The Zaradruga

For those who have been following my latest spate of blogposts, the hardest part about combing through cadastral maps (land registries) is when you see things such as Balen Obitelj, or Balen Family in just about every entry. You wonder what that means since you can see Pete, Luka, and Šime Balen as individual landowners. Who is this big nebulous Balen Family. How does it own so much land?
The answer lies in the traditional societies of the region. In the pre modern world people lived in extended family units, not the nuclear or blended families of today. Sometimes they were called tribes, some were kinship groups limited to a specific geographic region, and others were simply a couple of generations living together such as grandparents and their children and grandchildren children. In the Balkans, people, especially in the military frontier, would live in these family units called zaradruga. The zaradruga was more of a communal kinship group owning land in common, and more specifically sending a certain number of men every year for the draft. These men would range from the ages of 16 to about thirty or forty as far as I remember. You might find your ancestors, you might not in these rolls