Archive for the ‘croatia’ Category
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – BiH – is one of the few remaining places in Europe which are uncharted and unfamiliar to family historians in diaspora. It is also little travelled by tourists, at least beyond Sarajevo and Mostar and the important Catholic pilgrimage site at Međugorje. Visually the country is immensely stimulating but not immediately understood – it takes a few days to gather and process impressions and thoughts and make some sense of what you are experiencing.
Earlier this month I travelled from the Montenegro border crossing at Šćepan Polje, via Brod, Kiseljak and Vitez to Travnik, then back east through Zenica, Visoko, Sarajevo, Rogatica, Višegrad and beyond to the Serbian border at Kotroman. The most striking visual element is of course the prominence in the landscape of mosques (or džamije in what some guidebooks now euphemistically call “the local language”) and Muslim cemeteries. The latter are often sited on hillsides. The slim white grave-markers or nišani are elegant and, while many are simple and unadorned, others may be topped with a stylised representation of a turban or some other symbol such as a coffee pot. Islam requires prompt burial of the deceased and four or five sample grave-markers often lean together outside the cemetery ready to be purchased and put to use. The clusters of sleek gravestones reminded the childhood reader in me of the Hattifnattar in Tove Janson’s Moomin books.
The country is now divided into different entities, with Republika Srpska largely Serbian and the Federation segmented into a number of different cantons which are predominantly Croat and/or Bosniak (or Bošnjak – as most Bosnian Muslims prefer to be known since the War). However, it is incorrect to think of the country as having been neatly partitioned along religious or ethnic lines, and there is still much more mixing of population than media reports tend to suggest. The notion of cantons has been foisted upon Bosnia as if this borrowing from Switzerland could magic up the many privileges of the Swiss with their Catholic and Protestant religious, and French, German, Italian and Romansh language, harmonies, and their laissez-faire affluent burgher lifestyles. Reality in Bosnia is more complicated and not amenable to facile solutions imposed from outside.
But there is of course much ongoing outside influence. In predominantly Bosniak towns, the flow of money from Turkey and Saudi Arabia is apparent in the form of banks, airline advertisements, and investment in new mosques and medresas. Bosniaks have become re-Islamicised; or, rather, the young are embracing a Muslim identity that would have been foreign to the majority of their parents, grandparents and great grandparents in Tito’s Yugoslavia and even before WW2.
Meanwhile, in most towns in Bosnia the locals seem to have arrived at a pragmatic accommodation with one another’s faiths and nationalities. Mixed marriages were common throughout the former Yugoslavia and the bigger the town the larger their proportion. In the small town of Vitez, the population of which is roughly evenly balanced between Croats and Bosniaks, I ate lunch at the home of a Croat who had married a Slovenian and whose half-Russian aunt had married a Serb. This is the complex reality of Yugoslavia then and of BiH still.
The prospects for genealogical research in Bosnia and Hercegovina vary by place. If records survive, and were not destroyed during the various conflicts of the 20th century, it is usually possible to research Bosnian genealogies if one’s ancestors were Croats, Serbs, Sephardic Jews or, for that matter, Austrian Germans or other Imperial staff resident in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the period of Austro-Hungarian rule. The situation with respect to Bosnian Muslim ancestry is less straightforward, while Gypsy family history is regarded as all but impossible – registration of vital events by Gypsies was rare before the mid- or late 20th century and is unlikely to be complete even today.
Bluebird Research may be able to help you if you are in need of professional assistance with your family history research in Bosnia and is always pleased to hear from those investigating their ancestry in Bosnia. Please feel free to contact us for advice or an opinion on the prospects of success and the likely costs of research.
The Austro-Hungarian, or Habsburg, Empire, also known as the Dual Monarchy, collapsed and fractured during WW1 and new nation states emerged from its ruins, including of course the modest Central European state of Austria itself.
It is difficult to argue against today’s received opinion that empires are bad things and that it is wrong for one people to rule over another. In practice, though, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire was largely benign. It is true that from time and time, and perhaps particularly although by no means exclusively in areas under Hungarian rule, emerging nationalisms were suppressed; sometimes this was by show of force, but by the late 19th century the Empire had become largely a bureaucratic organism.
The great elegist of the Empire, Joseph Roth, does not attribute the collapse of Austro-Hungary to the rise of Yugoslav and Romanian and Czechoslovak nationalism, but to the overweening pan-Germanic nationalism which was to have such devastating consequences for Europe.
In his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by John Hoare, pub Granta, 1999), the character Count Chojnicki — a cipher for Roth himself — prophesied before the outbreak of WW1 that “Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy”1. “It is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Boryslaw2, the horse traders from the Bacska3, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing our national anthem “Gott Erhalte”, while the Germans in the Empire sing German martial and chauvinist tunes. Similarly, the narrator and protagonist, Trotta, writes of the “tragic love which the Crown Lands4 bore to Austria”:
“The gypsies of the Puszta5, the Huzulen6 of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian7 tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna8, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei9 in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge10, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia11: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria.”
After WW1, reflecting on the demise of Austro-Hungary and the mediocrity to which defeated Austria had sunk, Chojnicki bemoans “the fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen… It was not our Czechs, our Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart.”
