Parish Books

Registers of every denomination from the whole territory of Croatia, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth, plus Roman Catholic books from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Filming began in 1985 with the HDA's own collection HR-HDA-883 and was then extended outward to every other holder — state archives, church archives, parish offices, civil registry offices and monasteries. Most of it was shot in the HDA's central photographic laboratory, and part of it in the microfilming laboratory of the Državni arhiv u Pazinu — the same laboratory that answered this family's letter in 2021.

Because it filmed the matični uredi — the civil registry offices that took custody of the parish books after 1946 — as well as the parishes and the archives. The registry office copy of a parish register is the same book, and it was not subject to the same restriction. That single difference is the whole gain, and it is worth years.

The finding aid returns, for each volume: place, denomination, kind of register, period, holding institution, the roll signature (e.g. ZM-34J/251), the topographic mark (M-5976), and whether a digital copy exists. It does not show images. Material is read in the HDA reading room — digitised rolls on the reader computers, the rest on microfilm readers, maximum ten units a day — or ordered by e-mail to info@arhiv.hr quoting place, kind, period, roll signature and topographic mark. Copies are charged for by the published tariff.

Crikvenica, Status animarum, twentieth century. Roll ZM-34J/251, topographic mark M-5976, Župni ured Crikvenica, digitised. A Status animarum is a household census: it lists a house, its head, his wife, and every child under them with a birth date beside each name. It is the book that gave this archive the whole of Gračišće house 24 — the midwife, the mason and the eleven children — in one opening. A twentieth-century Crikvenica volume should hold Josip Defranceschi's household on the Kvarner in the same form, and if it does it answers the ZO…, the POLD… and the Ruža of the monument in a single page, without ever needing the missing baptisms.

Crikvenica, marriages 1909–1947. Roll ZM-34J/362, mark M-6957, Matični ured Crikvenica, digitised. Ruža Defranceschi, born 1903, married a Jarmacki and died in 1939. Her marriage falls squarely inside this book, and a Croatian marriage entry of that period names both parents of both parties. One line settles whether she is Josip and Ana's daughter.

Crikvenica, deaths 1909–1928. Roll ZM-34J/363, mark M-6958, digitised. If the POLD… born 1901 died young, he is here — and the death column would give his age and his parents. The register also runs through the influenza of 1918 and the whole of the first war.

Crikvenica births 1897–1908 are in neither collection. Either that volume was never filmed, or it did not survive. If the three books above do not answer the question, the remaining step is the parish office at Crikvenica itself, or the Rijeka archdiocesan archive — a letter, not a search.