There is a Skuce family in California with many branches. They are descended from Đuro Skvrce and his wife Marija Sablić who emigrated from Pločice, Konavle, around 1910 and changed their surname to Skuce. When I was a boy, there was a Nick Skuce, my mother’s second cousin, who occasionally visited my family near Fresno, CA. I learned this history of the Skvrce/Skuce family, as described above, from my mother. In 1999, when I first visited Croatia to find genealogical information on my...

Here is an interesting exercise that will show you what Konavle looked like in 1837. In 1837, the Austrian government sent out teams of surveyors to map the property in what is today Croatia. The purpose was for tax assessment. Five or six copies of these maps were made, and today they can be found in several Croatian archives but, interestingly, not in the Dubrovnik archive. The copy shown below was probably from the main Croatian archive in Zagreb. To see these maps, go to Arcanum maps:...

In 1994, Croatian money was switched from dinar to kuna. It changed to the euro (€) on 1 Jan. 2023. In the Croatian language, a kuna is a marten (related to the weasel and mink). In ancient times, kuna pelts were export items from many regions of what is today Croatia. Around 1000 AD, the towns of Cres and Beli (on the island of Cres) had to pay an annual tribute in kuna pelts to the Venetian authorities. This was the first known instance of kuna pelts being used directly as payment....