Fernasar
Generation three — she married Antonio Defranceschi (1825–1894), the stonecutter of house 19. Born 17 October 1832, at Gračišće. What this archive can prove about her family, and what it would take to prove more.
Five women married into this line and carried it forward, and for years the front page said the same thing under each of them: «no archive of her own line yet». David asked on 29 September 2026 for that to stop being true. These are the pages; the research behind them is mostly still to do, and each page says exactly how much.
The mother of the migration
Born 17 October 1832 at Gračišće. She married Antonio Defranceschi the stonecutter on 25 November 1856, and their son Josip, born 22 March 1863, is the man who took this line down off the Istrian karst to the Kvarner coast. (doc.)
Everything else about her turns on four letters, because two hands wrote her surname and they do not agree.
Two hands wrote her surname, and they do not agree
This archive's pedigree has carried the flag for a year: «The surname is written Fernasar and Tornasar in different hands.» An F and a T in a nineteenth-century Istrian hand are not always distinguishable, and the difference decides which family she belongs to and which entries in the register are hers.
And the second reading is not a copying slip travelling through this archive's own files. A register entry of 1862 was read «Maria Tornasar» and is recorded that way. Some scribe, somewhere, formed a letter that a careful reader took for a T. That reading is kept as a reading; what follows is about whether the name can be right.
«Tornasar» is retired: it is printed nowhere, and borne by nobody
The press test came first. Three spellings were run against the digitised Austrian newspapers. «Tornasar» returns nothing at all — not one issue. «Fernasar» returns three, and two of them are Austro-Hungarian casualty lists, which print a man's name, rank, regiment, home commune and year of birth:
> Fernasar Josef, Inft., k. k. LIR. Nr. 5, 10. Komp., Istrien, Pisino, Gračišće, 1884; kriegsgef., Merw, Gebiet Transkaspien, Rußland. — «Verlustliste», 6 May 1916
Josef Fernasar, born 1884, of Gračišće — taken prisoner and held at Merv in Transcaspia. The list gives province, district and commune, and the commune is Maria's own village, named in a printed record fifty-two years after she married out of it. (A second issue, the wounded list of 14 December 1914, has a Josef Fernasar of the Pisino district born 1883 in hospital at Kassa with a kicked heel. Whether that is the same man is not settled: name, district and rough age agree; unit and year do not. Two cousins would look exactly the same.)
Today the question was put to two national surname databases, because the work list predicted an atlas would decide the letter from the armchair. The full list of terms tried, with a control on each, is in the search log. In short: the Croatian 2011 census returns fewer than ten bearers — or none, it will not say which — for Fernasar, Tornasar, Fernazar and Fornasar alike, while returning 757 Poropat; and Cognomix, which holds about 180,000 Italian surnames, has no Fernasar and no Tornasar at all.
So the prediction was wrong, and it is worth saying so. No atlas of the present can choose between two names that have both stopped existing. What the databases do is remove Tornasar's last possible support: it is borne by nobody in either country and printed in no issue of anything. The reading stands as Fernasar — on the press, not on the palaeography, which is still unread. (inf, and firmly held.)
The person id is not changed. `maria-fernasar-tornasar-de-franceschi` was minted when the question was open, and ids are frozen here: a moved id is a dead URL. The id records what this archive believed when it minted it, which is the point of freezing them.
And the commoner form of the name points at Friuli
Beside the three Fernasar issues, the Austrian press holds 49 issues of «Fornasar», overwhelmingly in the same Pola paper. Fornasar is very probably the same name: Friulian fornasâr, the man who works the kiln — a trade name, like lapicida on the other side of this marriage.
And Fornasar is alive where that etymology says it should be. Cognomix gives it about 25 families in Italy: Piemonte 11, Friuli-Venezia Giulia 8, Veneto 4, Liguria 1, Puglia 1. Twelve of the twenty-five are in Friuli and the Veneto, which is the corner of Europe the word comes from. In Croatia it is under ten, like the rest — the name did not stay in Istria.
The eleven in Piemonte are not explained here. Industrial migration to the north-west is the obvious reading and is inf, not doc. And the step from Fernasar to Fornasar is itself still inf: two spellings in the same newspapers of the same province is a strong hint and not a document.
What is not known, and is worth asking for
The other maternal lines
- Salomon — Francisca Salomon
- Kovačina — Uršula Kovačina
- Kalanj — Anna Kalanj, and the parish nobody has opened
- Blažević — Hedviga; the family is kept in The Blažević Archive
The pedigree walls in this archive's own ancestors data, the Pfullingen and Arolsen material, and the Gračišće register programme. Written 29 September 2026 at David's request.