192 sources examined
The Search Register
Everything looked at, whether or not it found anything — because a search that returns nothing is a result, and the next person should not have to repeat it.
44
Yielded
21
Returned nothing
16
Blocked, not circumvented
19
Known and not yet got
Everything this project has looked at, whether or not it found anything. A search that returns nothing is a result, and an archive that records only its successes will send the next person down the same dead ends. «Blocked» means a bot check or a login wall that this project has deliberately not tried to get round. «Pending» means known, wanted, and not yet obtained.
Yielded
| Source | What was searched | When | What it gave, or did not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stare hrvatske novine (dnc.nsk.hr) | Every spelling of the surname and six place-names, across the whole portal; the two Bakar papers searched separately with control tests | Sept 2026 | 68 hits for «franceschi», 46 for «defranceschi», 4 for «defranceski», 3 for «defrančeski», 70 for «Gologorica». Zora Defranceschi nursing at Crikvenica in March 1915; Antun and Viktor Defranceschi in the Gologorica riot trial of 1894; the «stancija Defranceschi (Zamporovica)»; Carlo's son in the dock at Pazin in 1890; a captain Defranceschi of the bark Aquilone across eighteen issues 1873–78; and the Croatian spelling in print in 1879, 1919 and 1920. The index does NOT do substring matching, so every spelling must be run separately. |
| FamilySearch — Croatian church books, Bakar country and Crikvenica | Every spelling of the surname across Bakar, Hreljin, Praputnik, Kraljevica, Kostrena and Škrljevo; and an Anton Defranceski dying 1941–46 anywhere in Croatia | Sept 2026 | CORRECTED. The first run of this search was under-powered — it scanned only the first couple of hundred records per spelling and matched places against a short extracted string — and returned one Bakar entry. Run properly, with deep paging and whole-record matching, the Bakar country gives EIGHT, and they form one household across three generations: Franciscus Defranceschi; his son Joannes Baptista, who married Catharina Akacich; their children Maria Dorothea baptised 1773 and Antonia 1776; a Nodburga married there 1794; deaths in 1775, 1785, 1818 and 1819, the last of a Catharina born 1734 and dead at eighty-five. The family's own memory of Bakar was right. |
| Stadtarchiv Reutlingen — photograph database | The employers named in the family's own German papers: Hermann Sauer and Wilhelm Heim | Sept 2026 | Hermann Sauer identified as a motor-vehicle firm at the Südbahnhof / Eninger Landstraße 79, holding the MAN agency, with a filling station in the Marktstraße; the Sauer brothers' Autohaus photographed in the Tübinger Straße in 1935. And Wilhelm Heim identified as the Esslingen firm that took the Schickhardt works at Betzingen in 1938 and built V1 wings there with about five hundred forced labourers. The archive holds some thirty-nine units of 1944–45 portraits of that firm's workforce. |
| OpenStarts, Università di Trieste | Full-text search for the surname and for «Memorie autobiografiche» | Sept 2026 | Carlo's «Memorie autobiografiche» (1926, 309 pp.), Salata's «Un precursore» (1929), and the 1928 bronze-bust volume with his letters to Kandler. Three works this project had recorded as unheld, all open access. Should have been searched months earlier. |
| Hrčak (hrcak.srce.hr) | Portal search for «franceschi», all pages | Sept 2026 | Fourteen distinct articles. Already held: Jelinčić's three-part Kobler correspondence, the 2024 Arhivski vjesnik inventory, Marin on the Zagreb library. New: Kero & Bobanović on the Zadar notary Tommaso de Franceschi; two reviews of the 2023 Croatian translation of Camillo's «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino»; and a 2022 article on the Zagreb collection. |
| SIASP, Trieste (siasp-aps.org) | The society's published guide and archive inventories | Sept 2026 | «Archivio Camillo De Franceschi e famiglia», 26 boxes, 19th–20th century. The 2017 guide and the full 39-page inventory, both downloaded. A second complete family archive, distinct from Zagreb's. |
| Internet Archive — full-text search | Repeated sweeps on every spelling of the surname and on the place-names | Aug–Sept 2026 | Kobler's «Memorie» entire; Cavalli 1845 on the bishops of Pola; the Atti of Rovigno; the Wagna camp intake lists; «Il Piccolo» of Trieste for 1926; the Zagreb almanacs; the Almanacco Fiumano. The single most productive source this project has. |
| ANNO — Austrian Newspapers Online | Surname search across the digitised Austrian press | Aug–Sept 2026 | The press notices of Carlo's death in January 1893, and other notices. Images retrievable from the IIIF endpoint even where the presentation manifest fails. |
| FamilySearch | Record search by surname and by place, and the parish register films | Aug–Sept 2026 | The bulk of this archive's individual records. Deep paging caps at about offset 1,100, which limits large sweeps. |
| Državni arhiv u Pazinu — microfilm ZM34K-215 | The Gallignana baptism book 1667–1745, read image by image | Sept 2026 | Five occurrences of the surname in seventy-eight years, and a systematic negative for the rest. The most labour-intensive single piece of work here and the one that answered the central question. |
| Trove (Australia) | Surname search across the digitised Australian press | 2026 | Australian notices for the family's later generations. |
| Arolsen Archives | Displaced-persons and camp records | 2026 | The 1949 sailing and the word «apatride». |
| Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild | Post-war IRO sailings to Australia | Sept 2026 | The USAT General Stewart, Naples to Melbourne, April 1949, passengers 0180–0182. |
| istrianet.org | The Kobler and Carlo De Franceschi pages, and the bibliography of his works | Sept 2026 | The complete bibliography of Carlo's published writings, which is what led to the «Memorie autobiografiche». Also a clean transcription of chapters of «L'Istria» (1879). The site's firewall refuses plain command-line requests and needs an ordinary browser. |
| Camillo de Franceschi, «Povijest Pazinske knežije» — reviews | Read | Sept 2026 | The two Croatian reviews of the 2023 translation both state that the family «se iz talijanske pokrajine Karnije doselila u Gologoricu u 16. stoljeću» — moved from the Italian province of Carnia to Gologorica in the sixteenth century. The first published source this archive has seen that names Carnia rather than Friuli, and it gives a fourth date for the migration. |
| Kero & Bobanović on the Zadar notary Tommaso de Franceschi (2023) | Retrieved | Sept 2026 | A notary of the surname at Zadar whose ninth fascicle holds an unusually large number of unpublished Glagolitic documents from Biograd. Not yet shown to connect to this family; recorded because a notary of the name in Dalmatia is worth knowing about. |
| Istarska enciklopedija (Bertoša), «De Franceschi» | Read in full, both language columns | Sept 2026 | The Agrons castle, the investitures of 1467 and 1471, the 1502 «gismanus de Carnia», the de Franciscus at Mione in the 16th century, the 1661 first mention as «mistro Zuanne», the 1686 death of the «vecchio stipite», the 1712 imprisonment of the parish priest, and the eighteenth-century professions. The single richest page found this year. |
| istrianet.org, whole-site sweep | 9,000 pages crawled for the surname and for eight place-names | Sept 2026 | 319 pages carry the name; 250-odd are bare citations of Carlo or Camillo as authors. The rest include the encyclopedia entry, Brhan's Carnic-emigration study with the Mione emigrant register, the 1945 census by place, the Umag cemetery survey, a Francesco de Franceschi bishop of Pola 1422–26, and Dionigi Defranceschi of Gallignana in the Dachau index. |
| Ferigo, «Le cifre, le anime» — full text | Re-read for Agrons | Sept 2026 | Confirms what this archive already published from it, and supplies the join it had missed: the 1679 weavers' return lists «Agrons e Cella» and «Mione» as neighbouring entries, and the family held the castle at the one and lived in the other. |
| Centro di ricerche storiche, Rovigno — the full open-access corpus | All 1,303 article PDFs of the «Atti», «Quaderni», «Collana degli Atti», «Monografie» and «Documenti», downloaded for full-text search on every spelling of the surname and on Gologorica, Gallignana, Agrons, Mione, Moncalvo, Seghetto and Sanvincenti | Sept 2026 | Done. All 1,303 article PDFs downloaded, converted to text and searched on every spelling of the surname and on eleven place-names. 341 articles carry a mention; most are citations of Carlo or Camillo as authorities, which is itself a finding about how the family stands in the field. The substantive harvest: three Dean Brhan papers this archive had never seen, including his own footnote on the family — «presente in Istria dal 1650 circa, originaria di Mione» — and his judgement that their Carnian roots were «piuttosto deboli»; De Franceschi named among the Carnian households of Gallignana in the 1820 cadastre; De Franceschi tombs in the parish church of Svetvinčenat; Piero Defranceschi, garzone, aged nineteen, in Giobatta Lupieri's house; Sebastiano de Franceschi with a brother-in-law at Dignano; and Maria De Franceschi, married to the Mione weaver Giobatta Zanier. Also confirmed, independently: Bertoša's toponymic correction on Moncalvo, Matejčić on the palazzetto, and the 1679 headmen's list — all three of which this archive already had, which is a check on its own work. |
