Valentino Defranceschi
Came from Carnia and was made a citizen of Fiume in 1739 — the same year he baptised a son there. Fourteen of his children are now recovered from the Rijeka register.
The life
The existing family research records him as coming from Carnia — no parish named. Mione and Ovaro are in Carnia, and Carnian weavers and traders were moving into the Venetian and Habsburg Adriatic through exactly this period, so the identification is plausible and unproven in equal measure.
What is striking is the timing. Valentino was made a citizen of Fiume in 1739; Giovanni Battista Defranceschi arrived from the County of Pazin around 1740 and was made a citizen in 1746. Two men of the same surname, from the two regions this family claims, in the same port, within eighteen months. The existing research treats them as unrelated. That is an inference from an absent record, not a documented fact, and it is the most interesting question in this archive.
The Rijeka register carries the whole household. *Fourteen children* of Valentino and Helena — Elena — are recorded between 1737 and 1757, nine sons and five daughters. The received family account says he and Elena had ten sons and four daughters. Against an index that is only a quarter complete, that is as close to a match as this kind of evidence gets.
The dates line up with the citizenship exactly. Valentino was made a citizen of Fiume in 1739; his son Matheus Franciscus was baptised there on 17 September that same year, and a daughter, Josepha Catharina, had already been baptised on 26 November 1737. He was in the city and having children before the city formally took him in.
Five of the fourteen are recorded dying as infants — Mattio and Nicolo both in 1742, Antonio in 1753, Aloysia and Maria both in 1757. Two of those pairs died in the same year as each other, which in a port city usually means an epidemic rather than a coincidence.