Say Your Name
One person, written down six different ways by six different clerks. Type a given name and see every form the same human being would have been entered under across four centuries of registers.
This archive's owner puts it best: my own father can be Ivan or Giovanni or John. One man, three registers, three languages, no change of person.
That is not a curiosity, it is the central difficulty of the work. A Josip in a Croatian register, a Giuseppe in an Italian one and a Josephus in a Latin one are the same name, and an index that treats them as three people will never join a family up. Every name below was reconciled by hand from the forms that actually appear in these registers — not from a dictionary.
Why it matters, in one example
The Rijeka registers hold three households that looked like three different families, because the father's name was written Giovanni Antonio in one, Gioannis Antonÿ in another and Zuane Antonio in a third. Reconciling the given names merged them into one. That single change moved the earliest documented Rijeka household back by decades. See the household explorer, where the reconciled forms are what you are searching.
The forms this does not cover
Diminutives and household names — Bepi, Checo, Nane, Toni, Ivo — appear in speech and occasionally in a burial entry, and a few are listed above where a register actually used them. Saints' second and third names, which Austrian registers piled on (Valentinus Franciscus Xaverius, Joannes Nepomucenus Aloysius Paschalis), are kept whole in the records and only the first is reconciled.
And the surname does the same thing
De Franceschi, Defranceschi, Dei Franceschi, Defranceski, Defrančeski, De Franceski, Franceschi. Nine spellings, one family — and the spellings move with the border, not with the bloodline. See The Name.
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →