The New Croatian Telephone Directory (both White & Yellow Pages) that was released in March of 2009 brings some exciting new resources to genealogists interested in Croatian family history. This directory is probably one of the most comprehensive as well as most accurate publicly available source of personal data about Croatian people on the internet.

By using it, a genealogist can find out in which Croatian regions a particular surname is most frequently found. A comprehensive and very useful map of the Republic of Croatia, when connected with the data about surnames, can give a direction to a genealogist where to continue his or her search.

So we are offering an online help on how to use the new Croatian Directory, from the genealogist’s perspective.

The new Directory can be found at the internet address http://imenik.tportal.hr/

1) Changing the language

Upon accessing the Croatian Telephone Directory, you will find out that it is available in quite a few languages. They are indicated by flags of respective countries in the upper right corner of the screen.

However, the actual White Pages database search is available only in Croatian and English, whereas the interface of the Croatian geographical map is additionally available in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and Esperanto.

By clicking the flag of the United Kingdom (second from the left), the interface in English will be opened.

2) Starting a surname search

Although you can start your surname search at the very first page of the screen by entering the surname in Who? What? field, we would recommend that you click at the Directory link which will lead you to an interface for searching Croatian White Pages.

Upon clicking the Directory link, a new form will show on the screen where you can enter the family name you are looking for, in the Name / Family name field.

If you don’t have Croatian diacritical letters available on your keyboard (č, ć, đ, š, ž), don’t worry – you simply enter the surname without diacritical marks, and the search engine will still yield correct results.

For example, by entering Durasinovic, you will get Durasinović, Đurasinović & Đurašinović surnames listed on the result page.

 3) Advanced surname search

If you want to refine search parameters, so that you get fewer results, you can use other fields of the White Pages Search.

In the Name / Family Name field, a surname should be put. Only the Name / Family Name field is required, and should be filled with at least three characters (letters).

Since the White Pages search can also be used for searching the database of small businesses, in the Family Name field can also be put name of a business.

In the Name field, a first given name can be entered.

In the Place / Location field, the user can enter name of the city, town or village for the surname we are looking for.

In the Street field, the user can put the name of the street. Be aware that the street number shouldn’t be entered.

We can also limit the search to just one of 21 Croatian counties (županija). This can be done by choosing one of the counties from the County drop down menu.

And finally, we can limit our search to a particular dial code by choosing it from the Dial Code drop down menu. Since dial codes, with the exception of mobile network codes, strictly correspond with boundaries of Croatian counties, there is not much sense to choose different dial code if we already limited our search by choosing a particular county, and vice versa.

Upon entering data in all the fields by clicking the Search button we can get the results page.

4) Explanation of the Results Page

After you click the search button, the list of names will be shown, unless your search parameters do not yield any results. In that case, instead of the results page, a warning message will be shown above the area for entering parameters: Your search didn’t return any subscribers. You should try with another data.

If your search does yield results, you will see the list consisting of the surname followed by the name of the person. Below the name and the surname, there is the address of the person with the ZIP code and the city.

On the right, there is the phone number without international dialing code for Croatia. There you can also find the red the Map button which lead you directly to the spot on the map of that person’s location.

If you want to refine your search, click the link Start new search and you will be brought back to the parameters page, where you can change your search parameters.

How to dial a number found in the Directory?

To dial a phone number in Croatia that you found in the Directory, you have to follow this pattern:

035 471708 should be dialed as +385 35 471708

You dial international access code of your country (in the US & Canada it is 011, in Europe 00) followed by Croatia country code 385 and then the area code without leading zero (in this example 35) followed by the phone number (in this example 471708).

Image: Garvid, Wikimedia Commons