| Kurelić, «Eagle and Lion» (CEU doctoral dissertation) | Full text of 221 pages searched on every spelling of the surname and on Gologorica, Gračišće, Moncalvo, Agrons, Mione and Carnia | Sept 2026 | Sent by David and, to this archive's discredit, filed under a placeholder name for a day. Six named Gologorica marriages from the Glagolitic Boljun register, 1585–1608 — Kovač, Kaligarić, Matijašić, Gašparić, Ilijašić, Sergović, Ančić, Križmanić, Gortan, Cinić — and no De Franceschi in the whole thesis. A controlled negative for the arrival date. Also the Gologorica–Tremaun boundary dispute of 19 February 1472 (HHStA Vienna; Kos, «Pet razvodov», 189–202), the earliest document naming the village that this archive has; and Svetvinčenat parish registers surviving from 1569 (baptisms) and 1581 (marriages). |
| FamilySearch record indexes — the town sweep, rebuilt | Six spellings of the surname across five country filters, thirty jobs, each paged to the index ceiling; every record matched whole against thirty-six place patterns | Sept 2026 | 18,840 records read, 664 distinct people with a place, eighteen towns. Rijeka 206 (1620–1910), Svetvinčenat 142 (1666–1902), Ližnjan 81, Vodnjan 78, Split 40 (from 1581), Poreč 35, Rovinj 22, Labin 17, Vižinada 12, Pazin 8, Zagreb 6, Opatija 6, Trieste 3, Barban 2, Senj 2, Carnia 2, Gologorica 1, Čepić 1. Rebuilt from nothing after David caught the earlier method failing at Bakar: the old sweep matched a truncated summary field, not the whole record, and stopped after a couple of hundred results a spelling. |
| Hrvatski biografski leksikon — «Defrančeski, Ante» | The national biographical dictionary entry, chased after David pointed at it | Sept 2026 | Born Ližnjan near Pula 1 Feb 1894, died Skrad 27 Sept 1949. Kastav teachers' college 1912; volunteer on the Salonika front; Kotoriba and Čakovec 1920–24; Higher Pedagogical School Zagreb 1928; professor at the Zagreb teachers' training school; Ministry of Education Belgrade 1932–33; Metković 1941 and retired ill the same year; back to Zagreb 1946–47. Nine books, 1925–1940. Entry by Branko Pleše (1993), with sixteen items of secondary literature not yet worked through. He had stood on this site as a namesake with the note that nothing linked him beyond surname and country — Ližnjan is third of eighteen towns in the rebuilt sweep, with 81 people of the name in its registers. |
| Constructed illustrations (image model, from this archive's briefs) | Eight scenes the archive can defend from documents, each written as a prompt with negative constraints and a list of details that must be right; the first — Imotski 1717 — generated and installed | Sept 2026 | Standing rules, so nothing here can ever be mistaken for a source: no invented face is ever captioned with a real person's name; no invented lettering on a real inscribed stone and no invented heraldry for a family whose arms are documented; every image captioned as a constructed illustration with its departures from the record named; no fabricated documentary apparatus — no title block, scale bar, dimension, survey date; the unaltered original archived in the source library beside its brief, marked with whatever was removed. Briefs at notes/image-prompts.md. ALL EIGHT NOW DONE, seven published: the house at Gologorica, with the 1711 tablet deliberately blank; Imotski 1717; the road of the Furlans 1679; the Salamon palace; the mills at Perinuša; Crikvenica in the winter of 1943; Pfullingen 1944. Plus a lapidarius of Gračišće, published as the trade and explicitly NOT as a portrait of Antonio, because the model gave it a detailed invented face. TWO WITHHELD: the first Gologorica house, which carried a fabricated pseudo-Latin inscription across the 1711 tablet; and a close detail of the arms and the Madonna relief, because the coat of arms in it does not match the blazon Carlo gave Kobler and the carving the family photographed — a cross crossed by two arrows over a pomegranate. Both kept in the library marked WITHHELD. Four failure modes, each seen more than once: a caption burned into the picture; a watermark; an invented inscription or coat of arms on a real carved stone; and an image returned dressed as a measured conservation survey of a real protected building, with title block, scale bar, dimensions and date. Every one of them was caught before publication. |
| defranceski.com — the family's own Google Site | All eleven pages captured as HTML; both Google MyMaps exported as KML; every external link on the site diffed against this archive's own; the linear family chart checked date by date against the Direct Line | Sept 2026 | Done ahead of decommissioning. The chart's dates all match what is published here, most of them now with a register page behind them instead of a chart. Twenty-six web hosts the old site used were absent from this archive and are now recorded. Four things were genuinely new: the byname «Franceschi dalle Rose»; a German branch route Ližnjan → Monheim with a «Grga» who died at Zagreb and a Petar at Metzingen, four kilometres from Pfullingen; a layer of forty-four Veneto emigration hotspots ending at São Paulo, which is a candidate departure region for the Brazilian cluster this archive has never had one for; and two Dalmatian names, Tomasso and a Francesca de Franceschi of the 1500s. The whole capture is in the source library under «oldsite». |
| Ližnjan — the parish record indexes, targeted | Four spellings across three country filters, every record matched whole for Ližnjan; then every entry naming a Gregorius, Gregorio, Gregorii or Grga pulled out in full | Sept 2026 | 127 entries of the surname at Ližnjan, 1788 onward. Grga is real: Gregorius Defranceski, aged 22 at his marriage on 10 June 1874, so born 1851, son of Gregorio Defranceschi and Agata Skifić, husband of Maria Vojnić, father of Anastasia (1875 and 1876), Maria (1878), Justina (1879), Maria (1882) and Josephus (1887). His daughter Justina married Josephus Fedel on 22 Nov 1898 and a Stana married Jacobus Vojnić on 7 Aug 1899 — Fedel and Vojnić being two of the surnames standing beside «Defrančeski Ante» in the Ližnjan subscription list of 1920. Behind Gregorio stands a Mattio De Franceschi and a Madalena Peucovich. Index entries only; the books are at Pazin and unread. |
| MyHeritage — David's live family tree | Read directly from his logged-in session: 459 individuals carrying the surname, harvested through the site's own lookup and person-panel endpoints, with their dates, places, relationships and source citations | Sept 2026 | The 2018 GEDCOM this project had been using holds 8,286 people; the live tree holds 15,643, and David's own verdict on the old file is «really old and really wrong». It is now retired. 211 of the 459 carry citations, 262 distinct FamilySearch arks between them. The direct line agrees wherever both hold a fact, and the tree supplies what this archive lacked: exact death dates for Antonius (4 Aug 1894) and for Giovanni Battista (14 Sep 1846), Gologorica rather than Gračišće as the 1787 birthplace, and an ark for the 1750 Giovanni that no page had ever been put in front of. Notes at notes/myheritage-reconciliation.md and notes/myheritage-key-rows.md. |
| MyHeritage — what the tree holds and this archive did not | Compared row by row against the published site | Sept 2026 | Antonius Franciscus Defranceschi, born Gologorica 31 January 1909, died at DACHAU 7 August 1945. Giuseppe de Franceschi, born Gračišće 12 March 1892, died New York City 26 April 1940, with six citations. Bruno Defranceschi, born Gologorica 20 November 1942, died 15 January 2023. Anna Maria Francisca, born Gologorica 1860, died Trieste 1941. A «SORAVITO De Franceschi» lineage at Mione running from a Francesco of 1450 to Francesco Andrea, died 1971 — one of them, Antonio Bartolomeo, going Mione to Nantes. Mione is the largest single place in the whole tree at 29 people, which this archive has treated as an origin and not as a living branch. And Marijana de Franceschi (Bitanga-Radovinović), confirming the Jagul marriage from the Imotski page. |
| David's Google MyMaps — the emigration layers | «High Level of Emigration from Here» (44 pins) and «Italian Lines» (90 pins), read from the archived KML | Sept 2026 | A departure region for the Brazilian cluster, which this archive has never had. Scorzè, Moniego (Noale), Cornedo Vicentino, Castelgomberto and Pederobba in the Veneto — with «DE FRANCESCHI Luigi, spouse BAROLO Caterina Luigia, from Moniego, Noale, Venezia to São Paulo» and «Giuseppe Romano De Franceschi, born Scorzè 22 May 1835, died Moniego». And a second region entirely: the Castelnuovo pin is Castelnuovo in the Valsugana, Trentino — four kilometres from Telve, where David's tree holds eighteen people of this surname. The São Paulo destinations are all coffee-belt, which is a different and later migration from the Rio Grande do Sul colonies of 1875. Brazil is two stories, not one. Also on those layers: Castelnovo del Friuli to Trostberg in Bavaria (Peter DeFranceschi b. 19 Feb 1841); Mione to Biella; Bishop Lucio Soravito de Franceschi of Adria-Rovigo; and a France cluster around Metz, Nancy, Fréjus and Propriano. |
| Gradska groblja Zagreb — the city burial register | Every spelling searched through the cemeteries' own OData service: Mirogoj, Miroševac, Markovo polje and twenty-five other grounds, 1750 to now | Sept 2026 | Thirteen burials of the name, and the register carries parents' names on some of them. Milan Defrančeski (d. 2001, aged 78) and Dragutin (d. 2004, aged 79) are entered as children of «GRGO I MARIJA» and «MARIJA I GRGA» — two brothers naming the same father, which is the Grga of David's old map pin, now with two graves that can be visited. It also contradicts the MyHeritage tree, which gives Grgo as born 1931: a man whose sons were born about 1923 and 1925 was not. Marija Defrančeski, d. 3 June 1971 aged 87, Mirogoj 147A/II/58, with Zdenka, dead 16 March 1945 aged two and not buried until Christmas Eve 1971 — the child moved in beside her. Antun (d. 5 June 1943, aged 67) and Justina (d. 1963, aged 78) share Mirogoj 136/II/43. And an Uršula Defrančeski, born about 1892, at Miroševac. Endpoint: axiomgis.com/Zagreb/Trazilica.svc/PvWebUkopani. |