- Nibelungen: mythological nonsense popularised by Wagner
- Boryslaw: Boryslav, a small town now in Ukraine
- Bacska: properly Bačka, a region now largely in northern Serbia
- Crownlands: provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Puszta: the steppes of the Alföld, the great Hungarian plain
- Huzulen: the Hutsuls, a Ruthenian or western Ukrainian people
- Swabian: 18th century German settlers in the Banat in northern Serbia and adjacent Romania
- Osman Sibersna: a phrase not properly translated into English from the original German language die osmanische Sibersna but presumably referring to Ottomans of Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Hanakei: the Moravian people of the Haná region around the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic
- Erzgebirg: the Krušné Hory mountain range, also now in the Czech Republic
- Podolia: here western Podolia is meant, being the region around the city of Ternopil‘, now in Ukraine
When researching Croatian family history in Istria, one should not be surprised to find that names, both Christian names and surnames, do not appear in their expected forms. Just as in the diaspora a name may be changed to make it more pronounceable to an English speaker or to be typed on an English-language keyboard lacking the diacritical marks of Croat (so that Babić becomes Babich or Babitch, and Blažević becomes Blazhevich), so names were changed in Istria under Italian and earlier under Austro-Hungarian rule. The difference is that, under Italian rule, such changes were not always made voluntarily by the subject but imposed upon him or her by the state or the church.
The Italians occupied Istria in November 1918 and within a few years had started to suppress Croatian (and of course Slovenian) national culture. In October 1919, religious education in Croat was forbidden in schools and measures begun to encourage parish priests to use Italian rather than the local vernacular in church services. In October 1923 a diktat was issued closing all Croat-language schools; they could only re-open if education was conducted in Italian. In January 1929, Croat-language newspapers were shut down. Most pertinently for our purposes, in November 1928 parents were forbidden to baptise their children using Slavic names, so in baptism registers from that date one should expect to see only Italian equivalents of Slavic names (unless the local priest defied the ruling). From April 1927, surnames, especially those which Italians regarded as having Italian or Latin roots, or claimed to have been translated from Italian and given Slavic suffixes, were to be italianised as well, so that Babić might become Babicci, and Horvat became Crevato. In April 1936 an official publication was issued prescribing the way in which names should be changed.
These are but the legal manifestations of the pervasive creeping suppression of Croatian nationality in Istria during the inter-War period of Italian rule. Of course, some Croatians emigrated to the new Yugoslavia or to America, while a minority consciously opted for Italian culture. It can be expected that most, especially away from the larger towns, simply wanted to be able to get on with their lives and lived quietly, passively accepting the italianisation of the external forms around them and keeping their essential Croatian national identity intact. Those in positions of authority – such as teachers and priests – doubtless tried to continue using Croat where they could but switched to Italian if they had to. Roman Catholic parish registers – the baptism, marriage and burial registers – and the wonderfully informative status animarum documents, encapsulating a wealth of information about a family, usually evidence the pressure to italianise, and you should expect to see Italian spellings of names. However, this was seldom standardised, so that a single family surname can be rendered in different ways at different times. This demands constant alertness on behalf of genealogists, especially when surnames showed more significant alteration than a tinkering with the surname suffix. For example, one can expect a Croatian surname beginning with a K to be changed to a C, a name beginning with a Cu or a Ču sometimes changing to a Z depending on the spelling convention required when writing it in Italian, a name starting with Krm- or Krt- acquiring a vowel, and so on.
If you have roots in Istria and are interested in knowing more about your Croatian family history and ancestry, please contact us and we would be happy to provide you with an assessment of the research that can be done and an estimate of costs.
Many of the towns on the coast of Istria had Italian populations, but the rural population was predominantly Croatian. Here the traditional peasant society survived until about 1930. By “peasant society” is meant a largely self-sufficient farming or smallholding community, with a relatively limited cash economy, still living close to the land and according to cultural and religious norms which had evolved relatively little over the centuries. This is not to say that outlooks and experience were necessarily narrow, as we shall see in a moment when we look at emigration.
For a family historian with ancestral roots in Istria, it is important to remind oneself regularly of the larger political context, as this affected many of the events in even the smallest communities. Istria was part of Austro-Hungary from 1814 until the outbreak of WW1; Italian from 1918 until 1943; and of course Yugoslav thereafter. The Austro-Hungarian era in Istria is sometimes regarded with some nostalgia. Croatia was subject to Hungarian rule, it is true, but in the villages of Istria there was peace and no interference in daily life. This was not the case during the Italian occupation, when the peninsula was subject to increasing attempts at Italianisation – for example, Italian was made the sole language of government, the courts and business, while from 1930 there was pressure upon Croatians to Italianise their names.
These political changes affected emigration from Istria too. In general, there was restricted cultivable land, poor soil and limited opportunity. Accordingly, many peasants became part-time fishermen or sailors – often becoming cabin boys at a very young age (11 or 12) and working at sea until land was made available in the village by inheritance upon the death of the father. Others migrated elsewhere in Europe or to USA to find work and earn money – this could be temporary, during which they remitted money home before returning themselves, or permanent if they decided to settle.
During the Austrian era, the ports of Trieste and Rijeka (Fiume in Italian) attracted many migrants from across Istria. When these ports became Italian, they were cut off from their former natural hinterland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and started to stagnate. This meant that, although Istrian villagers were still residing in the same country as the ports, their opportunities beyond the village began to narrow. This problem was compounded by the Italians making emigration more difficult and the US imposing post-War immigration quotas. In consequence, the long slow decline of Istrian villages can be traced to the 1920s.
The Catholic parish of Sveta Lucija na Skitači is situated south of Labin (also known as Albona in Italian) on the eastern side of the Istrian peninsula. Three small Croatian villages within the parish – Drenje, Ravni and Škvaranska – were the focus of a detailed demographic study by Rudolph Bell*.
The parishioners in Sveta Lucija belonged to a relatively small number of extended families. Rudolph Bell calculated that the more than 500 individuals born in the parish between 1852 and 1914 carried only 15 surnames between them. The commonest names in each settlement were Blažina in Drenje, Škopac in Ravni, and Tomičić in Škvaranska. It should be noted that in the parish registers and status animarum the local surnames were often given in Italianised form, even prior to the Italian occupation: for example, Škopac may appear as Scopaz and even as Scopazzi.
Bell’s microhistory of this small society, using family reconstruction methodologies based on the same records which a genealogist would use when researching their family tree, produced some very interesting outcomes.
From birth and baptism records, he discovered a mid-summer dip in births, lasting from mid-June to mid-August. The annual peak was in April, with a lesser spike in September.
In a previous blog I wrote about seasonality in marriage, focusing on Eastern Orthodox communities in the Balkans. It is interesting that in a Roman Catholic country like Croatia the same basic patterns prevailed. Bell found the same influences – ecclesiastical and agricultural – producing the same peaks and troughs. In Sveta Lucija, marriages were rare both during Lent and Advent and throughout the high intensity workload on the land from April to September. Marriages tended to be celebrated after Martinje (St Martin’s Day) on 11th November, with a lesser peak in February before Lent.
Bell calculated that the mean age at marriage was 27 for men and 24 for women; that what demographers call premarital conception was responsible for between 20% and 25% of all first-born children of marriages; that women traditionally nursed their children for between 12 and 24 months as a form of contraception, and thereby were able to space their children by about three years; and that the average number of children per marriage fell from 6.25 in 1870 to 4.5 circa 1900 to 2.7 in 1930.
Family historians tend to concentrate on the particular, what is individual and specific to their own family. However, it is illuminating to place and understand one’s one family in a larger context and the work of demographers, anthropologists, local and social historians, and others is a great aid in this respect. Nor should the general reader be deterred – not all such works are academic and abstruse. Demographers may be statisticians but they illustrate their work with specific examples and also with anecdotal evidence gathered from personal interviews (oral history). For example, Rudolph Bell comments in passing that the unmarried couples of Sveta Lucija na Skitači sometimes used premarital conception to overcome parental disapproval of marriage – in other words, by presenting the parents with the fait accompli of the young woman’s pregnancy, they could precipitate a marriage which their parents had wanted to delay or prevent.
*See “The Transformation of a Rural Village: Istria 1870-1972”, published in Journal of Social History, vol 7 no 3 (1974).
For those American family historians with Serbian ancestry, it is important to understand that the immigrant ancestors did not necessarily come from within the borders of modern Serbia. By logical extension, when planning research from America back to Europe, it is crucial to identify correctly the place of origin to be able to successfully investigate your family tree.
Serbs settled in various parts of USA – including some quite unexpected places – during the second half of the 19th century. The first communities developed in cities such as San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Chicago. Many Serbs worked on the railroads and in factories, and in the mining and steel industries, settling in places like McKeesport and Steelton in industrial Pennsylvania. However, there were also sizeable settlements in towns as diverse and dispersed as Douglas (Alaska), Butte (Montana) and Angels Camp (California) which might not be front of mind when one thinks of “typical” immigrant centres of population. Their draw was the gold-rush.
So where did the early Serbian immigrants come from? Some came from Belgrade or across the Danube in Vojvodina but these were very much a minority. The more common sources for Serbian emigrants to USA were:
- Boka Kotorska (the Bay of Kotor) and the Budva district of what is today the coast of Crna Gora (Montenegro) – these Serbs were known collectively as Bokelji
- Dalmatia – prominent in the early settlement in San Francisco
- Herzegovina – particularly during periods when the Austrian occupation intensified
- Krajina, on the Bosnian side of the Croatia-Bosnia border – many settled in Pittsburgh in 1890s and 1900s
If you are interested in research assistance in Europe to help you with your Serbian family tree, please get in touch. We operate successfully throughout Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. We also work in Republika Srpska and elsewhere in Bosnia Hercegovina. Please contact us for an assessment and estimate of costs.
Miroslav Krleža, the Croatian writer, said in his 1952 speech “On the Freedom of Culture” that the greatest native cultural achievements of Yugoslavia (as opposed to those of, say, its Austrian or Turkish heritage) were Croatian church buildings, the frescoes of the Orthodox Church in Serbia and Macedonia, and the stećci of Bosnia.
The stećci or mramorovi are the monolithic carved headstones of the medieval Christian cemeteries of Bosnia and Hercegovina (at that date known as Hum). They span maybe 500 years from the 12th century onwards, pre-dating the Ottoman conquest and surviving it for a while. Most headstones in Europe are flat slabs, but the stećak is a massive solid monumental chunk of stone, inscribed with Cyrillic characters and sculpted in relief, some featuring human figures raising a huge right hand. It is not possible to describe the expressive power they exert, but that power is undeniable.
