Every Town in Istria

Colotta De Franceschi, born 10 October and baptised 24 October 1666. Fioretta, born 18 November, baptised 22 November 1666. Franceschina, 1667. Mattia, 1669. Anto and Giacomo, 1671. «Piero De Francesich», February 1672 — the surname already being pulled into a Slavic shape. Giovanna, 1673. Mattio, 1674. Zuana, 1688. Batista and Flora, 1692. Two children of this name were carried to the font at Svetvinčenat in a single autumn, five years after the family's first recorded appearance at Moncalvo at the other end of Istria. The 1734 household book was not the beginning; it was already the third generation.

Brhan, working the protocols of the Sanvincenti notaries, named «D.no Vittorio De Franceschi» among the Carnian landholders, a «Gasparo De Franceschi, carnico pure lui», and the kinswomen Pasqua and Antonia named in Maria Zanco's will. All four surface in the register sweep independently: Vitorio Defranceschi, born 1758, buried 8 November 1812; Victorius, born 1845, died 25 May 1897; Gasparo, Gaspari, Gaspero and Gaspo De Franceschi across the eighteenth century; Pasqua, and Pasqua Vitoria, born 16 December 1773; Antonia. Two entirely different classes of record, produced by different clerks for different purposes, naming the same household.

Eight records in four years, and the names are Habsburg-official names, not Istrian peasant ones: Anastasius Defrancoschi, born 1789, dead 5 March 1793; Liberatus Franciscus Xaverius, born 1791, dead 14 February 1792; Conraddus Vincentius, baptised 22 February 1793; Liberatus Maria Xaverius; Maria Leopoldina; Vincentius Defranceski. Two infants buried in thirteen months. This is a family that arrived, buried two children in the county town and moved on — and it stands at exactly the place and period of the unidentified «Count Damian de Franceschis» this archive has been carrying as an open question.

Marija Defrančeski, 1884–1971. Milan Defrančeski, 10 February 1923 – 24 May 2001. Milka Defrančeski Kirin, 1918–1990. Dragutin Defranceski, 1925–2004. And Zdenkica Defrančeski, 1943–1945 — a child of two, buried in Zagreb in the last year of the war. The Croatian spelling of this surname is not a scribal accident and it is not only in the newspapers: there are people under stones with it.

Gioannes Maria De Franceschi, born 1581, died 20 March 1645, buried at Omiš. Then Mandalina, baptised 14 November 1634; Nicolaa, 12 January 1644; Francesco, 1 August 1657; and Nicolo, born 1626, buried at Split on 18 May 1716 at ninety. A Dalmatian line of the name running from the year the Venetians finished the walls of Omiš to the eighteenth century, and no connection to Istria has been shown.

Francischina, 7 November 1620. Catterina, 15 November 1621. Franciscu, 23 February 1625. Joannem Antonio, 6 September 1626. Gioanna Victoria, 19 April 1628. Maria, 9 September 1632. Zuane, 13 April 1632. The clerk writes «de Francesco» in the 1620s and «de Franceschi» by the later 1620s — the surname settling into its form inside one register.

Bakar does not appear here, because the town groups were built before the Bakar correction and Bakar was not one of them; the separate Bakar query stands at twelve people over three generations and is published on its own page. Gologorica returns one record and Gračišće none — not because the family was not there, which the parish books prove it was, but because those registers are not in this index. An index sweep measures what has been indexed. It is a map of the record, not of the people.

The same query was run against FamilySearch's persona search with the place parameter set to Vižinada, Draguč, Dubrovnik, Vodnjan, Rovinj, Gračišće, Kaštelir, Ližnjan, and to «Zzzznowhere» and «Atlantis». Every single one returned the same total: 3,652. q.anyPlace is a relevance boost, not a filter. It changes the order of the results and nothing else. A place it does not recognise is silently ignored and you get the whole set back, with no error and no warning.