| Francesco de' Franceschi, the painter | The fifteenth-century Venetian painter carried on the roadmap as unfinished | Sept 2026 | Active 1443–1468, birth and death unknown. Religious work on church commission; the style follows Michele Giambono and he may have worked with Antonio Vivarini. An altarpiece of 1447 in the Museo Civico at Padua; a St Mary Magdalen and a St Catherine of Alexandria in the Ashmolean at Oxford; a St Michael the Archangel and a St Mamas series. Not kin — two and a half centuries before this family reaches Istria. Roadmap item closed. |
| The family's own field photographs, 2026 | 491 images from six visits — Carnia (Ovaro, Mione, Muina, Agrons), Gologorica house and graves, Gračišće, Seget and Umag, Crikvenica–Klenovica–Novi–Senj, and the Pazin reading room — read as contact sheets so that the frames worth publishing can be chosen | Sept 2026 | Read as contact sheets and plated. **31 published so far.** Gologorica (11): the builder's tablet, the memorial to Carlo, the arms cartouche with the Madonna aedicule beneath it, the blazon in the tomb pediment and the same arms weathered nearly smooth on an older stone, the tomb, the house from the lane, the arcaded end with the number 22, a wall niche, a carved ring, the chapel. Carnia (10): SORAVITO DE FRANCESCHI cut in stone at Ovaro with Anna Crosilla his widow; De Franceschi Ugo 1930–2020; Antonio 1877–1962 with Marta Anzola dead at twenty-five; Gio. Batta 1880–1963; Francesco 1887–1945; an 1850s stone; the war memorial carrying Vittorio and Isidoro De Franceschi; the campanile of Santa Maria di Gorto over the graves — the pieve whose parishes drew up the 1679 return. Gračišće (3): «F DE FRANCESCHI» with Marfan Virginija and Nazarijo; the Salamon grave, which turns Francisca Salamon from a surname into a family still in that ground; and a Marfan stone. Umag and Seget (7): the tomb's blue-and-gilt ironwork lunette with a lion rampant beneath a star under a coronet — the other family's arms, against Gologorica's cross, arrows and pomegranate; «FAMIGLIA DE FRANCESCHI — SEGHETTO»; «FAMIGLIA ETTORE DE FRANCESCHI»; a stone of 1848; the house at Seget; the tomb whole; the pine-cone finial. Living people appear in many frames and are excluded throughout. Klenovica and the coast (6): «OBITELJ DEFRANCESKI» with three portrait medallions — the household under the name it took on the coast — and then the Kalanj, who are everywhere in that ground: Marija 1889–1970, Josip, Franjo and Zora on one stone, Rozalija Anton Marija and Milan on another, Vinko and Paulina, Tomislav, Marijan, and the Kalanj-Perković. Anton Rudolf's mother was Ana Kalanj of Klenovica house 22, and it is her family and not his that stayed. Also a partisan star laid in white stone among the graves. **39 field plates published across six places.** The Pazin reading-room set of 117 is register images rather than ground; two of them are now published on The Eleven — the Gračišće Status Animarum for house 24, which carries the midwife Maria Fernazar's household, the eleven children in one column, and Daniel's household beneath. That page also settled Josip's birth at 22 March 1863 and joined Basilio of New York to this line. |
| Documents and photographs supplied by the family, 8 September 2026 | Five items sent in one morning: the Zdravko plaque at Horsham, Ivan's grave at Senj, the whole opening of Anton Rudolf's 1890 baptism, a marriage register opening of 1772, and the 1951 Senj birth certificate — checked one by one against what this archive already held | Sept 2026 | Three of the five were already here and all three were held in a worse copy. The Horsham plaque was a 1000-pixel thumbnail out of the family tree package and is now the 3648-pixel camera original, with the founder's mark legible. Ivan's grave was **400 pixels wide** and the dates could not be read at all; at 2368 they read **1925–1995**. Anton Rudolf's 1890 baptism was a cropped strip of entry 9, and the whole page adds three things the strip cut off — a pencil note «vjenčao se na Crikvenici», a remarks column explaining that the parents were staying with the wife's people at Klenovica, and the printer's line «Tisak H. Luster u Senju». The 1951 certificate was new, and carries the word STATELESS against the father in his own country. The 1772 marriage was new **as an image**: this archive had the FamilySearch index row for it and had written that an index is only an index. It is now the page. |
| HR-HDA-1448 — the Croatian State Archives' supplementary register microfilms | The finding aid at arhiv.hr, searched for Crikvenica and Proložac across all seven kinds of register. This collection filmed the parish offices and the civil registry offices as well as the state archives, so it is not bound by the cut that ends FamilySearch's Croatian birth registers in the 1880s and 1890s | Sept 2026 | **The single most useful thing found for this archive in weeks, and it is a catalogue rather than a record.** For Crikvenica it lists births to **1948**, marriages to **1947**, deaths to **1928**, and — this is the one — a **Status animarum of the twentieth century**, roll ZM-34J/251, mark M-5976, digitised, from the Župni ured Crikvenica. A Status animarum lists a house, its head, his wife and every child with a birth date; it is the form that gave this archive the whole of Gračišće house 24 in one opening. Crikvenica births 1897–1908 are absent here too and may not survive, but the household book and the marriage register of 1909–1947 between them should answer the three unaccounted names on the Crikvenica monument without the baptisms at all. Proložac, the Imotski family's own parish, runs unbroken 1853–1949 with everything from 1892 digitised. Ordered by e-mail to info@arhiv.hr quoting place, kind, period, roll signature and topographic mark; read in the HDA reading room, ten units a day. **Nothing has been read yet — this is the list of what exists and where.** |
| Seget and Imotski, taken back to the sources | The two non-Istrian houses of the surname, researched past the secondary accounts this site had been using: the 2016 conservation study of Stancija Seget, the Istrian encyclopaedia, and the Franciscan province of Split's own histories of its Omiš and Imotski convents | Sept 2026 | **Seget:** the house carries its own dates — «1724» on the courtyard portal and «1732» with the initials «MA. F.» on the cistern, Marc'Antonio's monogram on his own well-head. A generation appears that this archive had never printed: **Giorgio de Franceschi, 1788–1865**, who threw a staircase block along the east front in **1843–45** and put a classicist façade over it, frescoed inside by **Michele Urban**, the architect to be sought among those practising at Trieste. The estate's economy turns from wine to olive oil about 1840. And the Venier–Valier disagreement is settled for Venier, from 1623. **Imotski:** four corrections. The friars were not at Proložac village but **on an islet in Prološko blato from about 1600**, marked by a stone cut A.D. 1609. The party Zuane sheltered was **fifteen people of whom nine were friars**, with a lay brother, four schoolboys and a hermit. Skalice at Omiš was begun **13 July 1716** and blessed **29 October 1718** on ground belonging to Pavao Despotović and Jakov Mariani. And **the friars did not return in 1717 — they returned in 1738**, building at Imotski from 1740. Zuane's own dates are 1673–1741. **And one unopened primary source:** at Skalice there is a book bound in sheepskin, written in bosančica on 416 leaves, which is the friars' own chronicle of the flight. It is in a friary, not an archive. **And then the thesis was read.** David cleared the repository's bot check himself, and «Uloga obitelji Franceschi u mletačkom osvajanju Imotskog» — Matea Kaćunić, Split, September 2025, 77 pages, open access — turns out to be the best single source on the Dalmatian family that exists. It corrects this archive six times and adds a second estate. Full account on the Imotski page; the PDF is now in this project's library. |
| The Imotski death register, read off the page | The first unindexed FamilySearch register image this archive has read at full resolution, rather than through the viewer's shrunken view — Imotski-Glavina, Atti di Morte, third quarter 1845 | Sept 2026 | **Entry 17. «Franceschi Domenica», 48, Cattolica, «Moglie di q.m Giovanni Vucemilovich» — and in the PATRIA column, «Nata in ALMISSA, domiciliata in IMOSCHI».** Almissa is Omiš. Her parents are given as «q.m Vicenzo Franceschi, q.m Antonia Cappelletti»; she died at three in the morning of 10 August 1845 in her husband's house of chronic gastritis, was seen by the district surgeon Ravlin on the 11th and buried the same day in the town cemetery of Imotski, by fra Bernardino Brajković. **That is the join between the Omiš branch and the Imotski household, in a parish register.** The method is the other half of the finding and it is reusable: FamilySearch serves each image as a Deep Zoom pyramid, and from a signed-in session the tiles of any chosen rectangle can be composed at true resolution — a 6180 × 4247 master read as clearly as the open book, instead of the 600-pixel view the ordinary viewer gives. Written up on the Parish Books page. **Every unindexed volume this archive has listed is now actually readable.** |
