Nearly 25 years ago, I posted on a genealogical website the question..."Does anyone know any Crniches in Croatia?" That is pretty much all we knew about our Crnich family line. Twenty-five years ago, the internet, believe it or not, was NOT in every home in the world. Inspite of this insurmountable request, within the week, I received a message from a Joze Crnic, living in Ljulbjana, Slovenia that he knew of a small town in Croatia which had a lot of Crniches living in it. If I wanted him too, he was willing to find a phone number and call to the town to see if anyone knew of the name Mirko & Matilda Crnic.
It was this kind man and a simple phone call, which allowed us to find the town, Mrkopalj, of the Crnich family ancestral village and to begin the process of connecting with our relatives both old and new. I have kept in touch with Joze Crnich by email over the years, each checking in with each other about every 2-3 years or so. Thankfully email addresses did not change.
This week, we were able to meet Joze in Ljubljana and buy him dinner!!!! He is a lovely kind man, and we immediately made a Croatian connection. He was born in Croatia and during the war his father was stationed in Slovenia, where he met and married a Slovene wife, thus Joze has grown up in Slovenia. We marveled together how finding our family was a shot in the dark. He told us about his phone call to Mrkopalj and his talk with the eldest member of the Fire Department (which is where he called). This elderly man knew Matilda & Mrko Crnic and although he did not know where they had moved, he remembered them and told Joze that Matilda was very highly thought of in the village. Joze said, it only took him about 4 hours to find this man and, that he has many times over the years shared the story with friends and co workers, of the miracle of finding this Crnich family for Americans. Dinner took 3 hours as Joze shared thoughts and memories of early life in Croatia and the horrors of war that his father and family went through. He now operates a private business (selling products to sewage treatment plants) here in Slovenia and his wife has just retired. His only son graduated from MIT in the United States in linguistics and is now living in Jerusalem. He has promised us to visit here in Maribor and take us for "country rides" to see the unseen sites of Slovenia....the ones tourists never get to see! We are excited to have finally met him and enjoyed our evening with him. We are so blessed to be able to see the Lord's hand in this family history work.
