Help Clarifying My (Probably Serbian) Ancestry (Thank you!)

[John Dunn]

This may not be entirely relevant, but there is a description of the Bocche di Cattaro and the town of Cattaro/Kotor itself (along with a photograph of the latter) as they were in about 1905 in Harry de Windt's book Through Savage Europe (Collins, London & Glasgow, n.d.).  De Windt had travelled there on a steamer from Trieste; his aim was to proceed overland to Cetinje, and he describes Cattaro (which was then under Austrian rule) as the gateway to Montenegro, noting that a drivable road had been built between Cattaro and Cetinje in 1881.  One might suppose that the building of this road would have facilitated emigration from Montenegro.

John Dunn.   
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From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Andrea Gregovich [agregovich at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: 24 August 2013 21:57
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Help Clarifying My (Probably Serbian) Ancestry (Thank you!)

I've gotten a number of excellent helpful responses to my query about my ancestry, more helpful than I had hoped!  While I'm more unsure than ever whether the family was Serbian, Croatian, or maybe even a mixed marriage (very possible, if I extrapolate from certain vague family tales), I'm so grateful to have pinned down their departure point in Boka Kotorska, and I do feel like I have a much better sense of how to proceed in my research.  As I commented to someone off-list, my knowledge of the Balkans is much more that of a traveler than an academic, so this list has proven once again to be a very valuable in its guidance.

In the midst of this, I got an email from a woman who knew my grandfather personally whose deceased husband was an Austrian immigrant and certainly knew the difference between Croatian and Serbian.  He always said Nick was Croatian (based on their daughter's memories), but the mother herself remembered him as Serbian, and had some solid anecdotal reasons to back up her memory.  It is more and more ambiguous at every turn!  I've hit a point where, for the initial things I'm writing, I may just call them "immigrants from Montenegro".  My grandfather's stories are really wild west American stories, so the Serbian/Croatian distinction is not of paramount importance there, but as the project continues, I will definitely want to delve into the immigrant generation.  In fact, perhaps the real story is the complicated nuances of identifying an ethnicity from that region, and the way the family simplified it into "Yugoslavian" then to some extent shunned the Serbian possibility for political reasons.

I'm communicating with several people off-list, but if I lose track of someone I want to respond to, please know that every email has been very useful to me.  It will actually take me some time to process all the leads I've been given.  Thanks again!

Andrea Gregovich
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