| Šišić, «An Abridged Political History of Rieka (Fiume)», Paris 1919 | A 160-page brief written for the Paris Peace Conference by a member of the Yugoslav delegation, with a documentary appendix of Fiume's nineteenth-century election papers. Read in full for the surname and for the Istrian and Kvarner place-names | Sept 2026 | **One hit in a hundred and sixty pages, and it is the right one.** Appendix XVIII, the protocol of the electoral committee of Fiume's second college, 20 April 1871: the assessors are «Signor Francesco Defranceschi» and Francesco Seemann under president Pietro Dabalà, and the protocol is signed at the foot **«Frco Defranceschi»**. 128 of 1,115 electors voted; 126 chose Dr Antonio Randich to replace the resigning Giovanni de Ciotta in the Croatian-Slavonian Diet. Almost certainly Kobler's Francesco Giuseppe de Franceschi, patrician councillor and royal harbourmaster, of the stock that came «da Pisino» — which is the County of Pazin, which is where this archive's own villages are. Written up on the Kobler page. It also names a source worth chasing: the Fiume electoral roll of 1871. |
| Regan & Nadilo, «Istarski kašteli … sjeverno od Čepićkog polja», Građevinar 2012 | A civil-engineering journal's architectural survey of the fortified places north of the Čepić field, including Gologorica building by building — supplied by the family | Sept 2026 | **A hard date for the lease, and a name for the relief.** The Gologorica benefice was founded in **1443** by the Pazin provost Andreas Schuel; Frederick III took the right of appointment; the holders were the captains of Pazin and the bishops of Pedena, then the Marquis de Prié, then Charles Antoine Biotz, and «**naposljetku od 1772. obitelj De Franceschi … do ukidanja feudalnih odnosa 1848**» — the De Franceschi held it on lease from **1772 to 1848**, seventy-six years. That fits Carlo's «affitto fermo» rather than contradicting it, and dates it. The house is described as «velika kamena palača obitelji De Franceschi, dvokatna građevina s balkonom i portalom iz 1711., ukrašena grbom i natpisom te **reljefom s prikazom Isusa**» — which settles a thing this site once got wrong: the relief over the door is a figure of Christ, and it is real. Also: Gologorica burned in 1463, 1508 and 1511; the bell tower finished 1740; an Imago pietatis of 1446 and a Glagolitic inscription of 1595 in the parish church; and **Mikula Gologorički**, priest of this parish, wrote the Croatian Glagolitic version of the Istrian Boundary Settlement of 1325. |
| Križman, «Antička svjedočanstva o Istri» (1979) — found online and read | David asked whether the book could be found. It can: the full text is uploaded to both Scribd and idoc.pub, and it was read there | Sept 2026 | **Carlo De Franceschi is cited eleven times** — indexed at pages 170, 189, 192, 193, 211 and 263, with «L'Istria, note storiche» (Poreč 1879) quoted at pp. 10–11, 38ff, 45 and 67, on the topography of the Istrian war of 177 BC, the siege of Nesactium, and whether the Pontic and Adriatic Histri are one people. Križman sets him beside Kandler, Gnirs, Benussi and Zippel, and endorses his identification of Livy's **Mutila with Medulin** and Faveria with Mutvoran as the least likely to be wrong. **And it puts Gologorica in antiquity**: Gnirs's proposal that the ancient Alùon lay on the Veli potok **between Pićan and Gologorica**, where the Roman inscriptions CIL V 322, 323, 424 and 425 were found. |
| Twenty-three scans from the family, read and ranked in one pass | Every one converted to text and tested for the surname in five spellings and for fifteen place-names, then the ones that scored were read | Sept 2026 | **Three worth a section, five worth a line, eleven with the places but not the family, and four that cannot be read at all.** The best is **«LOS FRANCESCHI, la pequeña historia de una familia»** by Napoleón Franceschi González (Caracas 2002) — the Corsican branch written from inside it, from **Ersa in Cap Corse**, first generation **Pietro Franceschi 1694–1771**, out through the French Caribbean to Venezuela, with **not one line touching Istria**. That closes the Corsica marker on the family's map. **«Atti» 39 of Rovinj** yields Camillo De Franceschi's Pula bibliography, including **«Testamenti polesani del secolo XV con alcuni cenni sulle antiche casate patrizie di Pola»** — sixteen fifteenth-century Pula wills he transcribed, which is the obvious next reading for the southern-Istrian cluster. **«Istra iz pera Nobilea»** reports the **ex libris «De Franceschi – Seghetto»** on books in the Provincial Library — the Seget house's own library — and has Camillo buying the Nobile drawings at Koper in 1934 and 1941, and Giulio drawing monuments better than Nobile did. **Four are image-only with no text layer and need OCR**: the Planckenstein almanac of Trieste 1869 (327 pages), Jelenić on the sacred art of Umag and its surroundings (135 pages), the Hrvati i Karolinzi catalogue, and «Piazza Maggiore era troppo piccola». The first two are worth the trouble; an 1869 Littoral almanac is exactly where a harbourmaster or a civic assessor is listed by name. |
| Jelenić, «Sakralno bogatstvo Umaga i okolice» — OCR'd and read | A 168-megabyte image-only scan with no text layer at all, put through optical character recognition on this project's machine and then searched. 135 pages, parallel Croatian and English | Sept 2026 | **Four things, and one of them is a correction.** A section on **Seget**: the villa fifteen hundred metres from Umag among the vineyards on the Novigrad road, passing to the De Franceschi in **1720**, «ranije vlasništvo **Katarine Bernardo Valier**» — which gives the vendor a Christian name and **moves the Venier–Valier question to Valier**, against this site's earlier reading. The **library** confirmed from the parish's side — «vrlo bogatu knjižnicu» — matching the ex libris «De Franceschi – Seghetto» found in the Provincial Library. The **family chapel**, right of the villa entrance with its own door and a small apse outside; a wooden altar, an Assumption with St Anthony and St Catherine, an old canvas of St Lucy, a wall cupboard — **restored in the 1990s, and Mass said in it once a year on Easter Monday.** And in the parish church of Umag, a canvas of **1650**, Our Lady of the Rosary, whose painter's name is illegible but which carries **the arms of the De Franceschi of Umag — nineteen years before the flight from Candia.** Either the arms were added later by a donor family, or the name was at Umag before 1669. Not resolved, and not guessed at. |
| «Guida schematica di Trieste» 1869 — OCR'd and read | 327 pages of city directory, scanned at 122 megabytes with no text layer; converted on this project's machine and searched for the surname in every spelling | Sept 2026 | **Four occurrences in three hundred and twenty-seven pages, and two of them are people.** «**Defranceschi Corrado, controllore in pens., V. Caserma 12**» — a retired controller of the imperial financial service, listed among the possidenti e privati. And «**Gleyre Costante (Enrico de Franceschi), in manifatture e pece, V. S. Spiridione 7**» — a merchant house in textiles and pitch, with Enrico de Franceschi named as the man behind it. The other two are Franceschinelli and Defrancesco, different formations of the same root, recorded so the next search does not stop at them. Nothing joins either man to a line on this site; what the book proves is that two households of the name were living and trading in Trieste in 1869, twenty years before Camillo De Franceschi settled there. The directories for other years would say whether they stayed. |
| The Pazin archive's own price list — the acquisitions queue, priced | «Acquisitions» has sat on this project's research log as a wish list for months. DAPA publishes a current price list; it was read, and most of what was wanted turns out to be in print and cheap | Sept 2026 | **Seven titles, about a hundred and fifty-four euro, and the first three would close three questions this site currently prints as open.** **Jelinčić's «Knjiga ređenja u Pićnu (Prothocollum) 1632–1783», €19.91** — a hundred and fifty years of Pedena ordinations, and an ordination entry names the ordinand's father. This archive has four priests of the name it cannot place. **Orbanić's edition of de Buset's spiritual visitation of 1788, €13.27**, 477 pages, ISBN 978-953-7640-30-9, published in the Vatican and covering Gologorica and Gallignana parish by parish in the last year of the diocese of Pićan. **Doblanović Šuran and Mogorović Crljenko, «Matična knjiga krštenih župe Umag 1483–1643», €26.54** — which is the direct test of the 1650 painting in Umag that carries the family arms nineteen years before the family is supposed to have arrived. Then **Joksimović's edition of Valier's 1580 apostolic visitation of the diocese of Pula, €60**, aimed straight at the unplaced southern-Istrian cluster; the **1571 urbarium of the County of Pazin, €10**; Slukan Altić's «Katastar Istre», €9.29; and DAPA's own beginner's guide to genealogy in its holdings, €15. Two wanted volumes are sold out. Both the translator and the editor of the 1788 visitation — **Jakov Jelinčić and Elvis Orbanić** — are already on this project's list of people to write to, and both work at Pazin. |
