Senj
Senj made this family and then stopped being able to feed it. Every occupation in the record — day labourer, porter, sailor, cigarette-factory hand — is a consequence of one decision taken in 1873.
Senj sits under the Velebit at the head of the Senjska draga, where the bura comes off the mountain hard enough to stop traffic. It is one of the oldest towns on the Croatian coast, and for four hundred years it was a place of consequence: a free royal town, a bishopric, a Habsburg military port, and the home of the Uskoks.
The Uskoks and Nehaj
When the Ottomans took Klis in 1537, its defenders — refugees the Slavs called uskoci, “the ones who jumped in” — fell back to Senj. The Habsburgs put them on the frontier payroll and let them raid. They became, depending on who was writing, a Christian bulwark or a pirate confederacy; in practice both, because Vienna paid them irregularly and they took the difference out of Venetian and Ottoman shipping.
In 1558 the captain Ivan Lenković built Nehaj on the hill above the town, using stone from the churches and monasteries outside the walls so that a besieger would have nothing to shelter behind. It was the Uskok headquarters until the Uskok War of 1615–18 ended with Venice and Vienna agreeing to disperse them inland. Nehaj still stands over the town, and it is the thing everyone photographs.
1873: the railway goes to Rijeka
Senj's whole nineteenth century was built on being the port where the Lika highlands met the sea. Timber, wool and livestock came down the roads from the interior and went out through Senj. Then the Karlovac–Rijeka railway opened in 1873 and did not come here.
The traffic followed the rails to Rijeka. Senj's port trade collapsed, and it never recovered. This is the single most important economic fact in this archive, because the family's recorded work sits directly downstream of it:
| Toma Blažević 1838–1907 | Nadničar — day labourer. Born at Br. 114, Smokvica Krmpotska; died at Senj and buried there. A man who came off the mountain to a town that had no work left. |
|---|---|
| Josip “Joso” Papić 1857–1939 | Trhonoša, bremenar, gostioničar — load-carrier, porter, innkeeper. The first two are the same job twice: carrying other people's goods on your back for a fee. The third is what he made of it. |
| Ljubomir Blažević 1892–1966 | Mornar — sailor. Born at Rijeka, not Senj — the family had already followed the work to the port that got the railway. He came back, and died at Senj. |
| Milka Papić 1886–1971 | Supervisor of workers at the cigarette factory, Tvornica duhana, Senj. Her sister-in-law Anka Blažević (1893–1953) was a radnica — a floor worker — at the same factory. |
A town of incomers, and the register says where from
Page 107 of the Senj baptisms holds eight entries from 1885. Four of them — half — record not a mother's trade but the parish she came from.
| Katarina Rončević | of Jablanac, down the coast |
|---|---|
| Katarina Štimac | of the parish of Crnoluška |
| Roža Babić | of the parish of Starigrad |
| Tonka Papić | rodj. Prpić iz Krivogputa — from Krivi Put |
This archive already knows Antonija Prpić is of Krivi Put, because her 1859 baptism is there. Here the Senj register says it too — twenty-six years later and a mountain away, a town clerk recording that this woman is not from the town.
So the family's arrival in Senj was not unusual. It was what Senj was. The Blaževići coming down from Smokvica and the Papići from Selce are not exceptions to a settled population — they are the population, and the book was recording it in half its entries.
The same page gives the fathers' trades: nadcestar (road overseer), bremenar (porter), težak (labourer), mornar (sailor), with trgovac and postolar among the godparents. What they did →
The tobacco factory
The Habsburg tobacco monopoly was extended to Croatia, Slavonia and the Military Frontier by an imperial patent of 20 November 1850, effective from March 1851, and state tobacco factories followed across the region. Senj's was one of them, and for two generations of this family it was the employer of last resort in a town with no port trade — women's work, indoors, waged, and steady in a way that carrying sacks was not.
After the Second World War the Senj factory was liquidated and its cigarette-making machinery was transferred to the tobacco factory at Rovinj. The tree records the building's later life exactly: the address is given as Ul. Stjepana Radića 4, 53270 Senj, with the note that it “now is a textile factory”.
7–8 October 1943
After Italy's capitulation Senj became one of the most important Partisan ports on the Adriatic, and German aircraft bombed the town and harbour over two days in October 1943. Thirty local residents were killed and about half the town was destroyed to its foundations; only a quarter of the buildings were still habitable.
Hedviga was seventeen. Her aunt's husband died on the second day. Senj, 1943 →
And then the boats out
A port town with no port sends its people away. This tree records the destinations plainly: Port Pirie in South Australia, where Ivan Žubrinić went about 1884 and where his descendants still are; Buenos Aires, where Hedviga's cousin Oskar Kosina landed off the Philippa on 9 October 1947 and died on 15 January 1954; and then, two generations later, Africa — Hedviga to Rhodesia and then to Johannesburg in April 1975.
September 2026 — the by-name becomes the surname, in two documents
This archive has argued for years that Papa is a nadimak attached to Antić. Two Senj entries, twenty-eight years apart, show it stop being one.
1 November 1857 — the baptism of ahnentafel 6, in the prose register:
Anno Domini 1857 die 1 Nbris. Ego Joannes Tušić, cooperator loci, baptizavi Josephum, filium legitimum, Romano-Catholicum, Joannis Papa et ejus uxoris Mathiæ Pilipić. Levantibus Patrinis … ✝ Michaël Stipančić.
The date matches the tree to the day, the parents are named, and the godfather signs with a cross.
3 May 1885 — the same man's marriage, entry 5:
Josip Papić, bremenar, of Senj, aged 27 — son of «Juraj Papa, težak, i Matia rodjena Pilipić»
Read them together. The father is Joannis Papa in 1857 and Juraj Papa in 1885 — and never Antić in either. The son is already Papić. The by-name has displaced the surname outright in the parish register by 1857 and hardened into a new surname within one generation, and both halves of that are now documents rather than an argument. The by-names →
The marriage also names ahnentafel 7's parents — Ivan Perpić and Luce — which settles ahnentafel 14 and gives 15 her given name from a register.