The Blažević Archive
What this archive stands on

Sources

A MyHeritage tree of 15,643 people, a set of Croatian parish registers reachable through FamilySearch, and national surname statistics. Their weights are very different.

1,833
published people
355
carry a source string of some kind
719
carry a citation reaching an actual register image

“Their weights are very different” is the whole page, so it is recorded as a field rather than left to the reader to infer from paragraph length. Every source below is filed under one of six weights, and the order they appear in is the order this archive trusts them.

9 of the 12 link to the thing itself, 1 is paper and says where. The two that carry nothing carry nothing on purpose, and each says why in its own note.

State record — a civil register kept by a government

The civil birth extract for Ivan Defranceski, 1951

Municipality of Senj — recovered from the MyHeritage media library Register-of-births extract, sworn English translation

One document in this archive is a state record rather than a church one or a tree one: the Yugoslav register-of-births extract for Ivan Defranceski, born at Senj Hospital on 17 December 1951 — Senj registration 152/1954, issued 27 April 1954 over the seal of the Municipality of Senj.

It confirms Hedviga's own birth date and place from outside the family tree, and it carries three things the tree does not.

Held. A scan in the MyHeritage media library, attached to Hedviga's profile and absent from the GEDCOM export; the register itself is held by the Municipality of Senj

The certificate → →

Parish register — a parish register kept by a priest

Croatia, Church Books, 1516–1994

Hrvatski državni arhiv, Zagreb — digitised by FamilySearch Roman Catholic parish registers (Rimokatolička crkva), Latin and later Croatian, kept by the parish priest www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2040054

Citations in this tree reach specific images in specific volumes. A single baptismal entry typically gives the child, the date, the parents, the house number and the godparents — which is how this archive knows that Milka Papić's godparents were Josip Glavičić and Ivka Filipović, and that Antonija Prpić's were Lucas and Anna Tomljanović.

  • Senj — Births 1756–1858, Births 1878–1894, Marriages 1859–1920
  • Krivi Put — Births 1847–1884
  • Otočac — Births 1834–1846
  • Karlobag — the Pilipić and Uroda entries
A caution on the catalogue. One christening citation in this tree — for Nicolaus Žubrinić, Otočac, 1834 — is labelled by FamilySearch as “Osekovo, Belovár-Körös Megye, Hungary records”. The image group and page are right; the catalogue heading is wrong. Anyone re-searching by place name will not find it.

What has been opened → →

Family tree — somebody's genealogy, however carefully made

The spine: one MyHeritage tree

MyHeritage — exported as GEDCOM on 8 September 2026 Family tree, 15,643 people and 4,777 families www.myheritage.com

It is the structure of this archive and the origin of nearly every date. Within it, individual people cite other trees — Geni World Family Tree, Defranceski Family Site, Boras Web Site, Grlica Web Site, Janicic, Marko Karic rodoslov.

One export, six archives. This is not a Blažević export — it is the whole tree, covering the Defranceski, Lerena, Taylor, Barry, Blažević and Booyzen families, and the sibling archives are built from the same file. So a fact contradicted here is contradicted in all of them, and a re-export refreshes all of them at once. Checked 10 September 2026: still current, and nothing here depends on a newer one.

Many notes carry a SmartCopy stamp from Geni, dated 2014–2017. That records when a record was copied between websites, not when anything was verified. The build strips this boilerplate from the displayed notes and keeps the human prose.
Background — history and statistics — true of a place, not of a person

Forebears

forebears.io Surname incidence and density by country and Croatian county forebears.io

Built on national registers; good for orders of magnitude, not a census.

Used here → →

The Croatian Military Frontier

Wikipedia and the standard literature History of the Karlovac Generalate, the Otočac captaincy and its regiment en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Military_Frontier

The administrative world the Žubrinići and Urode lived inside, and the reason a baptism enters a father as Confiniarius rather than by a trade.

Used here → →

The Jews of Rhodes

Tierra prometida: Jews from Rhodes in the Belgian Congo and Southern Rhodesia, 1910s–1960s; the Rhodes Jewish Museum; Yad Vashem Community history and deportation lists www.rhodesjewishmuseum.org

The July 1944 deportation, and the roughly 2,000 who had already left for the Congo and Rhodesia — the two possibilities question 3 stands between.

Used here → →

Croatians in South Australia

SA History Hub; Port Pirie smelter history Regional and industrial history sahistoryhub.history.sa.gov.au

Why a Žubrinić from Lika is in a smelter town on Spencer Gulf at all.

Used here → →

The German bombing of Senj, 1943

Croatian scholarship (Njemačko bombardiranje Senja 1943.) Local wartime history hrcak.srce.hr

The dates, the casualty figures and the proportion of the town destroyed.

Linked to Hrčak, the repository the scholarship sits in. The individual article (Njemačko bombardiranje Senja 1943.) is not identified here, so the link reaches the repository and not the paper.

Used here → →

Consulted, and rejected — consulted, and not relied on

An automated surname-origin website

Not named here, because naming it would send readers to it Generated etymology

Consulted for Žubrinić and not relied on anywhere here. It offers two unrelated etymologies in the same article, places the name in Dalmatia when its Croatian density is highest in Lika-Senj, and names a “Petar Žubrinić, 18th-century Croatian ban” who did not exist — the bans of that century were Pálffy, Drašković, Eszterházy, Branyng, Batthyány, Nádasdy, Esterházy, Balassa and Erdődy.

Deliberately unlinked. This row exists to record that the site was consulted and rejected, and its own holder line gives the reason there is no link: naming it would send readers to it.

The full check → →

Not consulted — not consulted, and this page says so

Never consulted, and it shows

Croatian and South African civil registration; Zimbabwean immigration; Mirogoj cemetery; the Yugoslav war victims register The records this archive has not obtained

No death certificate has been obtained for Hedviga (Johannesburg 2001) or Ivan (Senj 1995), and no extract for the 1920 Senj marriage. No South African or Rhodesian immigration file. No Yugoslav war victims register search for Oto. No Mirogoj cemetery record for Antonija Prpić. These are the next things to do.

Not a source and so not linkable — this row is the list of records this archive has NOT obtained, kept here so the gap stays visible.

Open questions → →

Until September 2026 this page said that no civil registration document underpinned anything here. That is no longer true — the 1951 birth extract came out of the MyHeritage media library, where it had been sitting all along, attached to Hedviga's profile and absent from the GEDCOM export.