How exciting would it be to find one of these gravestones for an ancestor! Sadly, that it is unlikely to be. Although Ivan Lovrenović writes in Bosnia: A Cultural History (Saqi, 2001) that an estimated 60,000 stećci survive, and the names of the deceased and even of the stonemasons may be known, the chances of continuity of surname and of researching a family back to the 15th or 16th century in Bosnia are all but negligible. However, the names on the stećci must certainly have their descendants, both Christian and Muslim, and any visitor to their ancestral homeland in Bosnia or Hercegovina should take the time to drop by at one of these graveyards – known as mramorje or groblje – and experience their power. Lovrenović quotes an inscription on one stećak and one hopes that the sentiment will preserve this and all the other stećci for many generations to come:
Be blessed he who passes by And damned he who damages it.The Ottomans in the heyday of their rule permitted no church bells to be rung out to call the faithful to prayer, or to celebrate a marriage service or other festival. Bells were removed from churches already in existence at the time of Ottoman occupation and frequently the most convenient buildings were promptly converted for use as mosques and a minaret raised for the benefit of the occupying imperial power. Churches constructed during the years of Turkey-in-Europe were built with towers empty of bells.
All empires of all political persuasions wax and wane and the Ottomans became famous for being the proverbial “sick man of Europe” during the 19th century. Adjacent powers – the Austrian and the Russian – started to eye Ottoman territory hungrily and of course the subject peoples of the empire began to nibble away at its fabric during the long drive towards self-determination and independence.
The Austrians occupied Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878 and formally annexed it in 1908. However, even before the Austrians marched in, the Christians of Bosnia had begun to wrest concessions and compromises from the enfeebled Ottoman state. Sv Ive Krstitelja (St John the Baptist) at the Franciscan monastery of Kraljeva Sutjeska, between Sarajevo and Zenica, claims the distinction, in 1860, of being the first church in Bosnia to raise a belfry and be able to ring bells to call to prayer its worshippers (in this case, of course, Roman Catholics) while still under Ottoman rule.
Old travel books may possess a condescending tone and often seem ill-informed and romanticised, but they are still worth reading for the occasional and sometimes surprising insights they may give about the lives or at least the lands of our ancestors. Writers on the Balkans invariably viewed them as half-savage and as the gateway to the Orient or the boundary between contrasting civilisations.
Maude M Holbach’s Bosnia & Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings is largely what you might expect from a Western traveller writing a volume of that title in 1910: sometimes patronising, sometimes gushing, but sometimes also keenly observant and genuinely responsive to the beauty of the Bosnian landscape and its people.
Especially striking is a passing comment she makes about the Roman Catholics of Jajce:
“The Bosnians are very religious, with the childish simple superstitious religion of the Middle Ages, and the Catholic people of Jajce still cling to the custom of tattooing a cross on their hands and breast. It is said it was introduced in Turkish times to prevent apostacy, for no Christian thus marked with the sign of his faith could go over to Islam without enduring the painful operation of removing the tattooed portion of the skin.”
Holbach also describes how the Croatians of Jajce do not stand at worship but “kneel or sit cross-legged on the ground in Oriental fashion”, often on the prayer mats or even handkerchiefs which they bring with them to church. Other customs apparently borrowed from Muslim neighbours included touching the forehead to the ground in prayer and raising the palms of the hands upwards to receive the blessing.
If you read late 18th or 19th century writings in English about Dalmatia, you are likely to find references to Morlachs, or sometimes (using the Italian) the Morlacchi. The term seems to have been used derogatively rather than descriptively or, to be more accurate, the Morlachs tend to be described disparagingly. They are rough if not savage, inured to hardship, impoverished and imprudent, superstitious and ignorant. It is granted only that they a tough and martial people – and, as such, handy to the Austrian Empire defending its border against the Ottomans – and, equally handily, that they are extremely hospitable to travellers.
Morlachia is even marked on some period maps from the 16th and 17th centuries, being all that part of Dalmatia away from and parallel to the Adriatic coast. On a modern map of Croatia, Morlachia would correspond roughly to the strip of land running all the way from the hinterland of Senj down past Zadar and Split to Dubrovnik, but excluding the ports and the littoral itself. It is clear that they were thought of as unassimilated to the more urbane Mediterranean culture of the Dalmatian coast, with its strong Italian and seafaring connections.
They are described somewhat uncertainly and inconsistently by travellers as Greek Orthodox or maybe Greek Catholic, or perhaps Roman Catholic. It seems that, by the time of the curious and romantic Western travel writers, the people presented to them by their guides as Morlachs were simply the Slavic peasants of inner Dalmatia. The true historical Morlachs, a transhumant Vlach people, had long since assimilated to the Slavic population and/or moved west to Istria, but their name remained as a coatpeg on which to lazily hang up the contemporary inhabitants of the same land. You are unlikely to find the term Morlach used in modern scholarly works, except with reference to the true Vlach ethnic group. Nowadays, of course the descendants of the so-called “Morlachs” would presumably self-identify as Croats or Serbs, depending on their confession.
