The Defranceschi Archive
Nine chapters · 1679 to Brisbane

The Story

The whole descent told once, in order. Every chapter carries the document it rests on, and says plainly where the evidence stops.

1679 I
Mione di Ovaro, Carnia

A weaver and his son, wintering over the mountain

Every account this family gives of itself starts in Carnia — the high valleys north of Udine, where villages sent their men down the road of the Furlans into Istria each autumn as weavers and pedlars, and fetched them home in late spring. A headmen's list of 1679 catches exactly that: a Zuane De Franceschi of Mione at work in the imperial part of Istria, with his son. Some of them stopped coming home.

Zuane De Franceschi di Mione, con suo figlio.

Headmen's list, 1679

That is the whole of the documentary evidence for the journey. No page joins that Zuane to anybody in Istria, and this archive does not pretend otherwise.

Back to Carnia →The dal Ginut household at Mione →
1711 II
Gologorica

A house, with the year cut into it

A hundred and sixty years later Carlo De Franceschi — the family's own historian, born at Gologorica in 1809 — wrote privately to Giovanni Kobler about where they came from. His great-great-grandfather was Giambattista, son of the late Leonardo. And what that man left behind is not a document but a building.

Anche i miei derivano dalla Carnia, ma si stabilirono in Istria intorno al 1700. Il mio trisavolo fabbricò la nostra casa nel 1711 come da relativa iscrizione.

Carlo De Franceschi to Kobler, Parenzo, 10 November 1876

Both names Carlo gives — Giambattista, and the Leonardo who was his father — turn up in the eighteenth-century registers of Mione. That is corroboration and not proof, and the house has never been looked for.

Carlo's Letter →Carlo's Book →
1787 III
Gračišće, house 5

The farmer of house five

Here the line stops being testimony and becomes record. The Status Animarum of Gallignana — the parish's book of souls, bought from the Pazin archive in 2021 — rules a household across a page: Joannes Baptista Defranceschi, agricola, born 13 August 1787, married in 1819, dead on 1 September 1846. His wife Francisca Salomon, born 17 March 1797. Four sons, and the second of them is Antonius.

Joan. Bapt. Defranceschi, agricola — n. 13 Aug. 1787, m. 1819, † 1 Sept. 1846.

Status Animarum, Gallignana, house 5

The earliest ancestor this archive can put a date on from a register page.

The Spine →Households →
1825 IV
Gračišće, house 19

Lapicida — the man who cut stone

Three Latin words weld house 5 to house 19. Antonius Defranceschi q. Joannis — son of the late Giovanni — born 20 September 1825, married 25 November 1856, dead 4 August 1894. Against his name the clerk wrote his trade, and it is the trade that comes down the hill with the family: lapicida, a stonecutter. His wife Maria née Fernasar. Five children.

† Antonius Defranceschi q. Joannis, lapicida — n. 20 Sept. 1825.

Status Animarum, Gallignana, house 19

«q. Joannis» is what joins the two households. Without those two words the line breaks here.

The Spine →Gologorica →
1863 V
Gračišće

Josephus, and the certificate that started all this

On 22 March 1863 the stonecutter's son was baptised at Gračišće, entry 23 of that year. The family had held a certified copy of this entry for years without being able to say what stood behind it. The book of souls answered that: the father is the lapicida of house 19, the grandfather the farmer of house 5.

Josephus, filius Antonii Defranceschi lapicidae — 22 Martii 1863.

MKR župe Gračišće 1841–1899, entry 23 of 1863

Documented, certified, and the hinge of the whole archive.

The Spine →The Gallery →
1890 VI
Klenovica, house 22

One word welds the coast to the hill

Josip came down off the hill to the Kvarner coast and married Ana Kalanj of the Vinodol. On 20 January 1890 their eldest was born at Klenovica and baptised on 9 February. In the column for the parents' place of origin the priest wrote three words that no chart could have supplied — and they are the reason this archive exists at all.

Gallignana u Istriji.

Klenovica baptism, 20 January 1890 — the parents' zavičaj

The zavičaj is the inherited Austrian commune of legal settlement. The register is stating, as a matter of law, that this Kvarner household's home commune was Gračišće.

The Spine →The Crikvenica house →
1896 VII
Crikvenica

Six children, and the trade that came down with them

Josip and Ana had six. Three of them did not reach thirteen. Ivan died at two in March 1896 and was buried on the 28th; Zorica was conceived the month he died. Marija Stjepanka died at twelve in 1905, and a second Marija at three months in 1906. Against Josip's own name in 1906 the clerk wrote the whole arc of a life in five words.

vešti klesar sada tvorničar

Crikvenica register, 1906 — «a skilled stonemason, now a factory worker»

His father was entered at Gračišće as lapicida. Josip carried the trade down off the hill, and then the century took him out of it and put him in a factory.

The Crikvenica house →Burials →
1939 VIII
Reutlingen · Neuhausen · Pfullingen

Two brothers, two numbers, two hemispheres

Petar left Yugoslavia for Germany in April 1939, voluntarily, «to improve himself» — five months before the war. Zdravko was taken by the Partisans in 1943, held three or four months, then sent to Germany. Ivan entered a Reutlingen factory in October 1941, aged sixteen. When the IRO registered the two households after the war it gave them consecutive numbers: 148.901 and 148.902. Then they chose opposite ends of the earth.

Emigré Australie le 8.3.49. · Veut rester en Allemagne, a une maison, 2 autos etc.

Arolsen — Anton's index card, and Petar's counselling card of 22 July 1949

One brother took the ship. The other had a house and two cars and decided that was enough.

Pfullingen →Graves →
1925 IX
Crikvenica · Senj · Johannesburg · Brisbane

And Ivan went home

The third brother did not stay in Germany and did not sail for Australia. Ivan was born at Crikvenica on 25 June 1925, went back to his own coast, worked at Senj and married Hedviga Blažević — whose people were Senj packhorse carriers and tobacco-factory workers, and whose Karlobag ancestry reaches people born about 1690. He died at Senj on 30 October 1995 under a plain granite slab cut IVAN DEFRANČESKI. Hedviga died at Johannesburg six years to the day later. Their descendants are in Brisbane.

IVAN DEFRANČESKI

The gravestone at Senj

The living are omitted from this archive, so the last generations are named only where death has already closed them.

The Senj line →Graves →The Spine →

And the parts that are not the line

Around that descent sit four other families who share the surname and, so far as any document shows, nothing else: the Venetian house at Seget who came from Crete after 1669; the Imotski Franceschi descended from a governor, whom an online tree wrongly grafted onto this one; the Omiš and Zadar branches; and the eleven children of Josip's elder brother Antonio, who left for New York, Buenos Aires, Tuscany and Slovenia. They are here because the name is one word and the families are not.

Seget →Imotski →The Eleven →Every town in Istria →
What this page rests on
Državni arhiv u Pazinu (DAPA) Archive · Vladimira Nazora 3, 52000 Pazin, Croatia
Matične knjige — Croatian parish registers Archive · Ledenice, Klenovica, Crikvenica, Bakar
«Lettere di Carlo De Franceschi a Giovanni Kobler» Publication · Atti e Memorie della Società Istriana, 1928
Arolsen Archives — International Center on Nazi Persecution Archive · Bad Arolsen, Germany
FamilySearch Database

The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →