Finding Churches for your seemingly unchurched ancestors

I sent out a poll recently on FamilySearch, trying to find out what people wanted from my blog. They asked me to as CE Andrus asked me this question:


It would be helpful to learn how to identify a town and where the residents attended church (if the town didn't have its own church).





This was pretty easy for me to answer. It is a situation that occurred in Sveti Rok and the neighboring town Lovinac. Lovinac is the bigger town and original parish seat. Do you see the red church by the words D. St. Michael in black? This is on the 1763 Austro-Hungarian Military Survey, found on Mapire, on of three land surveys the Austro-Hungarian military. Using the layers function, we can go and find that this is the original name and location for Lovinac. A similar search will turn up Sveti Rok as D. Dolni Kray, or the Village of the Lower End. Usually Dolni is associated with Dolni Grad, or the traditional Downtown of a city in Croatian. Gorni Grad means Uptown in Croatian.



, not the original name of Saint Roch, the Italian saint of the Black Plague. In 'Dolni Kray' we do find a red colored church. That means that there was a church at that time in Sveti Rok, but Sveti Rok was not named Sveti Rok. It was named after it's location nearly twenty or so years after its founding. Everybody got married in Lovinac/Saint Michael. The D, by the way stands for Dorf, or village in German. The other labels on the map are hamlets of a few scattered houses. For example Czerni Bunar means "Blackwell". One must realize several things before they use Mapire.









Lovinac, ca. 1763 Dorf. St. Michael









But first you have to realize how I came to this conclusion. I was looking one day while living in Croatia for a place to help find my ancestors. I read (in Croatian) some family history sites. I found they mentioned a website called www.mapire.eu. Mapire is a collection of maps sourced from the differing archives of Europe, such as the Austrian, Hungarian, Croatian, British, and other countries. Actually, most of Europe is now covered by the map. It's well done. But you have to know several things about using Mapire.






Courtesy of Mapire.eu




1. It's like playing with Google Earth. There are multiple layers and even a 3D overlay of the maps with the modern maps of today. The modern map is based off of OpenStreet Map. You will find hamlets, or smaller settlements within the village that don't necessarily exist today. If they exist, they exist in local memory or in street names. For example both my great-grandparents came from Lotić, a hamlet in Sveti Rok. Today it is only a street name, and while the family still lives on the same plot of land. Had we not known this fact one field of the immigration form would have never made sense. My great-grandmother stated that she was from Lotić, and had I never been there, and looked at the map, I would have never understood what that meant.




2. The spelling is atrocious. In Serbo-Croatian, one uses the simple rule of "one letter, one sound." The Austro-Hungarians spelled Slavic names in a way that reflected the polyethnic nature of their empire; sometimes like I mentioned they use German topographical words (dorf=village, berg=mountain), and spell Serbo-Croatian names like they are Polish, Ukrainian, or Hungarian. The "Blackwell" example above would be spelled Crni Bunar today in modern Croatian orthography rather than the Czerny Bunar above. Another example would by Dolni Kray, or Dolnji Kraj. The Cz or Sz does not necessarily mean that you pronounce it as Ch or Sh. In Hungarian it is actually the c and s sounds in English.









To sum it all up. Look on all three surveys if you can. Look for the red church buildings. If you can't find them, look for the next closest group of villages. There will be a church somewhere in the little valley your family was from, or the next one over. But look through all three surveys, because you will see the growth and economic development of these little places, and you might miss the construction of a church just because you wrote it off in 1763 or the 1880's or whenever! Don't give up! You will find something interesting for your benefit sometime or some place or someone!