Hungary became an equal partner with Austria in the Dual Monarchy following the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise. Ironically, Hungary, which had been struggling for national self-determination and parity of recognition, then pursued policies which, in trying to consolidate its own nation state, failed to recognise properly the rights of the national minorities within its borders.
A policy of magyarisation was pursued vigorously, with view to welding all regions and peoples into a single nation state, as had been achieved in, for example, France. However, unlike France, Hungary contained within its border almost entire nations, such as the Croat and Slovak, and very significant populations of, for example, Romanians and Serbs living in regions very sparsely populated by Hungarians. The magyarisation project was therefore a doomed enterprise and its measures – for instance, to make Hungarian the exclusive official language of state and the language of instruction in schools, with church services to be held and parish registers kept in Hungarian – quickly aroused resentment and opposition.
The pressure upon non-Magyar Hungarian subjects to assimilate included pressure to change patently non-Hungarian or insufficiently Hungarian surnames. The legal process of change of name was simplified to the submitting of a petition. The fee was reduced from 5 forint to 50 krajcár (half a forint), meaning that poverty could not be pleaded as a good reason to retain one’s true name. These cheap “shilling names” were adopted by many among the professional and business classes. Robert Seton-Walsh, writing in his Racial Problems In Hungary of 1908, states that the “demoralising custom” of change of name “has played havoc with the family history of the Hungarian middle classes; and few countries will supply such a puzzle to the genealogist of the twenty-second century”.
Among the examples he gives:
the Oriental scholar Hermann Bamberger taking the name Ármin Vámbéry; the banker Eierstock taking the name Tőkőlyi; the historian Frankl taking the name Vilmos Fraknói; the ethnologist Hundsdorfer taking the name János Hunfalvy; the painter Lieb taking the name Mihály Munkácsy; the banker Löwenmuth taking the name Báthori; the poet Petrović taking the name Sándor Petőfi; the literary critic Franz Schedel taking the name Ferenc Toldy; and the politician Weinberger taking the name Soma Visontai.
The campaign intensified and was particularly directed at those in official positions, such as local authority civil servants, school teachers, railway employees and post office staff, with a clear implication that those not complying could at the very least not expect promotion within the service. Seton-Walsh also cites a document issued by the Royal Inspector of Schools showing exemplary official changes of name among teachers in Bihar county in 1881, designed to encourage colleagues to follow suit:
August Bruckenthal of Haimagi taking the name Bihari John Modora of Olosig (known as Érolaszi in Hungarian) taking the name Tinodi Nicholas Radovich of Cuzap (Középes in Hungarian) taking the name Keti
Urban German and Jewish Hungarians – who of course were not pushing for their own independent nation state as the Croats and Slovaks were – assimilated more readily than the rural populations of Romanians and Slavs and those family historians with German and Jewish roots from Hungary should be alert to the possibility of a change of name in the nineteenth century whenever research results are not achieved under the expected family name. However, anyone with ancestors from Hungary should be mindful of the change of name campaigns and their possible impact upon their family history research.
The Bunjevci do not feature much in Western commentaries on the complexities and controversies of the former Yugoslavia, which is complicated enough in ethnic and religious terms for most observers without going into granular detail.
Sometimes they are described as “Roman Catholic Serbs”, on the grounds that they are Catholic and (mostly) live within the borders of Serbia. However, most of the Bunjevci do not consider themselves to be ethnically Serbian. Because of their affiliation to Catholicism, over time a considerable number have come or been encouraged to think of themselves as Croats. However, a significant proportion of the people regard themselves simply as Bunjevci, a Slavic tribe with roots in Herzegovina who, some time in the 16th or 17th centuries, relocated to the Bačka region of Serbia (the land between the Dunav – or “Danube” – and Tisa rivers in the northern province of Vojvodina) and adjoining Hungary.
Today they form a minority population in the Serbian municipality of Subotica, especially around the village of Ljutovo and nearby Tavankut and Mala Bosna (“little Bosnia”). The villages sit in a wide open flat agricultural landscape under a massive sky with distant horizons. These villages are typical of those of Vojvodina – linear, built around a wide central road, which the traditionally low, well-spaced houses face narrow end on, with maybe an ancient stork’s nest on its traditional telegraph pole. In the yards there is likely to be an ambar, an open drying shed for maize cobs, or a hay rick, or maybe a small old tractor or an ancient bicycle. The villages have at least two names each: for example, Ljutovo is also known as Mérges in Hungarian. At either end of the village, there will be a yellow “city limits” road sign, giving the village name in Serbian in both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts and in Hungarian.
What is today the Croatian coast was the site of much controversy in the early 20th century, as Italy sought at various dates and under various pretences to claim it as part of the Italian state.
It is true that Italians lived in some numbers around the Istrian peninsula and along the Croatian littoral and the Dalmatian coast to the Bay of Kotor towards Albania. However, with a few exceptions, these were isolated coastal pockets in an otherwise Slavic country. For example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s 1910 census statistics show Italians forming a significant component of the population in Rijeka and Zadar but nowhere in the surrounding hinterland. Moreover, it seems that among those counted as Italians were what were known locally as talijanaši, those urban and more bourgeois Croatians with Italian leanings but with clearly Slavic names and antecedents. Many Croatians in Istria and ports such as Rijeka and Zadar spoke Italian, of course, with varying degrees of fluency, so as to be able to communicate with their neighbours in these ethnically mixed regions. However, some Croats also aspired to Italian culture and/or saw the use of the Italian language as a route to social mobility and prosperity during the years of the long 19th century, during which Hungarian domination suppressed the Croatian language and education and favoured the Italians. These were the talijanaši.
