Il Giornaletto di Pola, read end to end

The forename is split by a column break: the line ends «Defranceschi A-» and the next begins «lessandro». The same page wraps «Comparich Gio-/vanni» and «Porta Ro-/dolfo» the identical way, so the reading is secure.

A man called to the Austro-Hungarian levy in 1914 was of the class that turned twenty-one that year, which puts his birth at about 1893. Six weeks later Austria-Hungary was at war. This archive has no Alessandro Defranceschi of Istria at all — he is new, and he is the only one of the four who can be dated from the notice itself.

Two separate collections are printed one after the other, and Luigi is in the second. He was not necessarily one of the arsenal's coppersmiths; he is in the list a police inspector took up, among Kruk, Cerkovich, Runco, Zufich, Klemen, Jetonich, Matic, Udovic and Krajcer — Slav and Italian names mixed together at one and two crowns each, which is what a Pola tenement looked like in the fifth week of the war.

The reading of the line above as the reading of the line itself is the mistake this archive has now made three times, most recently over Francziska's sixty-five forints. It was not made here.

This is not a register entry and not a report — it is the notice the couple paid to place, in the ornamental type the paper kept for them. The ornament is why the groom's surname will not come off the OCR: the swash capitals read as «cRiecardo JBeace», and the announcement ran once only, so there is no second setting to check it against.

The surname is a four-letter word beginning B and ending e, and the page image would settle it in a minute. It is filed as an open question with the issue link.

The archive holds no Angelina De Franceschi anywhere — not in Istria, not in Carnia, not in the diaspora.

It is a four-line item about a drunk man and a door, and it is the most useful thing in the run: a name, an age, a village of origin and a street number, all in one sentence.

Sixty-three in November 1914 puts his birth at about 1851. This archive already holds an Angelo Defranceschi born 1851, son of Natale Defranceschi and Domenica Chersin, filed at Pola — and, separately, an Angelo Defranceschi of Fasana born 1815, a generation earlier. The newspaper supplies exactly the fact that was missing from the 1851 record: where he came from. Fažana is eight kilometres up the coast from Pola.

Same name, same birth year, same town, and the village the other Fasana entry names. That is a strong identification and it is not a proof; it is entered as an inference and the burial book of Pola would close it.