Finding Croatian Immigrants on the Immigration Manifests of Ships Arriving in America

About two months ago I began using ancestory.com to try to track down the records of the family members who migrated to the United States.  After a few days of searching I decided to expand my search and to track down everyone who came from Greater Udbina.  There are a few reasons for this decision. First, there simply are not that many people who came from Udbina so it is possible to actually attempt to track down all of the records.  At this point I have identified about 700 people who migrated from Udbina.  I expect to find 400 or so more.  Second, one of the advantages of tracking down everyone is that we are more likely to find our family members.  The "Udbiners" often traveled in groups and so identifying one Udbiner allows me to look at the fellow passengers to see if they were traveling with one of our direct family members.  Third, there is a lot of context when seeing everyone who traveled together.  We can see when everyone left, where they were headed, etc.  I hope that seeing the information for the larger group of immigrants will help us see how our family story compares.

I think it will be another month before I finish my search and start sharing the results.  In the mean time I thought I would share the lessons I have learned from looking for "Udbiners."  I hope this will be help anyone looking for records of people coming out of the former Yugoslavia.


LESSON 1: The BCS Alphabet

[SIDE NOTE: Language is a political issue in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.  When the Yugoslavia was intact, the official language was Serbo-Croatian, but with the breakup into smaller states each country has said that they have their own distinct language.  In this blog I will try to follow the convention of referring to the language as BCS (Bosnian-Croation-Serbian). ]

One of the first lessons is the importance of knowing how to pronounce the letters in the BCS alphabet.  There is an Latin alphabet that closely resembles the sounds of our Latin alphabet (there is also a Cyrillic alphabet too), but a few of the letters have different sounds.  Here are some of the letters with different sounds (taken from this textbook):

š --- English equivalent = sugar
đ --- English equivalent = ginger
ž --- English equivalent = treasure
dž --- English equivalent = junk
č --- English equivalent = church
ć --- English equivalent = chick
l --- English equivalent = left
lj --- English equivalent = million
n --- English equivalent = net
nj --- English equivalent = canyon


LESSON 2: Enumerators used phonetic spellings (Sometimes!?!)

By enumerators I mean the people filling out the passenger lists.  When the enumerators wrote down the names they would often write down the names as they sounded.  So, for example, one of the last names in our family plot in Kurjak is "Đukić".   The letter Đ, makes the sound of first g in the word ginger.  When the enumerators wrote down passengers with this last name, they did their best to spell it in English.  Here's an example of passenger list with two passengers with the last name "Đukić" coming from Kurjak (see lines 28 and 29).  The enumerator spells the name "Gjukic". 

However, the spellings are not always the same!  This actually comes in play with how they dealt with our family name: Kljaić.   The combo "lj" is actually one sound that is a soft "l" sound.  Similarly, the last letter in the name "ć", makes a "ch" sound.  Thus, there are really four possibilities - it could be spelled Kljaić, Klaich, Klaić, or Kljaich.  When searching for someone with these names, all of these are possible.  Here people from Greater Udbian with the last name Kljaić - the name is spelled differently across the records. 

Here's a "Kljaić" (see line 13):

And here's a "Klaich" (see line 2):

So in searching for these names it is useful to know the key differences in names (see Lesson 1) and to try different iterations of how the name might be spelled.


LESSON 3: The curse of cursive

One hard part about cursive is that some letters are difficult to distinguish.  Look again at passenger #2 in the list given just above.  The first name is "Nikola", but it would be easy to mistake the name for "Miola".   The  letters N and M often look like V and U.


LESSON 4: The indexer (probably) does not speak BCS

The cursive curse is particularly biting because indexers are volunteers who almost certainly don't speak BCS.  This matters because the indexers are not familiar with BCS names.  So if you know the name you are looking for, I recommend writing it out in sloppy cursive several times and then ask other people to guess what the name might look like. Then search the records using those terms. 


LESSON 5: Some Common Male, Udbiner Names

If you are just generally looking into the records of Udbiners, it is helpful to know some common names.  Here are some of the most common male names I have run across:

• Dane
• Dmitar
• Ilija
• Ivan 
• Janko
• Jovan
• Jure
• Luka 
• Marko
• Mile
• Nikola
• Petar
• Rade
• Sava
• Stipe
• Todor

I don't know female names because the overwhelming majority of migrants are male.  If you know what the common names look like, it is easier to recognize them in cursive.


LESSON 6: Traveled in Groups

The sixth lesson is that people travel in groups. This is important because when you identify one Udbiner, you can look through the rest of the ship's passenger lists in order to find other Udbiners.  For example in March 1903 there were 78 Udbiners who came on the ship Brandenburg and another 84 on Chemnitz.  I have found many records by looking through the passenger lists.  So if you find a lead, don't forget to see who else is on the boat.