Vižinada and Draguč return the same records, in the same order. They cannot be told apart by this route at all. Dubrovnik returns exactly what no place parameter returns — the unfiltered head of the list. f.recordPlace is a genuine filter, but it rejects plain town names: Vodnjan, Rovinj and a numeric place id all return 0, and a name with spaces is refused outright — «Filter value for term=record_place must not contain whitespace». No working place filter was found on this endpoint.

It does not invalidate the sweep's positive counts. The method here already compensated: for each place the top hundred were pulled and kept only if the record's own place text actually named that town. That check is what makes the numbers above mean anything, and it is why they were published as weight, not population. It does sharpen the blanks. Thirty-nine places returned nothing, and this page already said a blank proves nothing because those registers are browse-only and unindexed. There is now a second reason: the search can only ever see what ranks into the top hundred of a re-ranked list of 3,652 records. A blank is a statement about ranking, not about a province. And it retires a queue item. This archive was carrying «Vižinada — 53 records, unread». Those records are on DGS 005497893, which is the Vodnjan baptism film, and they have now been read: they are the eight Vodnjan households. The item was a ghost of the two-parish reel.

Resolve each record to the film it sits on, then ask the catalogue what that film is. That is what produced this archive's ninety-three-parish list, and it is what found Vodnjan. With one caution learned the same day: a film can carry more than one parish, and the catalogue answers a film-number query with the first creator on the reel. Resolve to the film, then read the item list — not the film heading. (doc — every claim on this page was produced by running the queries and is reproducible)

The Croatian index usually gives no parish. It says «Croazia, Austria», or «Hrvatska», or nothing — which is why a year of searching produced towns only where a transcriber had happened to type one. But every persona carries the ark of the image it was read from, the digital-archive service turns that ark into a DGS film number, and the catalogue names the film's parish. Do that for every record and the map draws itself. Nine hundred and fifty-four records, 196 distinct films, ninety-three parishes. It is mechanical, it is repeatable, and it took an afternoon.

The four biggest concentrations are the four this archive already follows, in almost the order it would have guessed: Omiš 145 records from 1634, Rijeka 105 from 1626, Ližnjan 100, Svetvinčenat 85 from 1666, Pula 63 from 1659. And Bakar gives exactly five, 1772–1819 — which is the household this archive reconstructed and dated, to the year, from a different direction.

Ližnjan's hundred records begin in 1794. Not 1667, not 1700 — 1794. The southern-Istrian line's own parish is a late register, and the early southern entries this archive has leaned on are Pula's (from 1659) and Svetvinčenat's (from 1666). Pula's run is real and it is the oldest in the south; the specific 1667 and 1669 baptisms this archive called «Pula» are Svetvinčenat's. Both things are true and the page now says both.

Six places this archive has never named, and one of them is large. Vižinada — 53 records, 1790–1860. Bigger than Kaštelir and Poreč together, in western Istria between Motovun and the coast, and completely absent from this site until today. Draguč — 25, 1784–1851, in the Buzet country. Rovinj — 23, from 1619, the earliest date in the entire map. Dubrovnik — 38 across the city parish and Pile, 1741–1862, plus Orašac and the hospital: a Ragusan presence nobody here suspected. Bednja 13 from 1706 and Pregrada 7 from 1674 — the Hrvatsko zagorje, three hundred kilometres inland and older than most of Istria. And a long tail through continental Croatia and the islands: Đurđevac, Đakovo, Karlovac, Križevci, Orahovica, Lepoglava, Samobor, Petrinja, Vukovar, Nerežišća on Brač, Cres, Rab, Pag, Olib, Hvar, Korčula, Murter, Skradin.

It does not join anybody to anybody. A parish map is a map of a surname, not of a family, and this one now has ninety-three points on it precisely because the name is common. What it does is tell this archive which registers to open, in what order, and stop it guessing at place-names the index never gave. Vižinada is the first of the new ones, because fifty-three records in seventy years is a household and not a scatter.