Despite there being an Italian majority in only some of the larger towns of the western seaboard of Istria, from Koper round to Pula, all of the peninsula was awarded to Italy following the carve-up of Austro-Hungary after WW1 and the region did not become part of Yugoslavia till after WW2. The change of state control in Istria of course affected the demographics, as Croatians and Slovenians emigrated during the times of Italian control, while Italians left (en masse, in certain instances, as from Pula) when it became clear that Yugoslavia would govern the peninsula from 1947. Notwithstanding this, Istria is still an unusually diverse region of Europe, with a regional identity strong enough for a proportion of the population to describe themselves as Istrians first and foremost. And, of course, now that Yugoslavia and communism have been dismantled and Croatia’s candidacy for membership of the European Union, there is again a renewed Italian influence along the coast, with investment and property development.
When undertaking Serbian family history research, it is important to understand two facts: that the current and historical borders of Serbia do not coincide and that Serbs have always lived outside the country. Therefore, you should not assume that your Serbian ancestors always lived on the territory of modern Serbia.
During the period within which most Serbian genealogists can hope to make decent progress in their family history research – approximately 1800 to date – the northern boundary of Serbia was formed by the Dunav (or Danube) and the city of Belgrade was therefore a border town. On the other side of the Dunav was Vojvodina, which was part of Austro-Hungary until WW1. Many Serbs, along with peoples of other nationalities, lived in the Vojvodina; they were known as prečani (“across the river”), sometimes translated as the transriparian Serbs. Vojvodina itself was divided into three segments: the Srem, between the Sava and the Dunav rivers; the Bačka between the Dunav and the Tisa rivers; and the Banat, the largest and most populated region which today extends across Serbia and neighbouring Romania.
Serbs also lived along the military border, the Krajina, established by the Habsburgs as a bulwark against Ottoman expansion. The existence of the Krajina explains the historic arc of Serbian settlement across northern Bosnia, Slavonia and the western Croatian-Bosnian border. Serbs have always lived elsewhere across Bosnia and Hercegovina (where they constituted between a third and a half of the population at different times throughout the 19th century) and, of course, also in Kosovo (“Old Serbia”) and northern Macedonia.
Serbia achieved limited autonomy from the Ottomans in 1815 and effective independence in 1830. The new state immediately attracted Serbs from the surrounding and still Ottoman regions of Bosnia, Hercegovina and Macedonia. New waves of immigrants arrived in Serbia periodically, for example in 1875 following an uprising in Hercegovina and in 1910 following the suppression by the Ottomans of an Albanian revolt in Kosovo. Serbs living in Austro-Hungary, such as those in the Krajina, were also drawn abroad – up to 300,000 Serbs and Croats are thought to have emigrated to USA from Krajina in the decade leading up to WW1. On American passenger lists, immigration papers and census returns, they may be described as Austrians or Hungarians after their citizenship in Europe. Their Orthodox religion, if recorded, will help mark them out as Serbs.
The history of the Serbs, even in modern times, is complicated by the kinds of factors mentioned above. It should be noted that in some areas many records of value to family historians were destroyed, deliberately or inadvertently, during, for example, the Balkan Wars in 1912/13, in WW1 and WW2, or during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As a result, success cannot be guaranteed.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research in Serbia and across Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia; research may also be possible in Kosovo and parts of Macedonia, depending upon the quality and detail of the background information available. We would be delighted to provide advice and guidance, as well as genealogical research services, and welcome all enquiries.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Cook County, Illinois, centred on the city of Chicago, had one of the fastest growing populations in USA, due to both transatlantic immigration and migration from other parts of the USA. Today, a significant segment of Cook County’s population has roots in Central and Eastern Europe, including a great many people of Polish descent and smaller but still sizeable groups of other Slavic origin.
A database of the Declarations of Intention completed by immigrants applying for naturalisation is available online here. This covers applications made locally between 1906 and 1929. The database has not yet been completed: somewhere between 150,000 and the total estimated number of 400,000 have been entered online so far. It is therefore worth bookmarking the website and returning to it later if a search is negative.
Importantly, the Declarations give the exact date of birth and the town and country of birth, which are essential when beginning research in the European country of origin.
Note that the place names as shown are subject to variation from the accepted norms: they may differ according to the ethnicity of the applicant, are rendered without diacritic marks and may have been transliterated in different ways from Cyrillic alphabet originals into the Latin script used in English.
Place names are also subject to mis-transcription, which is all but unavoidable when transcribing old handwritten originals. Here are two examples from modern Romania. The Banat city of Timişoara appears as Lemesveer, Temesvar (this is a correct German language spelling), Temisvar, Ternesvar, Timisoana etc; while the Moldavian university town of Iaşi shows up as Gassi, Iassy, Jasse, Jassy (a correct German and Yiddish form of its name), Tassi, Yassy, Yoss etc. The best advice is simply to proceed with care and not to use too many search terms to start with – you can always narrow down results by redefining your search later.
