Port Pirie

The first of them is Joannes / Juan / Ivan / Ive / John Žubrinić — a man carried in this tree under five versions of one given name — born 1860 and died 1930 at Port Pirie, South Australia. His eldest recorded child is born there in 1885, which puts his arrival at about 1884.

From that child onward the surname in the register is Zubrinich. Not once does it revert. The names →

Why Port Pirie

Port Pirie is not a random landfall. Smelting began there in 1889, and it grew into one of the largest lead smelters in the world — heavy, dangerous, continuous work that paid, and that hired men without English. Croatians began arriving in South Australia from the Dalmatian islands in the 1890s, and many of them went to Port Pirie and Broken Hill. Further groups came with the economic depression in Dalmatia and Međimurje between 1910 and 1913, and again after the political unrest of 1922.

The family's later moves confirm the pattern exactly: this tree records Zubrinich deaths at Broken Hill and Whyalla — the silver-lead mine and the steelworks. They followed the metal.

The Australian records in this tree

24 people with an Australian birth or death place. The infant deaths — Robert Emmett in 1888, Susannah in 1889, Stanley in 1897 — are the ordinary arithmetic of a smelter town.

And then the newspapers, which had them all along

Everything above comes from indexes. On 27 September 2026 this archive was given a Trove key by the National Library of Australia. 74 articles have now been read at the page and contain the name, between 1893 and 1955 — and they turn a row of dates into a life.

Family Notices, which is a different kind of evidence entirely

Everything above is social — a boxing card, a football team-sheet, a council minute. Trove carries a separate, narrower category, Family Notices — births, deaths, marriages, engagements, in memoriam. Run against it alone: 231 hits, and 50 of the first 50 fetched genuinely contain the name — a hit rate the general search never comes close to, because a family notice says a surname once and means it.

And this category does something the boxing card cannot: it names people this archive's own tree does not have, married to people it already does.

And Family Notices for Broken Hill gave a fourth man a whole family

New South Wales was never queried at the Family Notices level, only the general search. Run: 29 hits, 28 of 29 fetched genuinely contain the name, all of them Broken Hill.

Leonard James Zubrinić (1894–1985) — the WWI Staff-Sergeant Farrier this archive found in its first sweep — is in this tree with a birth at Port Pirie, a death at Broken Hill, and nothing in between. Family Notices, read across thirty-two years and three addresses, gives the whole of it.

How this branch joins the family

Not yet proved. Ivan Žubrinić of Port Pirie is in the tree, and he is of the right name, the right town and the right generation to be close kin of Tereza Žubrinić (1867–1931), Hedviga's grandmother. But the document that joins them — a shared father in the Otočac or Senj baptismal register — has not been produced here. Given how rare the name is (about 312 bearers on earth), the relationship is very likely. “Very likely” is not “shown”.

And they did not only go to Australia

This page exists because the family knew about Port Pirie. Searching the unanglicised spelling — Zubrinic rather than Zubrinich — turns up a second, entirely separate emigration: to Youngstown, Johnstown and Brooklyn, and a Kalanj emigration to the mining towns of Colorado, Michigan and Illinois.

Nobody in this family knew about any of it, and the records were never scarce — they were simply never looked for, because one spelling was searched and the other was not. The other emigration →

Nor only to South Australia

Every one of the 24 Australians above is in South Australia or, later, at Broken Hill. That is the whole Australian story this archive has told. Queensland's own historical index was searched for the first time on 13 September 2026, and it holds one Zubrinich.

Stanley Joseph Zubrinich married Joanna Marian Josephine Clowes in Queensland on 15 November 1947 — registration 1947/B/15067. He is not in this tree, and no Stanley Joseph is.

A candidate, not a relative. Nothing here shows how he joins. But two things make him worth the next hour somebody spends. The surname is vanishingly rare, and the anglicised -ich ending is the specific spelling this family adopted on arrival at Port Pirie and never once reverted from — so a Zubrinich in Australia is far more likely to be one of these than to be a separate landing. And the given name is the family's: a Stanley was born at Port Pirie in 1896 and died there in 1897, and these are people who re-used the names of children they lost. A Stanley Joseph marrying in 1947 would have been born around the 1920s, which is exactly the generation of Terrence Joseph (1924) and Maurice William (1922). His marriage certificate would name his parents and settle it.

The nulls are worth recording with it. Queensland's register covers births to 1926, marriages to 1951 and deaths to 1996, and across that span it holds no Zubrinic, no Blazevic and no Subrinich. The three Blazevich entries are a Queensland household of Thomas Bogin Blazevich, who married Jane Chambers in 1940, and are unconnected to anyone here.

The graves, and who lies in them together

This archive had never used a cemetery index. Find a Grave holds 72 Zubrinich memorials and not one of them is in Croatia — twenty-nine at Port Pirie, thirteen at Enfield in Adelaide, six at Timmins in Ontario, four at Whyalla, two at Broken Hill, two in Pennsylvania, one in California. The whole of this surname's recorded burial is emigration.

Sixteen of the 72 are people on this site. The other 56 are not, and the plot numbers say who they were: a lot number is a household claim, and it is one a parish register cannot make.

Six dates disagree, and five of them are not disagreements

Where a memorial matches somebody here, the dates were compared rather than merged. Five of the six differences run the same way — Find a Grave one, two or ten days later than the tree, never earlier. That is not a conflict. It is the burial. A cemetery records the interment, a parish records the death, and the gap between them is the funeral.

The sixth is real. Leonard James died on 25 March — both sources agree to the day — but the tree says 1985 and the Broken Hill cemetery says 1983. Same day, same month, two years apart, which is the shape of a typed digit rather than a misremembered date. This archive does not know which is right. His headstone would settle it, and Find a Grave has a photograph of it.

And one name closes a question this page opened. Find a Grave records Stanley J Zubrinich, a veteran, died 8 July 2001, at the South Australian Garden of Remembrance — which is very likely the Stanley Joseph Zubrinich who married in Queensland in 1947 above, and puts him back in South Australia at the end. Still a candidate, not a relative: nothing yet names his parents.