If your great-grandfather dug kauri gum in Northland and came from somewhere between Makarska and the Neretva, there is a good chance the Croatian Citizenship Act now reaches you. Until recently it did not.
The Croatian State Office for Croats Abroad, citing New Zealand government figures, puts the number of Croats and their descendants in New Zealand at more than 100,000. The same page records that somewhat more than 2,500 of them hold Croatian citizenship.
For most of them it was not legally possible, until 2020.
The old law stopped at the third degree.
A great-grandparent was one generation too far. In gum digger families the emigrant is almost always a great-grandparent, and often further back than that.
On 1 January 2020 the generational limit was removed.
There is now no limit on how many generations sit between you and the emigrant.
The dates are in your favour.
The Act asks that the emigrant left before 8 October 1991. A man who sailed in 1924 is more than sixty years inside that line.
For a gum digger family, the case usually turns on three things.
- Which village he was born in, because that determines which register holds his record.
- That the line is documented. A birth record for every generation from him down to you.
- When and where you can lodge. There is no Croatian embassy in New Zealand, which affects the timing.
Not sure whether your line qualifies? Send me the names and dates and I'll tell you what I see.
Where your family came from, and why they left
The emigration to New Zealand was not spread across Croatia. It came from a small and well documented area.
Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, describes the origin of Dalmatians who came before 1949 as a seventy kilometre coastal strip running from Makarska to the mouth of the Neretva, the hinterland districts of Vrgorac and Metković, the islands of Korčula, Hvar, Brač and Vis, and part of the Pelješac peninsula.
Within that strip, one village supplied more people than any other. In his study of Dalmatian settlement, Anthony Trlin found that between 1890 and 1939 Podgora accounted for close to twelve per cent of all naturalised Dalmatian migrants to New Zealand, roughly three hundred people. The Croatian government's diaspora office describes almost the whole movement as coming from Makarska and the villages around it, then from the islands.
What pushed them out
Dalmatia in the 1880s was under Austro-Hungarian rule, and a growing population was living off very little land. Three things then arrived close together.
- A trade agreement between Austria-Hungary and Italy, signed on 6 December 1891, opened the empire to cheap Italian wine and undercut Dalmatian growers. It is called the wine clause, and it ran for about a decade.
- Phylloxera, an insect that kills grapevines by attacking the roots, reached Dalmatia in the 1890s and worked through the vineyards over the following decade. It had already destroyed much of the wine industry across Europe.
- Austrian military conscription took young men out of families that needed them. Sources differ on the length of service, but the effect on emigration is not disputed.
Vines and olives were the crops on that coast, and wine was what brought money in. When the vines and the market failed within a few years of each other, men went where there was work, and word came back that there was work digging kauri gum in New Zealand.
A note on the word Austrian. Your ancestor's papers may say Austria, Austria-Hungary or Yugoslavia rather than Croatia, because the state he was born under may have changed more than once in his lifetime. That does not change where he was born, and where he was born is what the Croatian Citizenship Act is interested in.
The gumfields, and the law that pushed them to naturalise
Dalmatians appear on the Northland gumfields from about 1885. The work was digging kauri gum out of swamp and clay with a spear and a spade, living in huts of mānuka poles and sacking, and selling to a storekeeper on credit. In the 1890s some twenty thousand people were involved in the gum industry, seven thousand of them full time, and across the second half of the century gum was Auckland's main export, ahead of gold, wool and kauri timber.
They were resented for it. In 1893 what was called the Austrian question became an election issue and the government appointed a commission. A second commission, in 1898, described Dalmatians as "hardy, sober, industrious, law-abiding people" who would make admirable settlers. Parliament passed the Kauri Gum Industry Act the same year anyway, creating gum reserves on government land that could be worked only by British subjects, Māori and naturalised New Zealanders. Further restrictions followed, and under an Act of 1910 only British subjects could hold a gum digging licence at all.
If your ancestor took British nationality in the 1900s, 1910s or 1920s, that was very often not a change of heart. It was how he stayed allowed to work.
Does that naturalisation break your claim?
Article 11 of the Citizenship Act is about emigrants and their descendants. What it asks is that your ancestor emigrated from Croatia before 8 October 1991, and that you can document the line of descent from him to you. It does not ask that he kept a Croatian citizenship, and for a man born under Austria-Hungary this doesn't make sense. Taking a foreign nationality is what emigrants do.
I have not found a published Ministry statement dealing with this point directly, so treat the above as reading the Act rather than quoting a rule.
Where the naturalisation file genuinely helps you is as evidence. It is a New Zealand government document, usually stating his place of birth and his date of arrival.
If the other side of your family is Māori
From the early 1890s, Dalmatian men in the Far North began marrying Māori women. Te Ara puts the first recorded marriage in 1891 without naming the couple. The one recorded in detail came the year after: Andrija Klešković, digging gum at Houhora, married Erina Kaaka of Ngāi Takoto, from Te Kao, at St Saviour's Church in Kaitaia in 1892.
Te Ara records that Dalmatians got on well with the northern iwi Te Aupōuri, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu and Ngāti Kurī, who gave them the name tararā. Accounts of where the word comes from differ: some say it was the rolled Croatian r, others the speed of the speech. Descendants use it now as a name for themselves.
