Kalanj
The family this archive's own great-great-grandmother came from — what can be proved about her, what two archives disagreed about, and the parish register that would answer it. The Kalanj genealogy proper is kept in The Blažević Archive; this page is the join, and the evidence on this side of it.
David asked on 29 September 2026 whether Kalanj was a family this site should track and give a page of its own. It was — and building the page found a misreading this archive had carried in fifteen files, and a phrase in the same line of the same entry that no file carried at all. What follows is the evidence on this side of the join, in the order it was read: the baptism, the two things that baptism says which this archive had got wrong or missed, the stone the registers contradict, and eleven photographed graves that suggest a sibling set and cannot yet prove one.
It begins with one line in a Vinodol baptism
«Anna, legitima — Josephus Kalanj et Rosalia nata Perković ejus uxor, Brinjensis Parochiæ ruricolæ» — at «Kljenovica N° 22». Godparents Josephus Ban and his wife Anna; baptised by Vincentius Segulja, parish priest. The register of Ledenice, the Vinodol parish above Crikvenica. (doc — the plate is held here and was read at 6×.)
She married Josip Defranceschi, the stonecutter's son who brought this archive's line down from Gračišće to the coast, and she is generation four of the direct line. Five children are recorded to the couple. Anton Rudolf's baptism is entry 9 of the Klenovica register for 1890; four further baptismal entries at Crikvenica name the mother Ana Kalanj, and those four entries are the reason the next section but two exists.
Two sentences of that one line turned out to be worth a section each. The first is a place name this archive had been reading wrongly since it first transcribed the entry. The second is four words nobody had transcribed at all.
How this household joins the Defranceschi line
Her parents are drawn from one document and one only. Josip Kalanj and Rosalia née Perković are named in the Ledenice entry of 1864 and in nothing else this archive has read. No Brinje page has been opened; no stone here names a father. The four stones argued for above as her brother and sisters are not drawn on this chart, because a chart that draws a guess is a confident diagram telling a lie.
«Rijenovica» does not exist, and the mistake hid a fact
Until today this archive read that place as «Rijenovica house 22» and said so in fifteen files. There is no Rijenovica. The word returns zero hits in this archive's Croatian gazetteer. The register says KLJENOVICA — the older spelling of Klenovica — and the Blažević Archive has read it correctly all along.
What the misreading concealed is the part worth keeping. This site's Crikvenica page already said: «House 22 is somewhere in this line of roofs — Anton Rudolf Defranceski was born in it on 20 January 1890.» Anna was born in the same house twenty-six years earlier. The archive held «house 22» at both ends of the same family and never joined them, because at one end the village had the wrong name.
The correction is recorded on corrections, and `check-propagation.py` now holds every file that asserted the old reading.
And the same entry says where they came from, which no file of this archive carried
Country people of the parish of Brinje. Not one file of this archive carried that phrase, and it is the most important thing in the entry: the Kalanj were not coastal people. Brinje is inland, up behind the Velebit gap; they had come down to Klenovica on the shore.
And the Blažević Archive has since walked through that door. It called Brinje «the single largest hole in this family» when not one page had been opened. That is no longer true. Its own session located the films on 15 September and has been reading the marriage book of 1888–1899 through today, 29 September — and has found Kalanj men actually resident in the village: Niko, of Brinje house 231, son of Juro; Mijo, of house 249, born about 1838; and Mate as a witness. Also a Perković as a bride, and seven Borić men across four Brinje hamlets. None of them is yet tied to Anna's household, and this archive does not tie them. The family and the findings are kept there.
The oldest open question in this archive is a Kalanj question
The registers name ANA KALANJ in all four Crikvenica baptismal entries of her children. The family's own genealogy gives Josip a wife ANA GRUBIŠIĆ, 19 September 1863 – 28 May 1936, and that is the name cut on the Crikvenica gravestone.
The registers govern here and the stone is unexplained. And the stone no longer exists: the plot was sold to the neighbour of the family house and the monument taken apart, so the photograph of it is now the only record there will ever be.
This is why Anna's page carries no death date. The only date on offer belongs to a name this archive cannot yet reconcile with hers, and borrowing it would be the kind of quiet join that the Rijenovica correction above exists to punish. (open)
Eleven stones, and a sibling set taking shape
Eleven Kalanj monuments have been photographed in the three cemeteries and are held here as plates. Which of the three each stone stands in is not distinguished in the photographs and is not guessed.
