Eighty-two people of the name on the Kvarner, in nine households across two hundred and thirty years — the second-largest concentration this archive holds, and the one it has said least about. This page draws what is there, and marks every place a join is missing.
Rijeka is where the archive's oldest household sits — six children baptised between 1626 and 1632 — and it is also where the archive has done the least work. The reason is the shape of the material. Gračišće gave a line because the registers there name fathers; Rijeka gives a stack of households that never touch.
Two things emerged when they were finally set in order, and neither had been noticed before.
Nine households of the name on the Kvarner, from 1626 to 1855, in two towns twelve kilometres apart. None of them is joined to another by a record. They are not, however, farmers: the Hungarian state records name a harbour master of Fiume, a draughtsman who drew the imperial salt office at Bakar in 1827, and two naval officers of the name. They are set out in the order the register produced them, with the broken rungs marked for what they are — the places where a join looks likely and is not written down. Read the mothers' surnames with care: on four of these the indexer has copied the father's name into the mother's field, which is why so many of these men appear to have married a woman of their own name. 28 September 2026 — what the plate gave that the index could not, and it is mostly Valentino's household. The cards below were built from the FamilySearch index. Fourteen searches in September went to the film itself, and they are the reason the Valentino household has ten children and five burials rather than a handful of index rows. · The household is ours, and a plate settled it. The index writes the surname a dozen ways at Fiume; the register page writes «de Franceschi», and that is what the cards now carry. · Four dates no index reaches. St Vitus baptisms, film 005497925, read at four openings the index does not cover — including 23 November 1772 and 12 July 1774, where the godfather is Ignatio Defranceschi, a man the index never produced at all. · 1757 was a bad year. A baptism under «Die 21 July 1757» and a burial in September, entry 14 — Maria's, which is the entry that raised the question Aloysia's answered. Five of Valentino's ten children were buried. · They kept company above their station. At one font stands the wife of the Captain of Kastav — which is not where a labouring household's godparents come from, and is the single strongest hint that this family was not what the card's bare names suggest. · And the marriage register was found in the same film, which is what item 143 needs to close: it would give each of these men a father and each bride a family. ⚠ None of this joins the nine households to each other. That is still true, and it is the honest state of the Kvarner: nine households, 1626 to 1855, in two towns twelve kilometres apart, and not one record joining any two of them.
The oldest household the archive holds anywhere. Six children at Rijeka under a Venetian-Latin hand — Gioannis Antonÿ, with the trema the scribe put there. This one has been read on the page.
The 1626 baptisms, read →Ten children, and five of them buried in the year they were born. Mattio and Nicolò both dead in 1742, Antonio dead 1 September 1753, Aloysia dead 14 September 1757, Maria dead in the same year. The five without dates are the baptisms; the five with them are the burials. This is what a mid-century Kvarner household actually looked like in the register.
Four children, and the index has entered the eldest twice — once from his baptism on 22 November 1772 and once from his burial on 22 August 1775. Valentino, named for the man fathering at Rijeka thirty years earlier, died at two years and nine months. The second Ellena, born 1775, was dead by 2 March 1776; the first, born 11 July 1774, is not in the burial book.
Twelve children in eleven years, and nine of them carry Nepomucena or Nepomuc — John of Nepomuk, the Bohemian saint the Habsburgs pushed hard through their new lands. A family naming every child for the dynasty's saint, in the Hungarian crown's free port, is not a peasant household. Three died small: Giosefa in 1797, Anna in 1800, Maria in 1804.
Two entries, one child — Pietro Paolo, baptised and buried in the same year. The surname has lost its prefix: Franceschi, not Defranceschi, in both hands.
The name moves twelve kilometres down the coast to Bakar, written in the registers by its Latin name Vitipolis. Ludovicus, born 1836, lived to 1 June 1855 and died at nineteen.
Twins, and a week that took two children. Anna Francisca Catharina and Franciscus Andreas were both baptised on 10 November 1849. Carolo was buried on the 14th and Anna on the 17th. The father is entered as Francisci Defranceschi Regii — of the king — which in the Hungarian free port means an office, not a farm — and the Hungarian state's own pension rolls name a Defranceschi Ferencz, harbour master of Fiume, retired 1857 after forty-two years; and he is married to a second Bellinich, Carolina, where the 1836 household names Catharina.
Two daughters, Maria Dorothea and Antonia, with no year on either. The last of the name at Bakar in the index.