Some practical points:
- Your Māori descent has no effect on your eligibility, in either direction. Article 11 looks at one line: the line from the emigrant to you. Everything else in your whakapapa is simply irrelevant to it. Nothing about the application asks you to be one thing rather than another.
- Nor do you need to speak Croatian, live in Croatia, or give up your New Zealand passport. Article 11 sets aside the residence requirement, the language and culture exam and the release from foreign citizenship that other applicants face. It does not set aside everything: you still have to respect the legal order, have no unsettled public dues, and present no objection on national security grounds.
There is a second route worth knowing about. Article 16 covers members of the Croatian people abroad, and active participation in Croatian cultural, scientific or sporting associations abroad is one of the four things the Act names as evidence of belonging. If your family has been in a Croatian club, that is written into the law as relevant. It is not a qualification on its own, and for most gum digger families Article 11 is the more straightforward route.
Dame Mira Szászy, the first Māori woman to graduate from Auckland University College, was the daughter of the gum digger Lovro Petricevich and Makareta Raharuhi of Ngāti Kurī. These are not marginal families in New Zealand history.
Where the records actually are
On the Croatian side
Civil registration as we now know it began in Croatia in May 1946. For anyone born on that coast between roughly 1870 and 1930, the records are in a parish register.
Those books sit in one of a small number of places. Registers whose last entry is more than a hundred years old pass to the state archives, which for this coast means the Državni arhiv u Splitu. Its collection of registers, catalogued as HR-DAST-179, runs from 1570 to 1948. Some books remain with the parish. Others are with the archdiocesan archive in Split, because Makarska sits inside the Split-Makarska archdiocese rather than having a diocese of its own. The Franciscan monastery in Makarska holds a significant archive too, though that is a monastic and Ottoman era collection rather than a set of parish registers.
For anything after 1946, requests go to one office: the registry office in Makarska. It covers the whole stretch of coast, so Podgora, Igrane, Drašnice, Živogošće, Drvenik and Zaostrog all go there, whichever village name your family uses.
| What you want | Where it is likely to be |
|---|---|
| Birth before 1946 | Parish register: Državni arhiv u Splitu, the archdiocesan archive in Split, or the parish itself |
| Birth after 1946 | Matični ured Makarska |
| Marriage in the village | Same as above, by date |
| Anything digitised | FamilySearch's Croatian church books collection, which is indexed but covers only the parishes microfilmed in the 1990s |
FamilySearch is free and worth searching, but it only covers some parishes, and a few of its images can only be viewed at a FamilySearch centre. Matricula, which people are often pointed to, has nothing for Croatia.
Requests from abroad are answered, but slowly. The Ministry puts delivery of an extract at about two months.
On the New Zealand side
- Naturalisation files. Archives New Zealand holds naturalisation records from the 1840s onward and the pre-1949 register has been digitised. Files are restricted until a hundred years after the person's birth or forty years after death, whichever comes first, so for a man born before 1900 this is usually open now.
- Passenger lists. Commercial passenger lists from 1883 onward are held by Archives New Zealand, and those more than a hundred years old are indexed by name on FamilySearch, currently covering arrivals to 1925. Arrivals after that have to go through Archives New Zealand directly.
- Community records. The Dalmatian Genealogical and Historical Society keeps an archive at Villa Dalmacija, 10 New North Road, Eden Terrace in Auckland, covering family photographs, documents, oral histories and gum industry material. It is open by appointment.
- Births, deaths and marriages. The New Zealand historical BDM index is free to search online and will give you the generations between him and you.
It may be easiest to start with the New Zealand records. They are indexed, in English, and free, and his naturalisation file or passenger record will often give you the village, which is what makes the Croatian search possible.
If you want administrative support with a Croatian citizenship application, that is what I do: working out which pathway applies, preparing the documents, and coordinating the apostille and translation.
Tell me about your familyWhat to do first
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Find the village, not the region
You need the settlement he was born in, because that is what decides which register and which archive. This is often found in his New Zealand naturalisation file.
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Draw the line on paper
Him, then each generation, down to you. Every step needs a birth record, and every name change on the way needs a marriage record to explain it.
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Check the exclusions
He must have left before 8 October 1991, which for a gum digger is never in doubt.
Article 11, paragraph 5 then excludes three groups: anyone who emigrated under an international treaty or gave up Croatian citizenship, anyone who moved to another part of the former Yugoslavia rather than leaving it, and anyone who left without having held Croatian republic citizenship or zavičajnost, the old municipal belonging right. For a man who left the Makarska coast for New Zealand, none of these normally applies.
And if your ancestor was a Croat who left from Bosnia or Herzegovina rather than Croatia itself, Article 11, paragraph 4 covers him separately.
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Only then think about lodging
There is no Croatian embassy in New Zealand. Applications are handled by the Embassy in Canberra, which holds occasional consular days in Auckland and Wellington. Three of your documents, your birth certificate, your marriage certificate if you have one, and your police check, are only accepted while they are under six months old. Those two things together decide your timeline. I have written that up separately in the guide to applying from New Zealand.
You are not guaranteed Croatian citizenship because of your ancestor. You apply for it, and the Ministry ultimately decides.
Send me the name, the village and roughly when they left, and I'll tell you which article looks relevant.
Send me the family line