Sources
A MyHeritage tree of 15,643 people, a set of Croatian parish registers reachable through FamilySearch, and national surname statistics. Their weights are very different.
The strongest thing here: a civil birth extract
One document in this archive is a state record rather than a church one or a tree one: a sworn English translation of the Yugoslav register-of-births extract for Ivan Defranceski, born at Senj Hospital on 17 December 1951 — Senj registration 152/1954, issued 27 April 1954 over the seal of the Municipality of Senj.
It confirms Hedviga's own birth date and place from outside the family tree, and it carries three things the tree does not. The certificate →
The parish registers
“Croatia, Church Books, 1516–1994”, digitised by FamilySearch from the holdings of the Hrvatski državni arhiv (Croatian State Archives) in Zagreb. Citations in this tree reach specific images in specific volumes:
- Senj — Births 1756–1858, Births 1878–1894, Marriages 1859–1920
- Krivi Put — Births 1847–1884
- Otočac — Births 1834–1846
- Karlobag — the Pilipić and Uroda entries
These are Roman Catholic registers (Rimokatolička crkva) kept in Latin, and later Croatian, by the parish priest. A single baptismal entry typically gives the child, the date, the parents, the house number and the godparents — which is how this archive knows that Milka Papić's godparents were Josip Glavičić and Ivka Filipović, and that Antonija Prpić's were Lucas and Anna Tomljanović.
The spine: MyHeritage
A single family tree of 15,643 people and 4,777 families, exported as GEDCOM on 8 September 2026. It is the structure of this archive and the origin of nearly every date. Within it, individual people cite other trees — Geni World Family Tree, Defranceski Family Site, Boras Web Site, Grlica Web Site, Janicic, Marko Karic rodoslov.
One export, six archives. This is not a Blažević export — it is the whole tree, covering the Defranceski, Lerena, Taylor, Barry, Blažević and Booyzen families, and the sibling archives are built from the same file. So a fact contradicted here is contradicted in all of them, and a re-export refreshes all of them at once. Checked 10 September 2026: still current, and nothing here depends on a newer one.
Many notes carry a SmartCopy stamp from Geni, dated 2014–2017. That records when a record was copied between websites, not when anything was verified. The build strips this boilerplate from the displayed notes and keeps the human prose.
Statistics and history
- Forebears — surname incidence and density by country and Croatian county. Built on national registers; good for orders of magnitude, not a census. Used here →
- Wikipedia and the standard literature on the Croatian Military Frontier, the Karlovac Generalate and the Otočac captaincy and regiment. Used here →
- Hrvatska znanstvena bibliografija / Hrčak — Croatian scholarship on the Bunjevci Krmpoćani settlement of the Senj mountain. Used here →
- Wikipedia, Nehaj Fortress and the Uskoks; visitsenj.com for the town's own account of the 1873 railway. Used here →
- Tierra prometida: Jews from Rhodes in the Belgian Congo and Southern Rhodesia, 1910s–1960s; the Rhodes Jewish Museum; Yad Vashem, on the July 1944 deportation. Used here →
- SA History Hub on Croatians in South Australia; Port Pirie smelter history. Used here →
- Croatian scholarship on the German bombing of Senj in 1943 (Njemačko bombardiranje Senja 1943.), for the dates, the casualty figures and the proportion of the town destroyed. Used here →
One source this archive will not use
An automated surname-origin website was consulted for Žubrinić and is not relied on anywhere here. It offers two unrelated etymologies in the same article, places the name in Dalmatia when its Croatian density is highest in Lika-Senj, and names a “Petar Žubrinić, 18th-century Croatian ban” who did not exist — the bans of that century were Pálffy, Drašković, Eszterházy, Branyng, Batthyány, Nádasdy, Esterházy, Balassa and Erdődy. The full check →
Never consulted, and it shows
No death certificate has been obtained for Hedviga (Johannesburg 2001) or Ivan (Senj 1995), and no extract for the 1920 Senj marriage. No South African or Rhodesian immigration file. No Yugoslav war victims register search for Oto. No Mirogoj cemetery record for Antonija Prpić. These are the next things to do. Open questions →
Until September 2026 this page said that no civil registration document underpinned anything here. That is no longer true — the 1951 birth extract came out of the MyHeritage media library, where it had been sitting all along, attached to Hedviga's profile and absent from the GEDCOM export.