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ARTIFACT 015 — PARISH RECORD
ORIGINAL: BOUND PARISH BOOK, OAK BOARDS
KEPT BY: REV. MILUTIN TESLA, OFFICIATING PRIEST
PROVENANCE: SMILJAN ORTHODOX PARISH, LIKA, CROATIA
ACQUIRED: NARA, FROM SERBIAN PATRIARCHATE LOAN, 1971
DECLASSIFIED: 14 MAR 2016

The Smiljan Parish Record — Page 41, Deaths

HOLY ASCENSION ORTHODOX PARISH · SMILJAN, LIKA
REV. MILUTIN TESLA · ENTRY OF 12 AUGUST 1861
Archivist's Note

The bound parish book of Holy Ascension reproduced below was kept, from 1854 through 1879, by the Reverend Milutin Tesla, the subject's father. It is, with the exception of a six-month gap in 1862 during which the Reverend Tesla was indisposed by illness, the complete sacramental record of the parish for that twenty-five-year period.

The page reproduced is the entry for the death of Daniel ("Dane") Tesla, the subject's older brother, on the afternoon of the eleventh of August, 1861, age twelve. The entry is in the Reverend Tesla's hand. It records the cause of death as casus equestris — a fall from a horse — and the circumstance as fractura cervicalis, a broken neck.

No witness statements were taken. No coroner attended. The parish book and the priest's word were, in Smiljan in 1861, the entire civil record.

The reader is asked to note that the entry was made on the twelfth — that is, on the morning following Dane's death, in the kitchen of the parsonage, at a table at which Đuka Tesla, the boy's mother, sat across from the Reverend Tesla while he wrote, and made no remark. The boy Nikola, age five, was upstairs with the door closed.

— W.G., Office of Alien Property, transcribed Feb. 1943; cataloguer's note revised 2016
CHAIN OF CUSTODY: SMILJAN PARISH → SERBIAN PATRIARCHATE (1928) → NARA (1971) → DIGITAL (2016) FOLIO 015 / 112
SEIZED
SECTION 50-A
EXHIBIT 3327-O
☦
Holy Ascension Orthodox Parish
Selo Smiljan, Vojna Krajina, Carstvo Austrijsko
BOOK III · DEATHS · 1854 – 1872 · PAGE 41
No.
Name & Age
Cause
Date
041 · 14
Mara Vukosavljević, vdova — widow Mara Vukosavljević, age 71 —
starost prirodna— natural age —
2 avg. 1861
041 · 15
Dane Tesla, sin svešt. Milutina, 12 g. — Dane Tesla, son of Rev. Milutin, age twelve years —
casus equestris — pad sa konja —
11 avg. 1861
— uzrok smrti: fractura cervicalis, nastala usled pada sa kobile Mačka u polju iza parohijskog doma, popodne, oko 17 časova.
Sahranjen istog dana posle vespere, u presvetom dvorištu, sa istočne strane crkve, kod oca Milutinovog oca.
Pomen tridesetdnevni biće 10. septembra. Pomen godišnji, 11. avgusta naredne godine.
[Translation: Cause of death: cervical fracture, sustained in a fall from the mare Mačak in the field behind the parsonage, in the afternoon, about five o'clock. Buried the same day after vespers, in the most holy churchyard, on the east side of the church, near the grave of Milutin's own father. The thirty-day commemoration shall be the tenth of September. The annual, the eleventh of August in the years to come.]
041 · 16
Petar Janković, dečko od mlinara, 9 g. — Petar Janković, son of the miller, age nine —
groznica— fever —
19 avg. 1861
Milutin Tesla, prot. Sveštenik parohijski, Smiljan
☦ SMILJAN EST. 1763
Cross-references

The entry of 11 August 1861 is the official civil record of the death of Dane Tesla. It is the version of events the family carried — the "easy truth," in the phrase of the subject's later notebooks — and the version against which the parish, the village, and (for sixty-one years) the historical record settled. The subject himself never publicly contradicted it. He was five years old when his father wrote it. He was eighty-six when he wrote, in the third-to-last entry of the Aperture Notebook: "My father wrote what he had to write. He was a good man. He did not know."

The mare Mačak was never destroyed. She lived in the parsonage stable until 1871, when she was sold, in foal, to a farmer at Korenica named Stevan Lovrić. The foal was a colt; he was named Дане by the buyer, who had heard the story.

For the first private record of the same event — the boy's own, in pencil, on the night of the eleventh — see Artifact 002 (Aperture Notebook), page 1.