If searching by place, you should also consider the political geography of the period 1906 to 1929, which saw great change either side of the Great War. For example, a Croatian ancestor is most likely to have been residing in the Hungarian sphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before the War, and could therefore appear with Austria or Hungary against his or her name. After the War, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created, later to become known as Yugoslavia. Of course, a Croat nationalist might simply state that he or she was born in Croatia irrespective of the actual political borders at the time of their birth, emigration or application for naturalisation. Finally, do not forget that a Croat ancestor might not have been living within the modern borders of Croatia at all, but in Bosnia or Hungary proper or Serbia.
Analysis of the Croats who applied for naturalisation in Cook County offers a fascinating picture of their position in society at that date. Of the 820 entries returned by the search engine with Croatia as the recorded country of origin, 367 simply described themselves as labourers. Likewise, there are 67 machinists and many whose jobs – blacksmith, boilermaker, crane operator etc – are likely to have meant that they were either industrial factory hands or working in construction. However, there are good numbers of bakers, craftsmen in wood (cabinet makers, wood turners etc) and so on, and a number of less expected occupations – five chauffeurs, 16 firemen, nine saloon keepers, as well as a solitary iceman, pastor, reporter and undertaker.
As one would expect, most of the applicants came from Zagreb, which tends to appear in the database under its former name Agram. Other places with multiple entries include Čanak, Hreljin, Jaska, Luka, Petrinja, Plešivica, Ramljane, Samobor and Veliko Trgovište. Some of these places are small and the number of immigrants suggests chain migration: that is, one villager emigrating to Chicago, writing back home, and friends and family then following suit. This certainly seems to be true of Čanak, for example, where four of the eight named applicants are called Golić and two Prša (their names anglicised to Golich and Prsha in the absence of diacritical marks). Very few applicants for naturalisation appear to have come from the Dalmatian coast.
Finally, looking at the dates of birth of the 820 Croatian immigrants in Cook County, 33 were born in the 1860s, 109 in the 1870s, 389 in the 1880s, 271 in the 1890s and 16 in the 20th century. Partly this reflects the coverage period (application made from 1906 to 1929) but it also shows a clear upward trend of immigration towards the end of the 19th century.
Burgenland is an invention. All administrative regions other than island nations are, to a greater or lesser extent, inevitably inventions: why, for example, are the borders of any continental European state where they are and not a little bit further west or east, or north or south? But Burgenland is quite literally an invention and a recent one.
Before the Great War, what is today Burgenland was simply a strip of territory on the westernmost border of Hungary abutting Austria. It did not really have a name. It was ethnically mixed, with a population of Austrians, Croatians, Gypsies, Hungarians and Jews. The Austrians made up the majority but not in all towns or areas, some of which were predominantly Hungarian or Croatian. This multi-national flavour was true, of course, of not a few regions in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After the War, however, the Great Powers decided that defeated Hungary had to be dismembered, partly to punish and weaken it and partly to enable the self-determination of the peoples of what became “the Little Entente” of the newly founded states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and an enlarged Romania. However, for no apparent good reason, defeated Austria was awarded the westernmost strip of defeated Hungary. The other option had been the creation of a “Czech corridor” linking the Slavic states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, but this was dismissed in favour of unification with Austria. A plebiscite allowed Hungary to retain the largely Hungarian town of Sopron, which had been mooted as the likely capital of the new Austrian province.
The territory ceded to Austria in 1921 needed a name and Burgenland – “castle land” – was chosen.
What followed illustrates the effect of moving international borders. The 20th century nation states boxed in peoples as homogeneously as possible and effectively discouraged minorities. Burgenland was now Austrian. Austrians moved in. Hungarians moved out. Slavs emigrated to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The Austrian majority increased with the 1930s and creeping institutional germanisation. When the Austrians welcomed the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, the fate of the Burgenland’s Jews was sealed. It is true that today there are still Croatian and Hungarian minorities in Burgenland but the historical multi-ethnic mix of the region has been greatly diminished.
For family historians in the English-speaking world with roots in Burgenland, it is worth knowing that emigration from the region built up slowly during the closing years of the 19th century but gained momentum in 1921 to 1924, when Hungarians in particular emigrated to North America. Although Burgenland is Austrian, it should not necessarily be assumed that surviving vital records will be in Austria rather than over the border in Sopron or elsewhere in Hungary. Remember also that the majority of settlements in Burgenland have a Hungarian language name which may not be shown on modern Austrian maps and atlases, while others have Croat names. If you have Hungarian roots and are interested in the Burgenland, it is worth looking for a map published in Hungary, as this will almost certainly show the old Hungarian names. Concordances have also been published which match the Austrian, Hungarian and Croat names of individual settlements.
Croatia is a European tourist destination which isn’t yet blessed with a great many British visitors. The general British public prefers to holiday in places where it may enjoy all the delights of home – fish and chips, pubs, fine English conversation – with extra sun. Hence the enduring popularity of the well-worn British package tourist destinations in, for example, Spain and Greece. This is not to single out the British: think of the wonderful concept of the Accidental Tourist range of books envisaged by novelist Anne Tyler in The Accidental Tourist, in which the male protagonist Macon creates travel books which guide American travellers to those places, hotels and restaurants abroad which approximate closest to the comforts of home, and expose them least to the disconcertingly alien.