| IstriaNet — Camillo De Franceschi's collected bibliography | A queued item finally worked: the site's page of his selected works | Sept 2026 | **Forty-five entries between 1898 and 1964, with volumes and pages**, compiled from the Italian librarians' biographical database and the Trieste civic library catalogue. Three land on questions open on this site today. **«Testamenti polesani del secolo XV, con alcuni cenni sulle antiche casate patrizie di Pola», AMSI 42 (1930), pp. 167–219** — now properly cited, and aimed straight at the unplaced Pula cluster. **«La popolazione di Pola nel secolo XV e nei seguenti», Archeografo Triestino ser. 3 vol. 3 (1906), pp. 221–315** — the same question from the other side, ninety-four pages of it. And **«Quando e da chi sia stato ideato l'apocrifo istrumento di confinazione della Contea di Pisino con la data del 1325», Archivio Veneto ser. 5, 30/31 (1942)** — in which Camillo, of Gologorica, argues that the Istrian Boundary Settlement is a forgery, a document whose Glagolitic version was written by the parish priest of Gologorica. Also «I Castelli della Val d'Arsa» (1900), with unpublished documents and genealogical trees, and «Ricordi di biblioteca» (1959), seventy-four pages by the man who bought the Nobile drawings and shelved the Seget library. |
Partly
| Source | What was searched | When | What it gave, or did not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vodnjan, Liber Copulatorum — DGS 005497894, images 172–174 | Testing Michiela De Franceschi fu Giuseppe against the marriage register | 13 Sept 2026 | **The test is not settled, and the reason is worth more than the answer would have been.** The plan was to find the marriage of **Michiela De Franceschi × Domenico Giachin** — a marriage entry names *both* of the bride's parents, so if her mother is **Lucia Tromba** she is Giuseppe's daughter. Her first child is baptised in **1817**, so the marriage should fall about 1815–16. **What was established.** The register opens **«LIBER COPULATORUM in Ecclesia Sancti Blasii Adignani, Annus 1815»**, first entry **12 October 1815**. The fourteen De Franceschi marriages this archive has already catalogued from it run **1817–1832**, and **none of them is this one**. So the marriage lies either in the register's first fifteen months or **before the book begins**. Images 172–174 were opened; the 1815–16 entries have **not** been scanned surname by surname, and that is a bounded job, not an open one. **What was found instead, and it changes the reading.** There are **at least three different Michiela De Franceschis** at Vodnjan in this period: **Michiela *fu Pietro*** — wife of Andrea Palin, house 24, dead before January 1831. **Michiela *di Cristoforo* q.m Gio: Maria** — mother Maria Luigia Manzin, born about 1800, married in the register. **Michiela *fu Giuseppe*** — wife of Domenico Giachin, house 532, alive in 1833. **Michiela is not a rare name in this family; it is one of its commonest.** That is exactly why the inference has to rest on the patronymic and not on the name — and it is a good argument for *not* having claimed the Giuseppe link outright. |
| fiumemondo.com | «Brief history of Rijeka» | Sept 2026 | One sentence naming the Benzoni and the De Franceschi among Fiume's immigrant merchants. Checked against Kobler and found to be a compression: right on the Cremonese Benzoni, loose on the Bono, and it reverses the direction of travel for the De Franceschi. Cited as a lead, not as authority. |
| Corsican records — RHFC register index, 226 communes | Every commune, births, marriages and deaths, letter D | Sept 2026 | Four Defranceschi baptisms at Tomino in Cap Corse 1843–56, and a second cluster at Levie and Sartène in the far south. 132 Defranceschi births in the whole of France 1891–1990. Nothing whatever connects them to this family, and the honest position is that these are unrelated houses sharing a patronymic. |
| «Libri žminjski, libar drugi» (Žminj 2008) | Full text searched on every spelling and on Gologorica, Gračišće, Carnia, Agrons and Mione | Sept 2026 | Sent by David. Every De Franceschi mention is a citation of Camillo's «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino» as an authority — including, importantly, a Croatian edition cited as «De Franceschi 2003, Pazinska knežija» with page references, which is an acquisition target this archive did not have. The real find is elsewhere: Paolo Roseano's unpublished research on the Carnian families of Žminj, quoted there — recorded in Istria from the mid-seventeenth century, originally weavers and tailors, and «sve do 18. stoljeća mnogi od njih redovito boravili dijelom godine i u starom kraju, tj. Argonisu blizu Ovara u Karniji», many of them still spending part of each year back at Agrons near Ovaro; and marrying only girls from there, who stayed at home in Carnia while the men wintered in Istria. |
| Andrea de' Franceschi and Titian | The Grand Chancellor's portraits — Detroit, Hampton Court, Washington — and the 2016 Artibus et Historiae paper | Sept 2026 | Closed as far as it can be from here, after a year on the roadmap. Grand Chancellor of Venice 1529 to his death in 1551; Titian's friend; painted into the «Presentation of the Virgin» in the Accademia; owned two portraits of himself by Titian, the head in both taken from Titian's own picture now in Detroit. The Hampton Court double portrait was cleaned in 1958 and gave up a third figure painted out earlier. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds a further portrait it declines to call Titian. Not kin, and never claimed as such. Still unread: Charles Hope's «Titian's portraits of Grand Chancellor Andrea de' Franceschi», Artibus et Historiae 74 (2016), 139–151 — the academia.edu copy sits behind Cloudflare. The National Gallery of Art site requires JavaScript and the National Trust site served a CAPTCHA; neither was circumvented, and the facts above come from those institutions' own catalogue text as quoted elsewhere. |
| FamilySearch full-text search — the unindexed-image corpus | Tested for the first time from a signed-in session: the full-text service reads handwriting off images that were never indexed, and reports its own coverage collection by collection | Sept 2026 | **3,965 hits for «Defranceschi» across 172 collections, and not one of them is Croatian.** The corpus is Italian civil registration, the Americas, and a Dalmatian births series that turns out to be Zadar only. That is the negative this archive needed before writing letters. It is also a lead: **«Italy, Trieste, Trieste, Civil Registration (Tribunale), 1924–1939» carries 53 Defranceschi**, with Padova 143, Bologna 501 and Treviso 7 beside it. Trieste 1924–1939 is the right city and the right years for the Istrians who left through it, and this archive has never read a line of it. |
| Four more PDFs from the family, September 2026 | Šišić's Fiume brief of 1919; Regan and Nadilo's architectural survey of the Istrian castles; a Croatian historiography syllabus; Belaj on sacred triangular structures; and Orbanić in Acta Histriae 32 (2024) | Sept 2026 | **Three yields, one modest, one nothing.** Šišić gives a Francesco Defranceschi signing a Fiume election protocol in 1871. Regan and Nadilo date the Gologorica benefice lease to **1772–1848** and name the relief over the door as a figure of Christ. **Orbanić is the most valuable of the four, and not for its subject.** Its source list cites «Župni arhiv Gologorice, Matična knjiga krštenih 1691–1763» and «Matična knjiga umrlih 1646–1777» — **the Gologorica parish registers, in the parish, being read by a historian in 2024.** This archive has been saying they are the great absence in every collection it has searched. They exist, and the deaths start in 1646. It also gives Petar Kruzila, parish priest there 1722–31, deaf from a fall for doubting a miracle. The historiography notes add Carlo De Franceschi's full bibliography and his offices — secretary of the Istrian provincial committee at Poreč 1861–76, president of the Istrian archaeological society 1866–69 — with the flat Croatian verdict «potpuno prožet talijanskim duhom Istre». **Belaj on «Crkvina i svete trokutne strukture» has nothing**: zero occurrences of the surname in 670 lines. It is a study of pre-Christian sacred landscape geometry and is not relevant to this family. |
| Scribd, swept from a signed-in session | The surname in every spelling crossed with the towns and the events — Gologorica, Gallignana, Pisino, Pazin, Fiume, Buccari, Crikvenica, Ližnjan, Fažana, Medulin, Mione, Seghetto, Omiš, Imotski, Perinuša, and the 1945 census and cadastre | Sept 2026 | **Scribd is a library of uploaded scans, so it behaves like a bad index over good books.** Most name-plus-town queries return nothing (Gologorica, Gallignana, Pisino, Ližnjan, Medulin, Seghetto all zero) and the broad ones return noise — «Defranceschi» alone gives 517 documents, of which the top hit is a lute suite. But four real things came out of it, and one is important. **«ISTRA — Popis stanovništva 1945. / Cadastre National de l'Istrie», 664 pages, printed by Nakladni zavod Hrvatske at Zagreb in July 1946** — the ethnic cadastre the Yugoslav side took to the peace negotiations, and the source behind this archive's «twenty-five Defranceschi families left in Istria on 1 October 1945». The whole book is there. **S. Bertoša, «Puljska prezimena prema popisima krizmanika iz 1825. g.»** — Pula surnames from the confirmation lists of 1825, which bears directly on the Pula–Fažana–Ližnjan cluster this archive has just opened. **«Dalmacija — prezimena 1725»**, twice uploaded, for the Omiš and Imotski side. And **G. Radossi's historical and comparative toponymy**, 439 pages, which returns hits for both Fiume and Fažana. **What Scribd will not do is give the text.** Its reader loads page by page behind the subscription, in-document search is not offered on these files, and downloads are blocked from this browser. So the sweep's product is a shelf list rather than a reading: four titles worth having, all of them published books that should be looked for in a library or an open repository as well. |
