The Register of the Dead

Carlo sat in the district court at Rovinj from 1833; a Julius, son of Caroli, was buried there in February 1854, aged a few months. He later moved to Poreč, where his son Camillo was born on 3 August 1868. In July 1867 — thirteen months before that birth — two infant daughters of a Caroli were buried at Poreč within weeks of one another.

One of them was called Lamberta.

Carlo's mother was Lambertina Peschle of Volosca. He gave his daughter his mother's name, and buried her before her second birthday. In 1876 he buried Virginia, who was eighteen.

Camillo is described in the reference literature as the youngest of the four children of Carlo de Franceschi. Four is the number who survived. This page is the difference.

Inferred The entries give the father only as Caroli or Carlo De Franceschi, without a patronymic. The identification rests on the towns matching Carlo's own postings, on the dates falling inside his married life, and on the name Lamberta, which is not a common Istrian name and is his mother's. It is strong, and it is not proof. The parish books at Poreč and Rovinj would settle it.

On 30 March 1895, at five in the morning, Pietro De Franceschi died in the Civic Hospital of San Daniele del Friuli. He was forty-four, and the register calls him mura… — a mason. The same trade the Gračišće register gives Antonius in 1863: lapicida.

On 12 August 1899, at five in the morning, in the same building, died Edoardo De Franceschi. Forty-eight, già Ufficiale — a former officer — nato in Zara e domiciliato in Zara, son of the late Giovanni and the late Maria Zenardi, husband of Regina Pappafava.

Edoardo was a Zadar man, and he died seven hundred kilometres from Zadar. Both entries were written out by the same registrar, Giovanni Stocchi, from a notice sent over by the hospital director that morning. Whether the two men knew each other, or whether San Daniele's hospital simply took in cases from a wide catchment, the archive cannot say — but the coincidence is on the page, and Friuli is the country this family says it came from.

A third Italian entry belongs with these: at Concesio above Brescia on 15 July 1916, Giovanni De Franceschi, aged three, died at Via Pieve 17. The death was reported by his own father, De Franceschi prof. Umberto, forty, a schoolmaster of Brescia, who walked to the town hall the next morning and gave his son's age as three.