Four of them cluster around Anna's own generation
LUKA KALANJ 1859–1944 and KATA 1860–1942 on a ledger slab; and ROZALIJA KALANJ 1865–1943, whose first digit is damaged and was read at 5×. Anna was born in 1864.
So there are Kalanj born in 1859, 1860, 1864 and 1865 in one small stretch of the Vinodol — and Rozalija is the name of Anna's own mother, Rosalia née Perković, which is exactly what a second daughter would be called. A sibling set is the obvious reading: Josip Kalanj and Rosalia's children, with one daughter named for her mother.
It is still a guess, and the test is cheap
No stone here names a father. Four birth years in a six-year span, in three small cemeteries of one parish, with a shared given name, is proximity — and this archive has spent the day learning what proximity is worth without a document.
The test is specific and it is the most tractable question on this page: the Ledenice baptisms of 1855–1870, where Anna's own entry (number 2 of 1864) already sits, and where her brothers and sisters would sit within a few pages of her. (open)
The other stones
Albert 1895–1945 with five of his household; Petar 1913–1971 and Vera 1917–2011 with the infant Milan 1943–1944; Mate 1928–1992; Franjo 1933–2004; a joint Kalanj–Rebrović stone; Vinko 1901–1961 and Paulina 1904–1984; Josip 1950–1983 with Franjo 1909–1991 and Zora 1923–1999; Tomislav 1935–2006; Judita 1934–2012 with Marijan 1931–2019; and Rozalija's own, with Anton 1897–1977, Marija 1898–1989 and Milan 1927–2006.
One stone carries the šahovnica, and nothing else here does
OBITELJ KALANJ — MARTIN 1905–1988 and MARTINA 1913–1995. Two porcelain ovals, a stone cross standing in the gravel above — and propped against the plot, a pink stone plaque cut with the Croatian chequy shield.
It is the only national emblem on any stone in this whole set of photographs. It is worth recording as such and nothing more: a family put it there, and when or why is not on the stone.
Two photographs could not be stored
They reached this archive inline rather than as files: that one, and LOVRO 1906–1965 with Ana, Ivan and Marijan. They want re-sending if they are to be kept.
The stones
What is not known, and is worth asking for
A decision of the NRH Ministry of the Interior of 13 May 1949 ordered that every parish register with entries UP TO 1860 be handed to the competent state archive — while those from 1860 stayed with the matični uredi, the registry offices that needed them for daily work. (doc — Angelika Milić, «Zbirka matičnih knjiga u Hrvatskom državnom arhivu», Arhivski vjesnik 60 (2017), and again in its English abstract.)
Anna was born on 3 January 1864. Four years the wrong side of that line. Her baptism was never going to sit in a state archive's register collection, because the law that filled those collections stopped at 1860. It is not lost. It was left where it was being used.
The inventory proves the rule on Brinje's own doorstep. The collection covers the Senj-Modruš diocese — Brinje's own — and its Lika parishes stop exactly where the rule says: Gospić runs from 1789 and ends 1858/1859; Senj from 1678 and ends 1858. And Brinje is not in the collection at all — the word does not appear once in it.
So the door is not the film and never was. Anna's 1864 entry is with the registry office or the parish at Brinje; Brinje's pre-1860 books are unaccounted for and are either with the diocesan archive of Gospić-Senj or did not survive. Three places to ask, and not one of them is a state archive. The rule, the holdings and the two dead catalogues are in the search log.
Where the family itself is kept
The Kalanj genealogy proper — 215 published people, earliest birth 1734, running through Klenovica and Povile — is kept in The Blažević Archive, and is not rebuilt here. That boundary is right.
It had one cost, and this page is the answer to it: while each archive read only its own page, the two of them held one baptism and disagreed about the village for months. What belongs here is the join, the evidence photographed on this side, and the disagreements between the two. What belongs there is the family.
Ledenice baptismal register, entry 2 of 1864, read from the plate held here at 6×. David's photographs of the Kalanj graves, 29 September 2026. The Blažević Archive's Kalanj page, read 29 September 2026.