| «Rassegna di storia istriana» and «Čemu» 28 — two more scans from the family | Both read in full for the surname | Sept 2026 | **The Rassegna is Carlo, seen from the Slovene and Croatian side.** Fourteen mentions, all of him as a historian: «L'Istria — note storiche» (Parenzo 1879), «Sulle varie popolazioni dell'Istria» (1852), and a **«Studio critico sull'istrumento della pretesa reambulazione di confini»** that this archive's bibliography of him did not have. He appears again in the 1848 group with Michele Facchinetti and Francesco Vidulich. **«Čemu» 28 has nothing at all** — zero occurrences of the surname in eighty-three lines. It is a philosophy faculty's journal presentation and has no bearing on this family. Recorded so it is not searched again. |
| MyHeritage tree 4, person panels — 101 individuals | The people known only from the tree | 10 Sept 2026 | All **101** people this archive held as a name and nothing else were pulled from the tree, one panel at a time, from David's own logged-in session. **No errors, and one flat result: the tree has no years for them either.** Exactly **one** of the hundred and one carries a date range, and it is not a date this archive accepts — see below. What the tree did give was **place**. **48 of them are now placed**, and the places are the deep end of the story: **Mione in the Val Degano eight times**, **Paluzza five**, **Naunina**, **Pasian di Prato** — Carnia, where the surname is supposed to come from. Then a Trentino cluster the archive barely knew it had — **Fiera di Primiero, Telve, Strigno, Grigno, Sacco** — and Istrian parishes at **Kaštelir (five), Poreč, Pula, Pomer, Plomin, Pazin, Gologorica, Ližnjan**. Two are in **South America**: San Lorenzo in Santa Fe, and Colonia in Uruguay. **15 people are now filed to Carnia, 8 to Trentino, 2 abroad** — lines they could not be given while they had no place. Roster people with no place at all: **209 → 161**. Parishes known to this archive: **31 → 54**. |
Nothing
| Source | What was searched | When | What it gave, or did not |
|---|---|---|---|
| «Galeb» and «Kvarner», the two Bakar newspapers | The surname in all five spellings, with control searches to prove the OCR layer works | Sept 2026 | Zero, in every spelling, across both complete runs — and the controls pass («Galeb» returns 107 for «Bakar»; «Kvarner» 102 for «narod»). A genuine absence, not a scanning failure. The one apparent hit is Istrian election news reported from Bakar. It does not disprove a Bakar family, but the local press never once had cause to print the name, which for a numerous local family would be odd. The parish registers remain the real test. |
| isidore.co «Res pro Deo» journal collection | The complete text layer of the Catholic Historical Review, Nova et Vetera and The Thomist — 496 issues, 236 MB | Sept 2026 | Zero occurrences of any spelling of the surname connected to this family, and zero for all twenty place-names. Every «De Franceschi» in five gigabytes of theology is a French historian of Jansenism, a Sienese printer, or a Venetian chancery secretary. The one thing worth keeping was a pointer to Orbanić's 1788 Pićan visitation. |
| «Nova et Vetera» 21:2 (2023) | Read cover to cover | Sept 2026 | One footnote citing Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, a living French historian. Nothing else. |
| Zelda Alice Franceschi, curriculum vitae | Read in full | Sept 2026 | A Bologna anthropologist of the Argentine Gran Chaco. The surname is the author's own and there is no connection to this family. |
| Benedetti, «From Venice to Cairo» (2022) | Read in full | Sept 2026 | Concerns Andrea de' Franceschi, Venetian grand chancellor, of Cividale di Belluno — a different family. Useful only as a caution about how many unrelated houses carry this name. |
| Bruni, «Peace at the Lily» (2018) | Read in full | Sept 2026 | Concerns Francesco De Franceschi, printer, «born in Siena around 1530». A third unrelated family. |
| Kurelić, «Eagle and Lion» (CEU thesis, 2013) | Read in full | Sept 2026 | Excellent background on the sixteenth-century Pazin frontier and a useful Istrian place-name gazetteer, but every «De Franceschi» in it is a citation of Carlo or Camillo as authors. Six Gologorica marriages in the Boljun register 1585–1608, none of this surname — consistent with a later arrival. |
| Centro di ricerche storiche, Rovigno (crsrv.org) — site search | «franceschi», «de franceschi», «defranceschi», «gologorica», «gallignana», «sanvincenti», «carnia», «pisino» against the site's own search, then all 345 publication pages crawled and grepped | Sept 2026 | The site index reaches only volume tables of contents. Every «franceschi» match is «catasto franceschino» — the Franciscan cadastre, not the surname. Nothing at title level. One title worth noting for the other family: Niki Fakin, «Il catasto franceschino di Umago», Atti XXIX. |
| Hrčak (hrcak.srce.hr) — the háček spellings | «Defrančeski» and «Defrančeschi» run separately against the Croatian open-access journal portal | Sept 2026 | No article-level hits under either form. The háček spelling survives in the newspapers and in living use, not in the scholarship, which uses the Italian orthography throughout. |
| Monheim (Bavaria) and Zagreb — the rest of the map pin | German record indexes, Croatian digitised newspapers, and burial indexes searched for a Defranceschi at Monheim and for a death of Grga at Zagreb | Sept 2026 | Nothing for either. The Monheim pin is Monheim in the Donau-Ries, not Monheim am Rhein — about a hundred kilometres from Metzingen, and Metzingen is four from Pfullingen. Both the Monheim line and «Grga dies in Zagreb» carry no note, no date and no document on the map they came from, and neither could be confirmed here. The nearest thing is a Zagreb grave for Marija Defrančeski, 1884–1971, two years off Grga's daughter Maria of 1882 — suggestive, not proof, and left as such. |
| «Franceschi dalle Rose» | The byname on David's old map, pinned Ravenna → Venice 1040 → Giudecca | Sept 2026 | No such family in the literature. The byname «dalle Rose» belongs to the Donà — the Donà dalle Rose, a Venetian noble house with origins in Romagna and Altinum, two Doges, and a surviving main branch whose archive is at the Museo Correr. The pin's Ravenna-to-Venice sequence is the Donà origin story. Recorded as a probable conflation so that it is not repeated. |
| Crikvenica baptisms, 1901–1903 | The three names the Crikvenica monument adds — a ZO… born 1894, a POLD… born 1901 and RUŽA JARMACKI née DEFRANCESCHI 1903–1939, none of them on this archive's list of Josip and Ana's children. Searched signed in to FamilySearch across the indexed records, the catalogue film notes, the full-text corpus, and the Croatian State Archives portal | Sept 2026 | **Settled, and the answer is that they are not online.** FamilySearch's Crikvenica holding, catalogue item 522842, gives its own coverage in the film notes: **Rođeni 1859–1896**, Vjenčani 1859–1908, Umrli 1859–1892 and 1893–1908. The births stop in 1896 and the other two series run twelve years further. The same cut is on every parish along that coast — Senj births end 1894 with marriages to 1920, Bribir births end 1886, Grižane 1886. It is the hundred-year rule as it stood when the films were made. The family's own photographs stop at 1896 because they were taken from the film. FamilySearch full-text search — which does read unindexed images — holds **no Croatian church-book collection**; its nearest are Italian civil registration and a Zadar-only Dalmatian births series. ARHiNET is gone: NAIS was retired in June 2020 for HAIS, and hais.arhiv.hr resolves but times out from here. **The next step is a letter to the Župni ured at Crikvenica or to the Rijeka archdiocese, not another search.** |
| Donji Proložac, deaths 1837–1859 — swept page by page | The whole register read for the surname, to test the Frančeski gravestone the family photographed in that churchyard. FamilySearch film 005494056, item 2, images 61–111, unindexed; read by composing the Deep Zoom tiles of each page's name column at full resolution | Sept 2026 | **No Franceschi and no Frančeski in twenty-two years of that parish's dead.** The surnames are Šegarić, Prlina, Ćurić, Grizinić, Zorko, Martinis, Vlašanović, Smoljan, Dujmović, Babajko, Točina, Fazinić, Kosulić, Šimac, Marinović, Rosulić, Šinožić — a Croatian peasant parish with no Italian household in it, and the names do not change even when the register itself switches from Italian to Croatian in the 1850s. One near miss checked and discarded: «Maria Martinna Franinacich», image 74. **A complete negative is worth more here than a hit would have been**: it says the family were not parishioners of Proložac, so the stone is either later than 1859 or belongs to someone brought there — and there is a reason they would be brought there, because their own church at Opačac is in the immediate vicinity of the village. Next: Imotski deaths after 1851, and the Proložac deaths from 1859 on, which are not on FamilySearch but are digitised on HDA rolls ZM-34F/1118 and ZM-34F/1119. |
| The Zoppola thread — tested and cut | The one clue that pointed the Pula–Fažana–Ližnjan cluster at Friuli: a Giambattista De Franceschi with children registered at Zoppola in Udine in 1779, 1811 and 1813 | Sept 2026 | **Not evidence. A Smart Match.** Four things kill it. The tree gives the same father a daughter **Lucia born 1779 and dead 1813** and a second daughter **Lucia born 19 January 1811** — a second living daughter given her sister's name, which does not happen; so these are two men. The 1813 citation names him «Giambattista De Franceschi **o Samassa**», and **Samassa is a Zoppola surname in its own right** — Samassa Rachele and Samassa Giovanni are both in Zoppola's own civil registers. A full-text sweep returns De Franceschi all across that plain: Azzano Decimo 1897, Cordenons, Pordenone 1888 and 1898, Zoppola. And **Zoppola is the Friulian plain twenty-five kilometres west of Pordenone; Carnia is sixty kilometres north, in the mountains** — so even a real link would not have been a Carnian one. The cluster is back to having no origin, which is the honest position. |
