Clementina Defranceschi — The Defranceschi Archive

The family

No family chart is drawn for this person, and that is a statement about the data rather than about them. This archive records kin against a name — the tree on a name page gathers everyone who shares it, so it may hold one person's dates beside another's wife. Rather than hand a reader a family that might not be this person's, the chart is drawn only where the relationship is recorded person by person, which today means the direct line.

What the archive knows

She died at two days old, and the register proves it to the hour. > «1821. Die 30ma Januarii hora ½ 4ta a meridie · [domus] 104 · CLEMENTINA FILIA D.ni JOSEPHI DEFRANCESCHI · dierum 2 et horarum 11½ · Imperfecta Structura» > Sepulta fuit die 1ma Februarii 1821. — Ant. Ferdinandus Mocovich, parochus. (doc — DAPA ZM34K-214, M01069259, page 62 of the death register.) Her baptism has her born 28 January 1821 at four in the morning, at the same house 104. From then to half past three on the afternoon of the 30th is two days and eleven and a half hours. The arithmetic closes exactly. The cause is imperfecta structura — imperfect formation. ⭐ This archive inferred her death on 1 October, from nothing but the twenty-month gap before her namesake sister and what families did. The inference was right and it is now a document — and the caution published alongside it was right too: her baptism carries no marginal cross, and a blank margin in that book means nothing. ⚠ The death year of 1870 this row carried is withdrawn. It came off the family tree and it cannot be hers. It does not simply pass to her sister either: the thirty-year dispute over the 1822 Clementina is still open, and it has lost the easiest way of explaining it away.