Over the last few years, however, Croatia has been fast emerging as a destination of choice for British who read broadsheet newspapers and who, for example, enjoy the idea of island-hopping, and have the means to do it; or are fascinated with the historical palimpsest which is Split, or the breathtaking beauty of Dubrovnik, or the notion of slowly touring the long Adriatic coast. Of course, tourists focus primarily on Dalmatia and Istria, and few spend much time in the Croatian heartlands around Zagreb, let alone venture into Slavonia.
The British, as often, are latecomers to Croatia. Our northern and central European cousins wised up earlier. And, of course, the history of holidaying in what is today Croatia has a far longer history than that which has largely developed post-WW2 and especially post-1991 Independence.
One of the first places to attract visitors was Opatija, which like the remainder of Croatia, enjoyed, to varying degrees, being part of the big, baggy Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic empire. In the late 19th century, Opatija was usually known by its Italian name Abbazia. The two names are translations of one another: both mean simply Abbey (just as Croat Rijeka and Italian Fiume further round the bay both mean River). Opatija came alive during an earlier period of enhanced freedom of and possibilities for travel for those with sufficient resources. Just as today tourists take advantage of cheap flights and discounted package holidays, so in the 19th century a more limited demographic began to travel for leisure, as well as for business or looking for employment, with the advent and spread of the railways. The development of regional railways, and the promotion in tandem of the Adriatic coast as a tourist destination within Austro-Hungary, was what made Opatija possible as a resort. In its pre-WW1 heyday it was not just a resort, but the resort of choice for the fashionable and wealthy of the empire.
Of course, for every Austrian prince or Hungarian noble in Opatija before the Great War, there were many locals who lived and worked rather than played in the town. Opatija is situated on the edge of the Istrian peninsula, which has always had a mixed population of Croats, Italians, Slovenes and others. In this part of Istria, Croats predominated, although, as well as established native Italians, new Italian settlers arrived following Italy’s 1918 annexation and subsequent occupation of Istria until WW2.
Political and military events had their usual impact on the lives of the common people. Before WW1, locals had emigrated from Istria mostly for the usual push and pull reasons: lack of opportunities, or poverty, or pressure on land in the home country, and the draw of a new life and economic possibility in a remote destination such as USA. Of course, even during the 19th century some Croats and Slovenes left their homelands for political reasons, preferring exile to living under Hungarian domination. However, the political dimension to emigration intensified in the 20th century. Under Italian rule and especially Fascist Italian repression, many Croats emigrated; then, following the welcome defeat of Italy in WW2, many Italians, of both long-established and recently settled families, left rather than live within Yugoslavia and under its nascent Communist government.
Undertaking family history in Istria can be complicated for these reasons. In addition, the population, as well as their places of habitation, often had two or more names to suit the occasion and the individual or institution with which they were communicating. Many people were bilingual or even trilingual, able to converse and conduct business in Croat, Italian and/or Slovenian; often, if not entirely fluently, in all three languages. Naturally, the more educated classes during the long years of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy may well have been fluent in Hungarian and/or German as well.
Bluebird Research has tried and tested local research partners in Croatia and would be delighted to assist you with research in Istria or elsewhere in the country. For an assessment, please e-mail or snail-mail us using the contact details on the contact bluebird page.
In April 1941, a new administration, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH, was established in Croatia as a client state of Nazi Germany and with it a reign of terror.
Although Istria and parts of Dalmatia including the port city of Split, usually considered Croatian, were annexed by Italy, the territory of the NDH extended across Bosnia Hercegovina and the Srem. This meant that the Ustaša, the Croatian fascist party, were responsible for lands that included, as well as the Bosniaks, an estimated 1.9 million Serbs and sizeable populations of Sephardic Jews and Roma.
Summary executions of Serbs began almost immediately, and mass deportations from 4th June 1941. 180,000 Serbs are believed to have fled Bosnia for Serbia by the end of July 1941 and tens of thousands who stayed were rechristened as Roman Catholics. By the end of 1942, perhaps 150,000 Serbs were detained in death camps on the territory of the NDH, 300,000 had been killed, and thousands more had been sent to Auschwitz.
The Jewish population of NDH in April 1941 was probably between 36,000 and 39,500. They were immediately subjected to plunder, victimisation, arrest and execution. 26,000 died in Ustaša death camps, the most notorious of which was Jasenovac. The camp’s population apparently never exceeded 3,000, as prisoners were usually murdered shortly after arrival. At least 80,000 people – Jews, Serbs, Roma, and communists including Croats and Bosniaks – died at Jasenovac.
There are two websites which contain specific information about individuals at Jasenovac.
The first is the Jasenovac Memorial Site, which has a searchable database of 75,159 names of those killed at the Jasenovac complex. This is a work in progress and the number is that of known victims as at November 2008. The final count will be higher.
The second, the Jasenovac Research Institute, has published a larger database of 597,323 names of Yugoslavs killed in WW2, compiled by Yugoslavia’s Federal Institute of Statistics in 1964.
You should search both these databases if you believe that a relative may have died in Yugoslavia during WW2, or are trying to determine the fate of a missing person.
Except for the two databases mentioned, all the numbers given above are estimates and different sources give different, sometimes wildly different, numbers. The majority cited here are from Yugoslavia As History: Twice There Was A Country, by the US academic John R Lampe, published by Cambridge University Press (2nd ed, 2000).