Two books and a third thing. The Rijeka marriage register would give each of these men a father and a bride's family, and would close or break the Valentino chain in an afternoon. The Bakar baptisms would say whether Franciscus of 1836 and Francisci Regii of 1849 are one man. Neither has been read by this archive; both survive. And now a third, which is open and free and merely unworked. Hungaricana holds 196 entries for Julius Defranceschi in the k. u. k. navy rank lists between 1894 and 1909 — a complete officer's career, ship by ship and rank by rank, that nobody has yet sat down and transcribed. It also holds Ferencz's pension schedule, Francziska's twelve years of state charity, and Anton's 1827 plan of the Bakar salt office. That is a week's honest work on material that costs nothing.
Fiume and Bakar were Hungarian crown land, not Austrian and not Croatian, so the men who held office there are in Hungarian paperwork. This archive never looked until 13 September 2026. Everything below is documented, and none of it was here yesterday. One caution, and it opens a door. The 1888 account names Gentile Marussig as the orphan of a «volt fiumei révkapitány» — a former harbour master of Fiume — and in the very next line names Francziska Defranceschi as the orphan of a révkapitány with no port given. So Ferencz's post is placed by his authority and not by his town. The Fiume Maritime Authority governed the whole Hungarian Littoral, Bakar included — which means his port may have been Bakar itself, where the name is fathering in 1836 and 1849. 28 September 2026 — and one of these men may have a pier. Rijeka's main harbour contains «De Francescijev gat», the former Mol Zichy — 150 metres of stone on its east face, the pier where the port's first iron-and-concrete warehouse went up in 1882 and where the first electric light in Rijeka was switched on. No source says which De Franceschi it honours. The full account is on /namesakes/, and the question now has worklist 157 behind it. ⚠ Ferencz is the obvious candidate and that is exactly the danger. A port captain of the Fiume Maritime Authority is the right office in the right harbour in the right century — and not one document has yet been found joining him to the pier. It is recorded here as a question, not an answer.
Drew the «Bauriss der zu Buccari befündlichen aerarial Salz-Einnehmer und Controlors Wohnung» — the ground plan and section of the imperial salt-receiver's and comptroller's residence at Bakar. Manuscript, 56 × 45 cm, one sheet.
National Archives of Hungary, T 62 No 1642, out of E 96 Tricesimalia 1827, 4:51
Révkapitány — port captain — in the service of the Fiume Maritime Authority. The parliamentary pension schedule of 1872 gives him 42 years, 10 months and 5 days of public service and a pension of 1,050 forints from 1857, which puts him into state service about 1814. The later accounts style him m. kir. révkapitány — magyar királyi, Royal Hungarian — which is the exact Hungarian counterpart of the Regii written beside the name at Bakar in 1849.
Képviselőházi irományok, 1872, XV. kötet, 1872-650, p. 106; Állami zárszámadás 1894, p. 387
«Defranceschi Ferencz révkapitány árva leánya» — the port captain's orphan daughter, on a kegydíj of 65 forints a year, granted for three-year terms and renewed again and again. The 1898 account gives the reason in the state's own words: «tekintettel vagyontalanságára, munka- és keresetképtelenségére» — in view of her destitution, and her incapacity for work or earning. Her 1891 grant expired on 16 October 1894 and was renewed; she was still on the list in 1900.
Állami zárszámadás 1888, p. 179; 1894, p. 387; 1898, p. 412; 1900, p. 399; Képviselőházi irományok 1892
K. K. Kriegs-Marine, Marine-Direktion at Pola. And Valentin is the one forename that runs through the Rijeka households — a Valentino fathering there in 1742–57, and another in 1794–1805.
Militärschematismus des österreichischen Kaiserthumes, Wien 1854, 1855, 1856
k. u. k. Kriegsmarine. He appears 196 times across fifteen years of rank and distribution lists, by 1909 a Linienschiffsleutnant. A complete naval career, open and free, and not yet transcribed.
Rangs- und Eintheilungs-Listen der k. u. k. Kriegs-Marine, 1894–1909
K. K. Landwehr, foot troops.
Schematismus der K. K. Landwehr und der K. K. Gendarmerie, Wien 1909
Which re-reads the saints. This archive noted this morning that nine of the twelve children born to Valentino and Ursula at Rijeka between 1794 and 1805 carry Nepomucena or Nepomuc, and read it as Habsburg dynastic piety. That is half of it. John of Nepomuk is the saint invoked against drowning — the patron of bridges, and of men whose work is on the water. In a harbour master's town, a family that names nine children for him is not only being loyal. It is being careful.
Every household on this page is built from FamilySearch index entries. The spellings are the indexers'. Where a mother carries the father's surname, that is the index, not the marriage. Confidence is now split. The office is documented — the Hungarian state's own pension schedules, plan catalogue and military schematisms name the men and their posts, and those citations are given above. That any of them is the Franciscus of the 1836 and 1849 baptisms remains inferred, resting on Ferencz being Franciscus and on the dates fitting; a Bakar register would settle it. The Valentino chain stays inferred and is still broken by a burial.