| «Piazza Maggiore era troppo piccola» — OCR'd | The third of the four image-only scans, converted and searched | Sept 2026 | **Nothing, and it is not even the right century.** One hundred and thirty-one pages converted; a single occurrence of the name, and it is **Lydia Franceschi**, in a report of an Italian workers' and students' meeting of the late 1970s. The book is about the Bologna student movement. No Istrian place-name in it worth the count. Recorded so it is never opened for this purpose again. |
| «Hrvati i Karolinzi» — the 2000 exhibition catalogue, OCR'd | Two hundred pages of the fourth image-only scan converted and searched | Sept 2026 | **No person of the name, and none expected** — the catalogue is about the ninth century. But the surname is in it three times, and every one of them is **Camillo De Franceschi in the bibliography**, cited for his 1932 and 1933 work on the early-medieval church sculpture of Pula and Sv. Ivan od Nimfeja, alongside Gnirs, Marušić, Šonje and Rapanić. Sixty-seven years after he published, the standard national catalogue of Croatia's Carolingian-period art still cites him by name. Recorded as a nil return for people and a footnote for Camillo. |
| Rotilio Defranceschi, in Argentina and in America | «Rotilio» as a given name across the Argentine record; the surname in Argentina 1900–1910; and the whole United States index | Sept 2026 | **Nothing, and the lore loses its one prop.** A dozen Argentine Rotilios — Voltolini, Cichini, Moreira, Jurado, Ballesteros — and not one of the surname; a dozen Argentine Defranceschi, all of them an Italian-mainland stock with Piergiacomi and Rosso in-laws, and not one Rotilio. Meanwhile the album's detail that «he married Albina Chinkopan» turns out to be **his sister's marriage**: Albina De Franceschi, born 14 April 1900, married Frank Chinkopan of the same village and died at Brooklyn in 1945. Published on the Eleven. |
| Raymundus Defranceschi, b. 9 October 1823 | The Status Animarum page re-read at full magnification, and every index searched in every spelling of both names | Sept 2026 | **Alive at home and unmarried in about 1848, and then nothing at all.** The house 5 page gives him all four sacramental ticks and **leaves both the marriage and the death column empty** — as it does for all four sons. The indexes have no Raymundus, Raimondo, Rajmund or Raymond of this surname anywhere on earth, in any century. The eldest son of the house vanishes and the second son inherits, which is why this archive's whole spine runs through Antonio. Three bounded things would break it: the Gallignana death register 1848–1880, the marriage register for the same years, and the Austrian conscription lists for the County of Pazin. |
| Pomara, «An Attempted Albanian Settlement in Istria (1610–1612)», Diasporas 43 (2025) | An open-access article on Venetian-organised settlement in Istria | Sept 2026 | **No person of the name.** Carlo De Franceschi is cited as an authority — on the depopulation of Istria and on Poreč falling to some three hundred souls by 1601 — which is one more instance of the historian still being quoted, this time in 2025. Nothing for the family. |
| Pomorski i povijesni muzej Hrvatskog primorja, Rijeka | The museum's digital collection searched for the surname | Sept 2026 | The public search returns nothing for any spelling, and the interface is script-driven rather than searchable from here. **Not a negative worth trusting** — 75,000 objects in 48 collections, and the digital fundus is a fraction of it. The museum should be written to, along with the Rijeka city archive about the De Franceschi pier. |
| Count Damian de Franceschis (Gallignana, 1720) — searched again | Carlo De Franceschi's «L'Istria: note storiche» (1879) downloaded whole and searched | Sept 2026 | **Not there.** The full text of Carlo's own history of Istria contains no Damiano de Franceschi and no count of the surname — nine occurrences of «Franceschi» in the whole book, none of them him. So the only man ever recorded as **Comes Damianus de Franceschis** is still known from exactly one line of one baptism register, and the family's own historian, writing a hundred and sixty years later about his own county, had never heard of him. |
Blocked
| Source | What was searched | When | What it gave, or did not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geneanet | Surname and place searches | 2026 | HTTP 403 on every URL, including the public surname pages. Not circumvented. |
| Antenati (Italian state archives) | Civil registration for Carnia and the Veneto | 2026 | Bot check. Not circumvented. This is the route to the Ovaro civil registers and it remains closed to automated access. |
| ResearchGate | Article retrieval | 2026 | Refused. The wanted article was found open access elsewhere. |
| CEMLA (Argentine immigration) | Passenger records | 2026 | Bot check. Not circumvented. |
| WikiTree | Profile search | 2026 | Bot check. Not circumvented. |
| Cairn.info, Filae, Geopatronyme | French scholarship and surname distribution | Sept 2026 | HTTP 403 to direct requests; figures obtained by other means where possible. |
| Mémoire des Hommes, Grand Mémorial, Base Léonore | French service and honours records | Sept 2026 | JavaScript applications with no reachable interface. Not searched. |
| Regional heritage catalogue of Friuli Venezia Giulia (patrimonioculturale.regione.fvg.it) | «De Franceschi Giulio» — the drawings of Carlo's son in the Civico Museo Sartorio, Trieste | Sept 2026 | The portal refuses connections from this project's network at the transport level (no DNS from one route, connection refused from another). Not a bot check and nothing was circumvented. The holdings are known from public catalogue summaries: thirty-one initials for Caprin's «Il Trecento a Trieste» (1897), illustrations for «L'Istria nobilissima», and a headpiece drawn for Camillo's Arcadia essay of 1929–30. The individual sheet records remain unread. |
| Nati in Trentino (1815–1923) | The Trentino provincial birth register, for Defranceschi at Castelnuovo, Telve and Strigno in the Valsugana | Sept 2026 | The database exists and covers exactly the parishes wanted, but the register search is behind «Ricerca ad uso dell'operatore» — an operator login. The public site search returns «Nessun risultato». Not circumvented. A written request to the Servizio coesione territoriale at Trento is the route. |
| CISEI — Centro Internazionale Studi Emigrazione Italiana | The emigration database the literature still cites for Argentina, Brazil, USA, Canada and Australia | Sept 2026 | cisei.it is now a parked domain serving an ad redirect. The database is gone from the open web; the literature citing it is stale. |
| Geni — the Obitelj Franceschi noble-family project | The Croatian nobiliary project David's old site linked | Sept 2026 | Behind Incapsula bot protection; not circumvented. |
| ANNO — «Defranceschi» + «Buccari» | The Austrian National Library's historical newspapers, for the Bakar question David asked months ago | Sept 2026 | **Nine issues, named and dated — and the reader is behind a bot check.** The search itself runs: *Gazzetta di Zara*, 4 August 1840 (3 hits in the text); *Agramer Zeitung*, 27 December 1845 and 6 July 1898; *Vereinigte Laibacher Zeitung*, 8 June 1876, and *Laibacher Tagblatt*, 23 June 1876 — the same story from two papers a fortnight apart; *Il giovine Pensiero* of Pula, 21 December 1894 and 1 August 1896; the *Pharmaceutischer Almanach* of 1904 (4 hits); and the *Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung* of 1886. **The page viewer at data.onb.ac.at is behind a Cloudflare check, and this archive does not answer those.** The nine citations are exact and any reader can open them; what cannot be done from here is read them. The Zadar paper of 1840 is the one to open first. |
| hrcak.srce.hr, and the Croatian «Dabar» repositories | Four queued Croatian journal and thesis PDFs | Sept 2026 | **Both are now behind bot checks that this archive will not answer.** hrcak.srce.hr returns «Confirm you're not a robot», and so does the Dabar repository network that carries the Pula and Koper university theses. This archive has used hrcak successfully before, so this is a change rather than a rule. Where a paper exists elsewhere — a university's own site, CORE, an author's page — it can still be read; the Doblanović paper above was got that way. Recorded so the same doors are not knocked on twice. |
| FamilySearch — both the persona API and the Deep Zoom image service | Automated reading, stopped | 10 Sept 2026 | **403 — «This request was blocked by our security service.»** After two days of reading register images tile by tile, FamilySearch's bot protection has blocked this session: the persona search endpoint and the `deepzoomcloud` image service both now return a 403 with a NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW block page rather than data. **No attempt has been made or will be made to get around it.** This archive does not bypass bot checks or CAPTCHAs, and a block is a legitimate answer from a service that has given it a very great deal already — five generations at Vodnjan came off these films in two days. **What this stops, for now:** the rest of the Vodnjan marriage register (images 217–470), the death registers (546–575 on film 894 and all of 895), the Vodnjan baptism re-read, Svetvinčenat's marriage register, and the Rijeka and Bakar films. Those six items are paused, not abandoned. **What it does not stop:** everything already read and published, and the work that does not touch FamilySearch — the itineraries, the portraits, the archive letters, and the reconciliation of David's own GEDCOM when it arrives. |
