This is my Grand grand mother Ružica (Rose) who started building a family album. The album survived until this days. During visiting my family in year 2008, I found the album and copied all the pictures that I am selectively uploading to the my family tree web site. She seems to be very kind lady. She is a mother of my mother’s father.

Her husband Ivica

And her husband’s sister Tereza

The family owned big property in Slavonia (northern province of Croatia) in City of Vugrovci, Brod na Savi and Okucani. Unfortunately during the communist regime (1945-1990) where the state policy was to make everyone equally rich (or poor), they were taking properties by force from the hard working people and then they would be giving it to a useless parasites, which was a robbery on the state level. It was not different what happened with my family as well. They were a victim of this delusional movement. Their property has been taken and never been returned to its original owner – to my family (they we lucky they did not end up in one of many concentration camps where communists were performing mass execution of the people that were not sharing communist thoughts and way of thinking.

Below on the picture, there is my mother’s father (the youngest person on the picture below) with his older brother, sister and his parents.

My mother’s mother, father and brother.

This is my mother.

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The story about my father’s family begins in the city of Travnik in 17th century. My uncle – don. Ivan Bralić researched the old church’s records and put all the pieces together. The story goes … four brothers and one sister had to escape from their Croatian homeland, at a time occupied by foreigners – by Ottoman Empire (Turks). The occupied territory today is known as Bosnia and Hercegovina. The challenge was to accept Agha’s intent to take a virginity of their sister who just married her husband – “right of the first night”. Brothers didnt like the idea of watching her sister raped by Agha, so they ended Agha’s life and escaped. The father sent his children to the south to the Adriatic coast on 4 locations – to make difficult for Agha’s people to make a revenge, as father said: “At least one should remain for the seed”.

The locations are:

– Bibinje

– Klis (later the city become famous as they stopped Ottoman empire’s expansion to the Europe)

– Dicmo

– Vis island