What They Did

Both the Latin and the Croatian parish forms carry a conditio or stalež column, and the priest filled it in — for the parents, for the godparents, and for the witnesses. It is the only place in these documents where a person is described by something other than their name and their kin.

This archive had been reading past it. Where an occupation surfaced it went into prose on one person's page and nowhere else, which meant it could not be counted or compared. The comparison is the point.

Two families, two worlds, twenty miles apart

These families are twenty miles apart and they married each other. Hedviga descends from both — from a household that held the keys to the Otočac gaol and from a household whose head was entered, at his death, as a man who worked by the day. The Frontier →

The offices did not travel

Australian electoral rolls give an occupation and a street address for every adult, every roll year, from 1913. For the branch that went to Port Pirie that turns a family this archive knew only by name into a family it knows by trade — and the answer is not what the Croatian record would lead you to expect.

In Lika these people held offices — warden of the forest, master of the watch, keeper of the prison, and a rank the register writes as Confiniarius. At Port Pirie, two generations later, they are labourers and moulders in a lead smelter.

The offices did not travel. What a Frontier household held was a position in a system, and the system did not exist in South Australia — so the family arrived as what the smelter needed. The one man who climbed is Arthur Leslie, an ironmoulder, which is a skilled trade and not a labouring one.

Two small things the addresses give away. Edward Malcolm at 65 Queen Street and Keith Leo at 9 Queen Street are on the same street in 1939, and Solomontown is where their father died. And John William and Catherine are at the same Broken Hill address in 1913 — a mining town four hundred kilometres inland, which is where the family went before Port Pirie held them.

Four worlds, not one list

With 115 occupations in hand rather than sixteen, something shows that a list cannot: this family's branches did not live the same kind of life. The same tree reaches into a chartered Adriatic port, a stretch of the Military Frontier, a set of hill villages, and a factory town — and the words the registers use in each are not comparable with the words they use in the others.

79 of the 115 rows carry a place specific enough to group; the remaining 36 do not, and are left out of this section rather than guessed at.

Karlobag — the port town 2

A chartered town on the Adriatic. Merchants, master mariners, and a parish register full of Dominus honorifics, a Pro-Colonel, a Captain and a Baron von Holstein.

The Military Frontier — Otočac and its villages 11

Not civilians. Every adult male is enrolled, and the register records the rank or the office rather than a trade: Confiniarius, keeper of the watch, forest warden, keeper of the prison.

The hill villages — Krmpote, Smokvica, Krivi Put 9

Seljaci and težaci, almost without exception. Where a register gives anything else it is usually the household, not the man.

Senj — the town and the tobacco factory 34

A working port with a state tobacco monopoly. The register grades the factory workforce from radnica to nadglednica, and the town trades run from bremenar to gostioničar.

Port Pirie and Whyalla — the lead smelter 23

The same families, fifty years and half a world later, in the Australian electoral rolls. Two trades and no third: foundry — ironmoulder, moulder — and labourer. Not one office, not one rank, not one Dominus. The women's column is what the Commonwealth roll asked for rather than a trade, and is kept as it stands.

The Frontier register asks a different question

This is not a difference of wealth. It is a difference in what the document was for.

On the Military Frontier the column headed conditio is filled with an office — Confiniarius, Vigiliarum Magister, Silvarum Custos, Custos Carcerum, vicedecurio. These men are enrolled soldiers who farm; the register records their place in the establishment, not their trade.

At Karlobag the same column carries mercator and Cammeralis nauclerus — merchant, chamber shipmaster — in a parish whose godparents include a Giustiniani, a Pro-Colonel and a Baron von Holstein.

In the hill villages it says seljak or težak and very little else, and often describes the household rather than the man.

At Senj it becomes an industrial hierarchy — radnica · vratar · mašinista · meštar · nadglednica · nadčinovnik — because there is a state tobacco monopoly to be graded into.

Read off the registers

Each row cites the entry it came from. Nothing here is inferred, and where a word is ambiguous it is given as written rather than translated away.

And the 39 the tree carries

Sixteen people out of 1,833. Mostly twentieth-century, mostly from family memory rather than a document — and worth showing beside the register rows so the difference in kind is visible.

Senj, 1886 — and a man with two trades

The Senj baptisms for 1886 hold Milka Lucija Papić, born 9 October. Her father is entered trhonoša — a porter, a carrier of burdens.

A year earlier, on the page that records her sister Marija, the same man is entered težak — a labourer. Two words for one man, twelve months apart, written by two different chaplains. Neither is wrong; the register is describing what he was doing, not awarding him a title, and this is what it looks like when a man has no trade to name.

And the ten entries around hers are a cross-section of the town that the Senj page has never been able to show:

Three royal officials and a gymnasium professor, on the same page as two labourers and two porters. Senj in 1886 is not a poor town — it is a town with an administrative class, and this family is not in it. That is a sharper statement than “they were poor”, and it comes from one opening of one book.

Two details worth keeping. One family on the page is entered grčko-istočne — Greek-Eastern, Orthodox — in a register otherwise wholly Roman Catholic. And three of the ten mothers are rodj. Prpić or Perpić: Nedela, Ana, and Tonka. Krivi Put women were marrying into Senj in numbers.

Senj, 1885 — a town of incomers

Page 107 of the Senj baptisms holds eight entries. The stalež column is filled in for every married father on it, and the triage that called the Senj book thin was wrong.

The godparents on the same page are given trgovac (merchant) and postolar (shoemaker). A road overseer, a porter, a labourer, a sailor, a merchant and a shoemaker — that is a working port, described in one opening.

How the records describe women

Three conventions, from three kinds of document, and they do not agree about what a woman's entry is for.

Why this matters for the counting. Of the 115 occupations here, the ones attached to women are mostly not occupations at all — they are relationships or form-fields. Any statement this archive makes about what this family did is therefore a statement about its men, and should be read that way until the tobacco-factory records are looked for.

What this is not, yet

• It is not a survey. Thirty-eight records against 1,833 people. Every one had to be read off a scan by hand, and twenty-seven register pages this archive already holds have not been read for this column at all.
• It is the form of the register, not its language. This was assumed the other way round and checked on 13 September 2026. The ruled tabular books carry a conditio column — Otočac 1834, 1835 and 1845 give a trade or a rank to every parent and every godparent, which is why almost everything above comes from three pages. The prose books have no column at all: Karlobag 1754–1781 runs as continuous Latin sentences, and six of the eight Latin documents this archive holds are those. Reading them for occupations is wasted effort. Croatian tabular books sit in between — Novi Vinodolski names the parents' trade but usually not the godparents', and Sv. Jakov Krmpote mostly writes seljaci and stops.
• Women are recorded three different ways, and only one of them is work. See below.

The Frontier → Žubrinić → The Hungarian press → What has been searched →