| Vodnjan, Liber Defunctorum — DGS 005497894, images 560–575 | Deaths, late 1830 – Feb 1833 | 10 Sept 2026 | **The tile server refused.** `image.xml` still answered 200, but every image tile came back **403** from the Incapsula security service, at every zoom level, on the first request of the session — no CAPTCHA offered, no rate warning, nothing to wait out. **No attempt was made to get round it.** The reading stops here until the block lifts. The targets it was going to answer — **Luigetta De Franceschi**, dead by November 1831; **Martina Civico** and **Veniera De Rocchi**, both dead by 1832 — stay open on <a href="/gaps/">What we cannot close</a>. |
| Vodnjan, Liber Defunctorum — DGS 005497894, image 562 onward | February 1831 onward | 10 Sept 2026 | **Blocked mid-page.** After roughly four hundred tile requests the Incapsula service began returning **403 on `image.xml` itself**, which had answered 200 all session. The reading stopped there. No pacing was tried, no route was looked for, no request was repeated. The film is open at **image 562, second half**, and that is where it resumes. |
Not yet
| Source | What was searched | When | What it gave, or did not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orbanić (ed.), «Visita Spirituale del 1788 in Istria» | Not yet obtained | — | De Buset's parish-by-parish visitation of the Pićan diocese, 31 March – 31 August 1788, 178 sheets, published Vatican City 2016. Covers Gologorica and Gallignana. The manuscripts are in the Diocesan Archives of TRIESTE, not Pazin. |
| «Stemmi della nobiltà di Buccari», Bakarski zbornik 2 (1996) | Not yet obtained | — | Fifty-seven pages on the arms of Bakar's patrician houses. |
| Bertoša, «Pisma Carla De Franceschija Šimi Ljubiću», VHARP 13 (1968) | Not yet obtained | — | Carlo's letters to Šime Ljubić, printed. The archive knew of five in the Zadar state archive and did not know they were in print. |
| Jelinčić, Jadranski zbornik XI (1979–81), pp. 293–307 | Not yet obtained | — | A summary of the whole published Kobler correspondence. |
| Gentileo, «Bibliografia degli scritti di Camillo De Franceschi», AMSI 55 (1954) | Not yet obtained | — | Camillo's full published bibliography. |
| Camillo de Franceschi, «Povijest Pazinske knežije na temelju isprava» (Pazin 2023) | Not yet obtained | — | The 2023 Croatian translation of «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino», 574 pp., translated by Klara Buršić Matijašić and Robert Matijašić. In print and purchasable. |
| Archivio di Stato di Udine, Notarile antico B. 2979 | Not yet requested | — | Franceschi Gio. Batta, notary at Mione, protocols 1737–1783. Needs a letter, not a search box. |
| Državni arhiv u Rijeci, HR-DARI-382 kut. 1 | Not yet requested | — | The 1896 «Albero genealogico della Famiglia de Franceschi», said to reach back into the fifteenth century. |
| Bakar parish registers | Not yet touched | — | A series this project has never opened, and the family's own recollection points at it. |
| Vergé-Franceschi, «Le cap Corse: généalogies et destins» (2006) | Not yet obtained | — | The reference work for Cap Corse families; would settle whether the Tomino Defranceschi are in it. |
| Stare hrvatske novine (dnc.nsk.hr) | Surname and place searches across the digitised Croatian press, including the Bakar papers Galeb and Kvarner | Sept 2026 | In progress. An ASP.NET search that will not answer a plain command-line request and has to be driven like a person. It carries two Bakar newspapers, which is the sharpest reason to work it. |
| Camillo De Franceschi, «Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino», AMSI 1963 vols 10–12 | Not yet obtained | — | The authority the Istarska enciklopedija cites for the Agrons charters. 516 pages. Republished in Croatian translation at Pazin in 2023. The highest-value unheld book after the Memorie. |
| Carlo De Franceschi, «Uspomene», Pula–Rijeka 1989 | Not yet obtained | — | A Croatian translation of the Memorie autobiografiche, made by Istrian scholars; will carry an apparatus the 1926 edition does not. |
| Bertoša, «Etos i etnos zavičaja», Pula–Rijeka 1985 | Not yet obtained | — | Contains «Gologorički De Franceschi: između etosa i etnosa», the footnoted scholarly version of the encyclopedia entry. |
| Matični ured Crikvenica — death register 1943 | Not yet requested | — | Closed under the hundred-year rule and not public until the 2040s, but open to a direct descendant on request. A prijepis (full transcript) must be asked for by name; the ordinary izvadak gives only date and place. Letter drafted. The parish death book and the 1964 census of war victims at the Croatian State Archives are two further routes to the same fact. |
| «Atti e memorie della Società istriana», n.s. 2 (1952) — Camillo on the Cretan refugees | Camillo De Franceschi, «Il Consiglio nobile di Parenzo e i profughi di Creta», AMSI n.s. 2 (1952). Found cited in Milena Joksimović, Tabula 17 (2020) | Sept 2026 | Not digitised. Archive.org holds AMSI only to 1933. This is the paper most likely to settle whether the Umag–Seget family really came out of Crete after 1669 — written by a man of the Gologorica family who was a professional archivist. First item on the acquisition list. |
| Museu da Imigração / Hospedaria de Imigrantes, São Paulo | The route to the São Paulo arrival registers, 1882–1925 | Sept 2026 | The museum's own digital collection is real — over 250,000 images, enrolment books, ship lists, call letters — but the searchable interface was not reachable from the paths tried. The practical route is FamilySearch's «Brasil, São Paulo, Registros da Hospedaria de Imigrantes», which indexes the same registers and can be searched from a logged-in session. That is where a De Franceschi off a ship at Santos is entered by name with his home parish beside him. |
| Arolsen Archives online collections | Ivan Defranceski, Hedviga Blažević, Uršula Kovačina, Anton Rudolf — 1948–1951 | 10 Sept 2026 | **Not attempted: the service is down.** `collections.arolsen-archives.org` resolves to 62.90.197.110 and **times out**, while the main Arolsen site answers normally — so the online archive, not the organisation, is unavailable. David confirms it is dead from his side too, so it is not a block on this machine. **It stays on the list.** The four searches are *Defranceski*, *Defranceschi*, *Blazevic Hedviga*, *Kovacina Ursula*, and the window that matters is **1948–1951** — the only place the failed exit can have left a trace, since a departure that was reversed leaves nothing in any Croatian register. A record of **Anton Rudolf after 1943** would separately settle whether Uršula was a widow or a wife when the man called **Car** appears. The written enquiry to Bad Arolsen is drafted and waiting, and is deliberately **not** being sent first: their own advice is to search the online archive before joining a queue they warn may run to thirteen months. |
| FamilySearch full-text search — untested | Whether the Croatian church books are machine-readable yet | 10 Sept 2026 | **A maybe, recorded so it is not lost.** FamilySearch has been extending an AI handwriting-recognition search that makes the **text inside register images** searchable rather than only the catalogue around them. **Whether the Croatian church books are in it is not known** — it has not been tested, and FamilySearch is refusing this session at the time of writing. It matters more than anything else on the list. Reading Vodnjan's death register 1815–1833 by eye is about **105 images and four and a half thousand entries**; if the text is already searchable, that work is a query instead of a campaign. **Test this before committing to any exhaustive read**, because a positive answer makes the plan obsolete and a negative one costs a single request. If it is not available: the fallback is **handwritten-text recognition trained on this clerk's hand** — twenty pages transcribed by hand to train on, then the rest by machine. That costs money and setup and is **David's decision, not this archive's**. |
How to read this
Three of the five headings are the useful ones. Nothing is the heading that saves work: five gigabytes of theology journals searched end to end for twenty place-names and every spelling of the surname, and not one hit — that is worth recording so it is never done again. Three of the entries under it are entirely different families who happen to share the name, and naming them is the only defence against quietly absorbing them.
Blocked means a bot check, a login wall or a paywall that this project has chosen not to get round. Those are recorded rather than worked around, and where a blocked route matters — Antenati for the Carnian civil registers is the sharpest case — it is named as a gap rather than filled with a guess.
Not yet is a shopping list. Most of it is printed and purchasable or is one letter away. Anyone who wants to move this archive forward should start there rather than at the beginning.
Sources that did yield are described properly in the bibliography, with what each gave and where it is weak. Open questions are in the research log.
What this page rests on
OpenStarts — Università degli Studi di Trieste Digital repository · openstarts.units.it
Hrčak — the portal of Croatian scientific and professional journals Portal · hrcak.srce.hr
Internet Archive — full-text search Portal · archive.org
Società Istriana di Archeologia e Storia Patria — «Archivio Camillo De Franceschi e famiglia» Archive, Trieste · SIASP, Trieste. Consistenza: bb. 26, sec. XIX–XX
Državni arhiv u Pazinu (DAPA) Archive · Vladimira Nazora 3, 52000 Pazin, Croatia
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →