10 collections examined · 0 hold Croatian places and are not on our map

Croatia, filed under other countries

The research map was built from FamilySearch's Croatian church-book collection. Croatian places also sit inside Italian, Hungarian, Austrian and Slovenian collections, under names the map has never heard of.

This archive's map says it shows «every parish in Croatia whose registers are on film». It did not, and it never had. It showed every parish in one collection — Croatia, Church Books, 1516–1994 — plus three sources added by hand.

FamilySearch publishes 3,488 collections. The whole list was walked on 15 September 2026 and every one that could touch this family's ground was opened. The result is below, and it is meant to be complete rather than interesting: where a collection holds nothing for us, that is recorded too, so nobody walks it again.

The short version: a Croatian town is filed wherever the state that kept its registers filed it, under the name that state used. Čakovec is under Csáktornya, in a Hungarian county, inside a collection named for Slovenia.

Opened, nothing for us 5 Already a provider here 5

Already a provider here · collection 2040054

Croatia, Church Books, 1516–1994 ↗

The collection the research map is built from — 1,333 parishes, 5,482 volumes.

Ours. Everything else on this page is not.

Already a provider here · collection 1875189

Croatia, Delnice Deanery Catholic Church Books, 1571–1926 ↗

A second Croatian church-book collection, for the Delnice deanery in Gorski kotar — the mountain country directly inland from Crikvenica and Bribir.

It browses by film number, not by parish, so the place-walk that built the research map could never have found it. Six reels, ~3,485 images, no parish structure at all — they hang on Delnice itself rather than pretending to a precision the collection does not have.

Already a provider here · collection 2152685

Italy, Pola and Trieste, Catholic Church Records, 1593–1941 ↗

Seven Istrian parishes under «Pola» — Buie, Cittanova d'Istria, Portole, Verteneglio, Materada, Isola d'Istria, Pirano — and four under Trieste.

Five of those seven are in Croatia today — Buje, Novigrad, Oprtalj, Brtonigla and Materada — and all of them are now on the map, each under both names. 36 volumes across 9 places.

Already a provider here · collection 1985107

Slovenia, Prekmurje and Međimurje, Civil Registers, 1895–1918 ↗

Two roots, Vas and Zala — Hungarian counties. Under Zala are 33 registration districts, and nearly all of them are Croatian towns in Međimurje.

Csáktornya is Čakovec. Perlak is Prelog. Nedelicz is Nedelišće. Stridó is Štrigova. Kottori is Kotoriba. Légrád is Legrad. A Croatian county's civil registers, under Hungarian place names, in a collection named for Slovenia.

Now on the map: 46 places, 365 volumes, each on the same dot as its modern name and carrying the catalogue's spelling in «also written» — because that is the name you must search for to find the book.

Already a provider here · collection 1939238

Italy, Udine, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1806–1815, 1871–1911 ↗

The Carnia comuni — Mione and Ovaro among them.

Already a provider here, as fs-it, with 26 places.

Opened, nothing for us · collection 1947830

Italy, Trieste, Trieste, Civil Registration (Tribunale), 1924–1939 ↗

Duino, Muggia, San Dorligo della Valle, San Pelagio, Sgonico, Trieste.

All in Italy or Slovenia today. Nothing Croatian — checked so it need not be checked again.

Opened, nothing for us · collection 2684447

Italy, Trieste, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1924–1944 ↗

A single root, and it is Slovenia.

Nothing Croatian at the top level.

Opened, nothing for us · collection 5000002

Austria, Catholic Church Records, 1565–2007 ↗

6.85 million records, 17.4 million persons — and no browse tree at all. It is a name index, not a filmed collection, so it cannot be walked by place.

It does not cover the Austrian Littoral. Searched inside the collection: 289 Defranceschi records, and every named place among them is Tyrolean — Bozen, Salorno, Tirolo, St. Florian bei Linz. Not one in Istria, Gorizia or Trieste. The same for three Istrian surnames tested alongside: Sestan (Zwettl, Longomosso, Feldkirch), Kostesich (Bozen), Miškulin (Bozen).

So the hole stays open. Gračišće, Gologorica and Pićan are not here either, and this was the most promising place they could have been.

Two things worth keeping anyway. There is a whole Tyrolean Defranceschi population — 289 records around Bozen and Salorno — which is a separate family of the same name and a standing warning against arguing from a surname. And one record reads «Vukovar, Sriem, Croatia, Austria», so Slavonian places do appear in this collection even though Istrian ones do not.

Opened, nothing for us · collection 1452460

Hungary, Civil Registration, 1895–1980 ↗

33 Hungarian counties — Abaúj-Torna, Arad, Bács-Bodrog, Baranya … Vas, Veszprém, Zala. Not one Croatian-Slavonian county, and no Fiume.

It does not reach Croatia, and the reason is constitutional rather than archival.

Hungary introduced civil registration in 1895. Croatia-Slavonia did not. Under the Nagodba it ran its own administration and kept the parish registers as the legal civil record until 1946 — which is why FamilySearch's Croatian collection is church books, and why there is no Croatian civil-registration collection anywhere to find.

And it explains Međimurje. Međimurje's civil registers exist from 1895 because Međimurje was administered as part of Zala county — as Hungary proper, not as Croatia. That is the whole anomaly.

Checked rather than assumed: Zala here holds 235 districts and not one of Csáktornya, Perlak, Nedelicz, Stridó, Kottori or Légrád — they are in the Slovenia-titled collection instead, so the two do not overlap. The 16 Defranceschi records inside are Budapest, Esztergom and Sopron.

Opened, nothing for us · collection 5000449

Italy, Gorizia, Census, 1742–1895 ↗

No browse tree — an index-only collection.

Searchable by name, not walkable by place.

What this page is, and is not

Three of these are now on the map — Pola and Trieste, Prekmurje and Međimurje, and Delnice — as their own providers, each place shown under the name its catalogue uses as well as the name it goes by today. Čakovec and «Csáktornya» are one dot.

And the merge paid for itself immediately. With the parish books and the Hungarian civil registers on the same marker, Čakovec shows a four-year gap in 1891–1894 across births, marriages and deaths — the interval between the church books closing and civil registration opening. Neither catalogue could show that on its own.

The lesson is about method rather than about any one collection. A map built from a collection named for a country will show the places that country's archives filmed, and nothing else. The border moved five times in a century and the paperwork did not follow it. Every place on this family's ground was, at some point, filed by Venice, by Vienna, by Budapest, by Rome and by Zagreb — and FamilySearch files by whoever kept the book.

Walked from FamilySearch's own list of 3,488 historical record collections on 15 September 2026, filtered to anything naming Croatia, Istria, Dalmatia, Fiume, Trieste, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia or Italy, then opened one by one through /platform/records/collections/<cc>/waypoints. All 3,488 collections, walked → · The research map → · What is being done about it →