The trees
This archive follows six families of the name, and every one of them is now drawn — not all as pedigrees, because only two of them are pedigrees. A line that moved is drawn as the ground it covered; a parish that never joined up is drawn as the web it is; a chart a family made about itself is drawn banded by how much of it can be tested. A tree with invented joins in it is worse than no tree, so none of these has any.
The only one of the six that is a descent father to son, with every wife named, every child listed, the marriage year, the occupation and the evidence. Now drawn twice: as a pedigree with seventeen ancestors and eleven walls, and as a channel of places — Gologorica, Gračišće, Crikvenica, Klenovica, Pfullingen, Senj, Johannesburg, Brisbane — with the six families that married in dropping into it from their own towns.
The tree and the channel →The richest material the archive holds and the emptiest tree, now set out in full: Elena di Franceschi, 21 December 1628, read on the page; then Anto × Marta, Gasparo × Antonia, Piero × Vittoria, Mattio × Elisabetta, Nadal × Anta, and after a ninety-year silence the Austrian households of the 1820s and the two daughters who married Bergamo and Crosilla. And since 21 September 2026 the marriage register of 1762–1815 has been read, which adds six more households inside what this page used to call a silence — Mattio (dead by 1766), Giacomo the elder (dead by 1771), Giacomo the younger (married 1772), Gasparo (dead by 1773), and Antonio with his son Vittorio.
The hole has been entered. This row used to say that the Svetvinčenat marriage book runs 1581–89 and 1622–23 and then jumps to 1762, and that every missing join falls inside that gap. The jump is real, but the book on the far side of it has now been read, and it holds six households of the name between 1766 and 1773 — including, on 4 February 1773, «Victorio de Franceschi filio Antonij», the first father and son of the name this archive can document at the castle. Eighteen years still separate Anto from Gasparo, and Nadal — godparent in the 1660s, father in the 1730s — is still the single thread most worth testing. The new households are drawn as their own nodes and joined to nothing, because nothing yet joins them.
The web, household by household →Venice, Zadar, Omiš, Imotski, the mills at Perinuša. This is a chain of fathers and sons: «Rodoslovno stablo obitelji Franceschi» gives seventeen of them with their wives and their offices.
What was missing was not the tree but the honesty about it. It is now drawn with each generation coloured by what can be tested: the eight medieval generations as the family's own account, the seventeenth-century three as inferred, and the six from the governor of Imotski down as documented, because seven independent Omiš households found for this archive agree with them.
Seventeen generations, banded →Candia falls in 1669; Zorzi de Franceschi goes to Zante, then to Šibenik, drawing a Venetian pension for the war. In 1720 Nicolò and Marc'Antonio, sons of Giorgio, buy the Seget estate. In 1724 a date is cut into a portal, in 1732 the initials M A · F into the well-head, and in 1790 a division deed lists the palace room by room.
Zorzi is Giorgio — the Venetian form of the same name. Three things stand behind that identification and none of them had been put together: the 1730 order directing Zorzi's pension to be drawn at Capodistria «probabilmente perchè la famiglia viveva già a Seghetto»; Marc'Antonio's birth in 1671, two years after the island fell, which makes him a child of the flight rather than of Crete; and the deed of 1720 naming Giorgio as the father. The tree is drawn on that inference and says so on its face.
Candia to Seget →Pietro Franceschi, 29 June 1694 – 12 February 1771, then Gasparo, Francesco Maria, Pietro, and Simone, born at Ersa on 11 March 1826 and dead there on 25 March 1907, whose son went out through the French Caribbean and died at Miranda in Carabobo in 1918. Written from inside the family by Napoleón Franceschi González, Caracas 2002.
It is drawn here precisely because it is not kin. Six generations, twelve in-marrying Cap Corse families, and not one line touching Istria, Carnia or Dalmatia. It is the clearest demonstration the archive can offer of what «De Franceschi» actually is — a patronymic that grew twice, four hundred miles apart, without the two ever meeting.
Six generations that never touch Istria →The archive's oldest household anywhere — six children at Rijeka, 1626–1632 — and its largest unworked concentration. Now set on a time rule with every broken rung labelled. Two findings came out of doing it: nine of twelve children born 1794–1805 carry Nepomucena, and the Bakar father of 1849 is entered Defranceschi Regii — of the king, which in the Hungarian free port means an office. It is the first evidence anywhere in this archive of the name holding one.
The chain that almost closes. Valentino fathers 1742–57; Giuseppe names his first son Valentino in 1772; a Valentino fathers again 1794–1805. The grandfather-to-grandson pattern is exactly right — and that boy was buried on 22 August 1775, aged two years and nine months. The Rijeka marriage register would settle it in an afternoon and has not been read.
Nine Kvarner households →So there are six, and all six are drawn. What unlocked them was not new evidence but a better question: not can this be made into a pedigree, but what shape is this family actually in. Two are descents. One is a route with a pension office carrying the join. One is a chart the family made about itself, now banded by how much of it holds up. Two are webs — parishes where the name is dense and the filiations are missing — and they are drawn as webs, with every gap measured in years and every missing book named. Where a join is inferred it is coloured as inferred. Where there is no join at all the rung is broken and labelled no join shown. That is the whole method, and it is the reason these can be published at all.