Kurt, Several points of information to add to this stew: 1) The officers (both commissioned and non-commissioned) of the "border guard" were almost all Austrian ("of German extraction" as you say). The Austrians also had some military posts along the Dalmation coast (and I'm sure other places) outside this military border area. I have seen in some Split records I've checked a limited amount of intermarriage between these "Germans" and the local population as one would expect. So there's a possibility your "German" ancestor was in the military although I suspect the chances were less likely of intermarriage with the peasant farmers in the military border area. 2) The church records in the 1700s in some of the Dalmatian islands were all kept in Italian with some Glagolytic records earlier. The peasant farmers were all designated in Italian as "rustics" or "pastorals" or "farmers" if their "occupations" were noted at all. The village records (also in Italian) just in from Split only go back to around 1800. There they were also called "rustics" or "illiterate rustics." They were also all farmers but I think the vocabulary used depended more on the decision of the local priest than on the individuals recorded. Back then they were nearly all subsitance farmers in most small Croatian villages. 3) "Half the men" meant that half males of all the families settled on the farmland in the military border area had to attend training and be available for sudden call up. The Austrians also used men from these border units to fill out their armies in some of the continental campaigns. Indeed, when Napolean's French army marched down the Dalmatian coast around 1805/06 and took it from the Austrians and made it part of the French Empire briefly (until he lost it all and had to give it back only a few years later) he took some of the militsary border units he had just conquered from the Austrians and swapped them into his French army. If I remember correctly without checking, these Croatians were given a good amount of the credit for saving Marshal Fey's army from defeat at Berenzina(sp?). 4) US Naturalization could occur via any level of court jurisdiction (county, state, federal) so you may have to check several different courts in the same location depending. Jim