Four records · 1829 to 1871 · one family
Ragusa — the Dubrovnik household
A Defranceschi daughter who married into Ragusa, and the three children she had there. It is the smallest group on this site, and until today it was not a group at all.
When this archive was asked in September 2026 whether Dubrovnik could have a page of its own, the answer was no: four people, and one of the rows carries four parent names, which is exactly the tabular-register trap that burned us on Francisca. Giving it a page would dress four records as a group.
That was the right caution and the wrong conclusion. The trap was real; the answer was to apply the rule, not to walk away. Applied, the four records resolve into a household.
Four records, and this archive said they were too thin to be anything. That was wrong, and the reason it was wrong is instructive: read singly they are four unrelated Persich baptisms with a Defranceschi somewhere in the margin. Read together, and with the tabular-register rule applied to the first of them, they are one household across forty-two years — a Defranceschi daughter who married into Ragusa, and her three children.
1829
Antonio Persich × Teresa Martecchini
Dubrovnik (Ragusa) · one son recorded
- 1829 Matteo Persich
The groom's parents. The index files this as a birth and hangs four parent names on it — Pietro Defranceschi, Marietta Defranceschi, Teresa Martechini, Antonio Persich. Four names on one row is the signature of an Austrian tabular marriage register, whose printed columns run SPONSI, SPONSAE, GENITORES SPONSI, GENITORES SPONSAE, and which the index flattens into a single list. This archive has been caught by that exact pattern twice before. Read as a marriage it resolves cleanly: Matteo Persich, born 1829, son of Antonio Persich and Teresa Martecchini, marrying a daughter of Pietro Defranceschi.
The tabular-register trap → inferred Marietta is the Defranceschi. She is named as mother on all three baptisms and as a daughter of Pietro Defranceschi on the marriage row. Her own birth is in no record this archive holds, and neither is Pietro's — so the family that produced her is unplaced.
1853 – 1871
Matteo Persich × Marietta Defranceschi
Dubrovnik (Ragusa) · 3 children indexed ·1 buried as infants
- 1853 Antonio Persich d. 5 Feb 1863
- 1863 Cattarina Teresa Vittoria Maria
- 1871 Giustino Antonio Alberto Lucciano Peršić
And the children carry the proof. The first son is Antonio — his father's father. The daughter born 23 December 1863 is Cattarina Teresa Vittoria Maria — his father's mother. That is the ordinary Adriatic naming order, and it is independent support for reading the 1829 row as a marriage rather than a birth.
The index writes the mother Maria in 1853 and Marietta in 1863 and 1871, and the surname drifts from Persich to Peršić across the same eighteen years — one family, three spellings, as the century turns Croatian.
What would turn this into a tree
Who Pietro Defranceschi was, and what he was doing in Dubrovnik. Marietta is the only Defranceschi in this group whose existence is certain, and she is documented entirely through her husband and her children. Her father is a name on one flattened index row.
Ragusa is neither Istria nor the Kvarner nor the Venetian Dalmatia of the Omiš chart — it was its own republic until 1808, with its own archive, and this archive has never searched it. The Državni arhiv u Dubrovniku holds the parish registers of the city and the republic's own records; nothing in this project has ever been asked of it.
Teresa Martecchini is not a Venetian name, and this archive had her filed as one. Martecchini was the printing house of Dubrovnik. Pier-Francesco Martecchini published «Galleria di Ragusei illustri» in 1841 and printed the city's editions of Ignjat Đurđević and the Bunić poets through the 1830s, 40s and 60s — the press that put Ragusan literature into print.
She appears here as the mother of the man Marietta Defranceschi married, in 1829, which is the generation before those imprints. No claim is made that she is of the printers' immediate family — Martecchini is rare but it is not unique, and one Ragusan marriage row is not a genealogy. What can be said is that the surname this archive had grouped under «Venetian», on the strength of how it looks, belongs to Ragusa, and has been moved.
The archive also spelled her Martechini, following the index. Forebears finds exactly one person of that spelling in the world and suggests Martecchini at 95% — which is the form the Croatian record uses throughout.