everything about the family's life in Rhodesia sits inside it — three children schooled somewhere, a husband working somewhere, and a marriage ending, since Ivan died back at Senj in 1995.
· Southern Rhodesia immigration and permit records, 1953–1965
· South African permanent-residence and naturalisation files, 1975
· Yugoslav passport applications — leaving was not a private act
· School enrolments in Salisbury or Bulawayo for three children
· Whatever ended the marriage, since he returned and she did not
The National Archives of Zimbabwe in Harare holds the immigration series. This is the largest single hole in the life of the person this archive exists for.
6. Why is Antonija Prpić buried at Mirogoj?
She was born at Krivi Put 136 in 1859 and died at Senj in 1935 — but is buried at Mirogoj in Zagreb, 200 km away. Nothing in the record explains it. A child living in Zagreb is the obvious guess and it is only a guess.
7. Two deaths on 30 October, six years apart
Ivan Anton Defranceski died at Senj on 30 October 1995; Hedviga died at Johannesburg on 30 October 2001. Both dates come from the tree, not from certificates seen here. A shared date is exactly what memory tidies into place.
8. What was the Senj tobacco factory?
Two women of this family worked there — Milka as a supervisor, Anka Blažević (1893–1953) on the floor. The tree gives the building's address and says it is now a textile factory. Its founding date, size and closure are unconfirmed here; the machinery is said to have gone to Rovinj after the Second World War.
Its scale can now be read off one page. Senj marriages p.359 covers 20 November – 22 December 1919, entries 44 to 51. Six of the eight brides — Anka Blažević, Marija Ilić, Ivka Babić, Marija Babić, Božica Zrinski and Šulka Papić — are entered radnica u tvornici duhana, and entry 45's witness Ivan Antić is a mašinista in it.
Three pages across three registers, counted the same way:
p.303 · 1909 · 3 of 5 brides
p.350 · 1918 · 3 of 6 brides
p.359 · 1919 · 6 of 8 brides
This is not one unusual page. Across at least 1909–1919 the factory is the standing occupation of the young women marrying in Senj, and men appear in it too — Mate Tadić, radnik u tvornici duhana, and Ivan Antić, mašinista.
Ten pages have now been counted the same way, 1909 to 1919: 3 of 5 brides, 3 of 5, 4 of 5, 4 of 5, 4 of 5, 3 of 4, 3 of 6, 7 of 8, 6 of 8. It is not one unusual page or one unusual year.
And the register shows the whole hierarchy, because it records each person's grade:
radnica / radnik worker
vratar doorman
mašinista machinist
mestar master
nadglednica / nadglednik supervisor
nadčinovnik senior clerk
Milka is a nadglednica; so is Antonija Blažević. Two women of this family reached supervisor, which makes the factory a career and not merely a wage.
It was also a route out. Antonija “Tonka” Blažević married Ginro Babić in 1912 — nadglednik u tvornici duhana na Rieci — and went to Rijeka with him; the witness at that wedding, Andrija Babić, held the same grade at the same Rijeka factory. Floor in Senj, supervisor in Rijeka.
9. Three place errors that will mislead someone
(a) Juraj Blažević's birthplace is geocoded to Smokvica, Općina Smokvica, Dubrovačko-neretvanska županija — that is Smokvica on Korčula, 400 km south. The village meant is Smokvica Krmpotska near Novi Vinodolski. (b) Ivan Žubrinić of Port Pirie is given “Senj, Split-Dalmatia”; Senj is in Lika-Senj. (c) A FamilySearch citation for Nicolaus Žubrinić's Otočac christening is catalogued under “Osekovo, Belovár-Körös Megye, Hungary”.
10. The photographs are not in the export — ANSWERED
The GEDCOM contains no media records at all. Seventy items have now been swept out of the MyHeritage media library across the whole line — 34 of them register scans, certificates and gravestones, many at 4,500 px. Three are read out in full: the 1920 marriage register, the 1951 birth extract, the family grave. All of them →
11. Who is in the photographs?
Most of the recovered photographs carry no caption but a camera filename — 1595624858.9990501, 1134835622, IMG_5752. Faces this archive can name are guesses from resemblance and from the ages of children in shot. The pictures →
And five of them were not photographs. Five items were being published as portraits of ancestors born between 1806 and 1838; they are stock question-mark placeholder graphics, one with a visible Adobe Stock watermark. They are now excluded from the build. The five →
12. Why does Ivan Defranceski have Arolsen card files? — ANSWERED
They are his, beyond reasonable doubt: all three give the birth as 25 June 1925 at Crikvenica, matching the 1951 civil birth extract exactly. They place him at Licht und Kraft, Reutlingen, as an Hilfsarbeiter — unskilled labourer — from 21 October 1941, aged sixteen, lodging at Brunnenstraße 7, Pfullingen, with a second Reutlingen employer from January 1942. The full reading →
12b. Was he a forced labourer or a free one?
The 1950 municipal questionnaires carry three printed lines designed to answer exactly this — Wurde der Arbeiter restlos entlohnt? (was he paid in full), Dienstverpflichtet (compulsorily assigned), Freier Arbeiter … seit (free worker, since). All three are blank on both cards. The collection is titled a card file of persecutees, but that is the name of a zone-wide registration file, not a finding about anyone in it. This archive claims neither.
12c. How long was he in Germany?
The second employment runs from 26 January 1942 to 28 November 194? — the last digit of the year runs into the column rule and cannot be read. 1942 gives ten months in Germany; 1944 gives just over three years. His daughter is born at Crikvenica in 1948, so he was home by then, and nothing at all is documented between the card and that birth.
13. The gravestone contradicts the register
The Senj stone gives Ljubomir's birth as 1891. The 1920 marriage register, written in his lifetime from his baptismal certificate, gives 1 March 1892. This archive follows the register.
Three letters
Three of these questions can only be answered by a book that is not online. The
enquiries are written and sit in requests/, each naming exactly what
is wanted and what is already known, so the search can be narrow. None has been
sent.
| Rijeka, Senj branch | The registers of Sv. Jakov, Krmpote — the parish named by Toma's 1907 death entry, and therefore the book holding every Blažević above him. Wanted: Jurko's baptism (likely 1855–1870), his marriage to Tereza Žubrinić (likely 1885–92), or his death before December 1920. Any one of the three names his father and ends question 1b. |
|---|---|
| Rijeka, Senj branch | Senj, 1915 — the death of Zvonimir Vukelić: how Milka came to be widowed at twenty-eight, about which this archive knows nothing at all. |
| Gospić added 10 Sept 2026 | Otočac — one man called Michaël Žubrinić, or two? The 1834 baptism at Šumećica 24 and the 1880 son named at his 1910 marriage give parents of the same two names forty-six years apart. Wanted: a Žubrinić–Orešković marriage before 1834, and whether a second one exists around 1855–70. One entry, or its absence, decides four generations. Question 4d. |
Two of the three were first addressed to the wrong archive. Gospić covers Lika-Senj “osim gradova Senja i Novalje” — except the towns of Senj and Novalja — and Smokvica Krmpotska is not in Lika-Senj at all. Senj, Krmpote and Krivi Put belong to Rijeka; Otočac and Karlobag to Gospić. That correction →
All three drafts say plainly that a nil return is worth having and will be recorded as one. An archive that holds nothing is a finding; an archive never asked is not.
And the standing one
Everything above generation eight is silence, not mystery. The Croatian parish registers for this coast begin in the sixteenth century and many survive; the Blažević line simply has not been followed into them below Mateša Blažević, born about 1750. That is a research gap, and it is closable by someone with the patience to read Latin parish hands. How far back →