About
How this archive decides what it is willing to say.
The confidence system
A claim is never stored as a fact. It is stored as an assertion with a source and a confidence, and the interface always shows which. Three states, on every date, every relationship and every claim about character.
A named source with a folio reference and, wherever possible, the scan itself.
A reasoned conclusion from documented facts, with the reasoning written out so it can be challenged and overturned.
Told, remembered, not corroborated. Kept because it is precious and the family said it; labelled because pretending otherwise is how family myths become family history.
Living people
Data protection law reaches the living and not the dead, and a private tree is exempt from it while a public website is not. So the rule is structural rather than editorial: anyone marked living is omitted from the generated site at build time — not hidden behind CSS, not behind a login, not present in the data with a flag. Not rendered at all.
A living person appears only if they have asked to. A removal request is honoured within days, without argument and without requiring a reason.
Successes and failings both
Illegitimacy, poverty, desertion, debt, drink, crime, children who did not survive — these are in the registers and they are the truth of most families. The policy: the closer to living memory, the higher the bar. Beyond about 1920, nothing without a named source. Within living memory, nothing about anyone without their family's consent.
Hardship is told in its context. Camillo De Franceschi went to prison for two years at twenty-one; that is not a stain to be managed but the most interesting fact about him, and it belongs on his page in full.
These places sit on the fault line of one of Europe's most contested memories. Between a quarter and a third of a million people left Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia after 1943, and there are two national narratives that do not agree about any of it. This archive's position: report what happened to our people, with sources; use both toponyms always; do not adjudicate between national grievances. Some of this family stayed and some left, and both are owed the same dignity.
Sources
| Source | Where | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| State Archives in Pazin — register inventory | dapa.hr | The 407 registers in the Archive section |
| Cadastre National de l'Istrie, Institut Adriatique, Sušak 1946 | via istrianet.org | The 1945 village census of the surname |
| Istria on the Internet — Prominent Istrians | istrianet.org | Biographies of Carlo and Camillo De Franceschi |
| House of de Franceski | defranceski.com | The received account of the lines and the migrations |
| Forebears — surname incidence | forebears.io | Worldwide distribution by spelling |
| Acta Croatica | actacroatica.com | Surname distribution within Croatia |
| Portale Antenati / Archivio di Stato di Udine | antenati.cultura.gov.it | Ovaro civil registration 1806–15 and 1871–1911 |
| FamilySearch | familysearch.org | Microfilmed registers; 770+ Croatian Catholic parishes |
| Archivio Storico Diocesano, Udine | archiviodiocesano.it | Parish duplicates for Carnia |
| State Archives in Rijeka | riarhiv.hr | Senj, Crikvenica and Vinodol — not yet inventoried |