The Military Frontier — Vojna krajina

The frontier was carved out of Croatia and Slavonia and put under the war council, not the ban. Catholic registers begin after Trent where a parish survived at all; the Orthodox settlers granted the Statuta Valachorum kept their own. Very little of either survives from before 1700.

THE TRAP, AND IT IS THE REASON THIS REGION EXISTS. From 1746 a frontier village belonged to its REGIMENT, not to a county. Its vital registers were kept by the regimental chaplain and filed under the regiment — Ogulin, Otočac, Slunj, Gradiška, Brod, Petrovaradin — so a search of the county archive for a Lika village finds nothing before 1881, and nothing is not the same as not existing. Look for the regiment.

The frontier was wound down over thirty years and abolished by degrees; the regimental series end at different dates in different districts, which is why a family can vanish from one series a decade before its neighbours do.

The frontier is incorporated into Croatia-Slavonia and its ground finally files like everywhere else: civil registration from 1895, county and parish series thereafter.

Parish registers continue; the state registers of 1895 onward are held by the registry offices and pass to the state archives after a century.

Records of these four years are scattered and incomplete, and much of the Orthodox parish record of this ground was destroyed with the communities that kept it.

Church registers were gathered into the state archives; civil registration is with the matični ured of each municipality.

ARHiNET is the catalogue of the Croatian state archives and is the place to establish what survives before writing.