June 20 - Zagreb and Archive

Lots going on today, but not many pictures.  I guess this is because we are working today on names, instead of seeing things as tourists.

This morning we went to Zagreb to visit the National Archive and try to find more information.  It was a bit of an experience navigating the one way roads, and figuring out the parking, etc.  Pretty easy overall though when you think this is the country's capital.  It didn't even feel as big as Seattle, so except for navigating in a new area, it wasn't bad at all.

Here's how you get to park in Zagreb!  Glad our little rental car (not pictured) cleared the curb.

Jen spent the day in the National Archive, while I felt like I spent the day moving the car around every two hours because there were no parking garages nearby.  I didn't mind though.  This was one of the reasons for coming on this trip, so it was fun to help Jen out.  The genealogy specialist that Jen hired a few months ago, and who found the first of our information about Janko's family, came by in the afternoon and she and Jen were able to get a lot of work done.  Turns out Lydia is a convert to the church and is a genealogy specialist/expert in Croatia.  She mentioned that she visits Salt Lake City every two years or so to attend the church's genealogy conferences there. She said there are genealogy conferences in Croatia that she goes to, but they are very basic compared to the ones in Salt Lake City.  Then she mentioned with a laugh that she is in charge of the conferences in Croatia.  Lydia was pretty hilarious and was just so excited about helping people do this work.  It's a great service that she can provide in helping those of us who are far from Croatia to find our ancestors.  By the way, after this trip, I'll bet I know where Jen will want to be going in the near future -- Salt Lake City genealogy conference the next time Lydia comes:)

Can't figure out how to rotate the pic, but this was from a microfiche in the archive.  Looks like a baptismal record.  You can see the town of Ertic (spelled Ertich here) on the left and Stanislaus as the first name mentioned in the record.  At times, the names were recorded in Latin.   

As you can see above, this is a record of Ana's father (Stanko Sopcic).  Ana was Janko's wife.  Not only are we dealing with family who changed their names when they immigrated, but we also have to be on the lookout for latin variations of their names, and sometimes even phonetic spellings of the name.  Look at the record above.... Stanko's father is listed as Sopchich.

We also found out from Lydia that because there were so many Sopcic's in one area, the families would take on a 'household name' to distinguish themselves from other Sopcic's.   Stanko Sopcic is a good example of this.  Do you see in the record that his mother's last name is Stajcar?  That was the household name that Stanko's family took on in Ertic.  So we found some of them listed in other records as Stajcar (sometimes spelled Stajcer, too).  Make sense so far?

Now you can see how complicated and challenging it can be to find these family members.  Remember Ana above?  In the states, she listed herself on the census as Annie Soptich.  Family recollection here in the states was that her name was Joana Peresko.  Lydia thought that perhaps Peresko is another of these 'household names' which is why Jen hasn't been able to find any info on Joana Peresko, but we haven't been able to confirm that yet.  Quite the tangled web!  Who knew it would be so hard to find our ancestors!

Lydia also gave us a lot of information and tips/tricks about the records that we were looking at in the church with the priest.  We have found a few other family names -  Stjacar mentioned above, Grgoric, Mihelic and Bahor.  Bahor comes from Slovenia, and Lydia thinks she can help us find info on that part of the family.  She also recommended that we go back to the priest and basically take pictures of every Sopcic we see in the books, especially in the Ertic area.  We had already set up a return appointment for tomorrow (Sunday), so we are looking forward to returning and trying to find some of the above names in the books.

After the archive closed and kicked us out, we spent about an hour seeing of few of the sites of Zagreb.  One of the most popular is St. Mark's Church because of the Croatian coats of arms/symbols in the roof.  Check them out.  Pretty cool, right?

Mom really wanted to go to a museum nearby called the Museum of Broken Relationships.  Her guidebook had great things to say about it.  I guess the nice part of that is that it would be a different museum from those that we've seen, which are typically art-related.  I didn't want her getting any ideas though.  Maybe next time Jen.

It was a good thing we didn't go to the museum though because we had some last minute souvenir shopping to do.  My favorite thing!  But right as we were finishing up, a heavy rain storm rolled in with some pretty close lightning.  So that had everyone scrambling for cover and us ending our time in Zagreb a little early.  So we headed home for dinner, a chance to sit down and organize the information that we have so far, take a breather and catch up on this blog while watching some world cup soccer, do some work on the school budget (yay!) and get a game plan for the last two days here in Croatia.