A port, a war, and the Highveld

Part III · 🇭🇷 🇩🇪 🇬🇷 🇿🇦 🇦🇺 🇺🇸

Hedviga was born in a dying port on the Adriatic and died seventy-five years later on the Highveld, having crossed a world war, a country that stopped existing, and two continents. These chapters hold her life and her mother's, the town in 1943, the papers and pictures that survive, and the work that took others of the family to Port Pirie and to America.

Start reading: Hedviga →

1. 1HedvigaBorn in a dying port on the Adriatic, died seventy-five years later on the Highveld.
2. 2MilkaHer mother, the best-documented person in the archive.
3. 3The Wedding of 1920One page of a parish register closes the gap this archive was built around.
4. 4Senj, 1943Half the town was destroyed in two days.
5. 5The BrotherHer brother died at twenty-two in the last year of the war; the family keeps two accounts of how.
6. 6RhodesHer second husband was born on Rhodes in 1913 and died in South Africa in 1997.
7. 7The CertificateA sworn English translation of a Yugoslav birth extract: the one state document in the archive.
8. 8The Arolsen CardsThree German index cards place her husband in a factory in Württemberg at the age of sixteen.
9. 9The GraveSix names on one family plot, and one of them is not buried in it.
10. 10The StonesNames read off photographs of the memorials themselves.
11. 11The PicturesRegister scans, gravestones and portraits that the GEDCOM never carried.
12. 12The FacesA contact sheet to be shown to the family: every picture attached to a name in the tree.
13. 13What They DidThe tree records a trade for sixteen people; the registers record one for almost everybody.
14. 14Port PirieOne man left Senj for a lead-smelting town on the far side of the world, and his name changed on arrival.
15. 15The Other EmigrationYoungstown, Johnstown, Brooklyn, Leadville, Calumet and Chicago: records that were never looked for.
16. 16The Catch AbroadEvery record the commercial indexes returned for the family's emigrant surnames.

The whole book: Contents