The Defranceschi Archive
52 places, one map

The Atlas

Every place this archive can put a document in — from the Gorto valley in Carnia to a cemetery in the Victorian Wimmera. The dark line is the documented descent, walked in order.

The documented lineCarnia — where it may startIstria, where the name isOther families of the nameThe Senj and Karlobag sideWhere they went

Click any marker for what happened there and a way into the page that proves it. Scroll to zoom; the line joins the nine places of the direct descent in order.

Reading the map

The line is short

Nine places carry the whole documented descent, and seven of them sit inside a hundred kilometres of each other. The family did not move much until 1939, and then it moved to three continents in a decade.

The cluster is not the line

Rijeka, Pula and Ližnjan carry far more of the surname than Gračišće ever did — and none of them is connected to this family by any document. Weight on the map is not kinship.

The gap is the argument

Between Mione in 1679 and Gologorica in 1711 there is nothing but a house with a date on it. That two-hundred-kilometre jump is the one thing this archive cannot yet prove.

What this page rests on
FamilySearch Database
Državni arhiv u Pazinu (DAPA) Archive · Vladimira Nazora 3, 52000 Pazin, Croatia
«Lettere di Carlo De Franceschi a Giovanni Kobler» Publication · Atti e Memorie della Società Istriana, 1928
Find a Grave Database

The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →