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I am attempting to trace my mother's family Rapaich back to 1750.
Much of the contact with this family has been lost. Since my mother is now senile, we can get no further information from her. The information that we do have is as follows:
Danial (Dane?) Rapaich, born 28 May 1894 in Bos Dubica. His father was listed as Jovan Rapaich. I do not have a mother's name or particulars. It appears that he immigrated to the US in 1913 although there may be some questions yet regarding this date.
Evica (Gostovich) Rapaich, born 21 November 1906 in Gostovo Polje Vodotech Brinje, Croatia. Her mother was reported as Millica born approximately 1879 in Austra and father was Mihelo Gostovich, born 1872 in Serbia. It is also not clear what date she immigrated to the US but she was probably a child accompanying her parents with a possible date of 1912.
Any assistance would be appreciated.
Walter W. Olson, Ph.D., P.E.
Posted : 08/07/2014 6:26 pm
Hello Walter,
The data that you listed, did you get that via Ellis Island?
Regards,
Sergej
Posted : 10/07/2014 11:23 am
Topic starter
Sergej,
No we did not. He doesn't appear to be listed in the Ellis island data. The data we have, which is limited is from family sources and from Ancestry.com searches. There appear to be at least two Dane Rapaich with similar data. One settled in Michigan while my grandfather settled in Minnesota.
I should say that it took years to get this data... Dane apparently would not tell anyone about his genealogy. I am told he was scared to reveal the data. It doesn't appear that he ever applied for US citizenship. And my mother was nearly as secretive as he was. But we got bits and pieces that we followed up on, whenever we could.
Walt
Posted : 10/07/2014 1:16 pm
Hi Walt,
I am on the road in Serbia for the coming 3 weeks so I will not be able to reply until the 10th of August. Do you have any cards or other items with dates and names on it? If so you can attach them to this post as an attachment and I can check it out. The trick with Ellis Island is that back in the day most immigration officials were of English heritage, meaning they often wrote down the names the way they deemed correct. So its kind of a puzzle to locate the correct person in the records of Ellis Island. A lot of Serbs were/are Orthodox, which means that they used the old calendar. So there is a discrepancy in dates of birth because they used those a lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Old_Calendarists
Another thing to keep is mind that the geopolitical map these days looks different. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is not more so a lot of places are now located in either Croatia, Serbia or even Hungary. Let me know if you have any cards or pictures that you could scan in. I will check them for sure in 3 weeks from now, or Yugoslava might even earlier all depending on where we are 
Regards,
Regards,
Sergej
Posted : 14/07/2014 5:48 pm
Topic starter
The best information I have is on the Marriage Certificate. The search of Ellis Island information is negative.
Since it does not appear that I can upload a picture here, I uploaded it as a Blog. Please see it there.
Walt
Posted : 17/07/2014 7:28 pm