Tracing Roots
Sean apparently looks Croatian. This was told to us twice. The first time it was by a Croatian man at the table next to us at a restaurant in Split, who shared his very strong wine with Sean. He studied Sean very carefully before he pronounced that Sean had a Croatian head. Sean’s Croatian looks were confirmed in a separate instance by the sister of Maria (one of the non-granny “Grannies”). Sean contends that their pronouncements are meaningless because they only mentioned his apparent Croatian looks after learning that part of Sean’s family is originally from Croatia. Still, they should know.
The Croatian man was wrong about one thing: his proclamation that Sean specifically looked like he was from coastal Croatia. Thanks to Sean’s brother Gary, the keeper of the family history, we learned that Sean and Gary’s great-great-grandfather supposedly was born and died in House 35 in Volavje, a village inland not far from Zagreb, the capital. Sean’s great-grandfather and his grandfather were also born in House 35. Sean’s grandfather came over to the United States in 1921, when he was about 13.
We stopped in Volavje on the way to Plitvice National Park. Driving out of Zagreb, you pass rows and rows of large, ugly communist block apartment buildings, and quickly reach farmland. Although Volavje was only about 25 miles outside of Zagreb, it was a different world.
We noticed that many of the houses appeared to be much, much newer, so we were not sure if House 35 is still standing. Volaje is so small, it still does not have any street names, and each house in the village is numbered. We found the house numbered 35, but there was no way it was old enough to be The House 35.
We did find the church that Sean’s family likely attended, as it has been standing since the 17th century. It was neat to think that his ancestors likely got married and were baptized there.
They also probably had funeral services there, although we were unsuccessful in tracking down any of the headstones marking their graves. Some of the graves in the graveyard by the church were old enough, but most were quite new. It was easy to see which families had a real presence in the town, as their names were repeated over and over on old and new headstones. We did find two more modern graves with Sean’s family’s last name, including one where the husband appeared to still be alive. Many of the graves simply had unmarked crosses, so one of them could belong to Sean’s family. We attempted to chat with the man working in the church, peering at us walking around the cemetery, but he spoke no English.
Tracing roots is pretty fun, even if we didn’t come up with anything too concrete. Future trip idea: tracking down my family and Sean’s maternal side in Germany.
Yikes, the pictures are all missing in the albums & some in this blog. Hope you can fix it fast ~ we’ll all be lost without the gorgeous photos! And root tracing sounds like so much fun ~ it would have been great if you could have tracked down the living man whose name was on the tombstone!