Looking out the window at the beautiful scenery below of Croatia’s Adriatic coast before landing at Split Saturday afternoon, I had to wonder: What had led one set of great-grandparents to decide separately that they each had to split, leading to an improbable migration to the same small town on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

I have no idea, since Nona’s parents died in 1944 and 1952 and I don’t have any of their papers. And I don’t remember my dad’s mom talking about how her mother and father had decided to leave their homes and start new lives in the United States.

I know those great-grandparents lived somewhere near the city of Karlovac, well inland of the coast of what was then a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So the climate probably was not as nice. And had that great-grandfather stayed, he might have been among the millions of soldiers who did not survive World War I. I’m glad that he chose America instead, for whatever reason.

The scrapbook Nona put together decades later does say that her mother emigrated to live with her brother and his wife in America; she then met her husband because he happened to be a boarder in her brother’s house. After what seems to have been an exceedingly brief courtship, my grandmother was born in 1911 (as seen in the photo here taken not long after), the first of nine children.

Going to Croatia to speak at the Shift developer conference hosted by the messaging-services firm Infobip cleared up none of this family backstory, since I was in the wrong part of the country. (It also didn’t give me a chance to compare my memory of how Nona would make potica to any current examples.) But it’s also been too long, with too many wars in between, for any family ties to exist–as far as anybody on that side of the family in the U.S. can tell me.

In that respect, Croatia is like Italy to me: a place from where a big part of my family comes, but where establishing family ties remains a future research project. The country in Europe where I can expect to have relatives welcome me is instead about a thousand miles to the northwest of Croatia, a place with a coast beautiful in its own way but with worse weather: Ireland.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/09/22/an-overdue-visit-to-a-corner-of-my-family-history/

#ancestors #Croatia #genealogy #grandmother #greatGrandparents #Hrvatska #immigrants #Infobip #Karlovac #migration