Engage in research of family roots in the area of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina is very arduous, painstaking, lengthy and uncertain business. I believe that this is more difficult in Bosnia and Herzegovina than in any other European country. Bosnia is a country where the every fifty years a war is a part of history, lifestyle, way of thinking, and fate prerequisites unhappy situation of the Balkans in the windswept interests of nations stronger than us on the east or west side of the world.. Bosnians could never appreciate and preserve their past, much less know how to build a future. It has been this way from the beginning and has not changed until today.

Yet, in the nineteenth century, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the new ruler of the Austro-Hungarian state, Bosnia started seeing a small transformation toward a much better organization in many areas. In Bihac, in the year 1888 there are established land records from which they derive oldest written information about the Cetic family.

It seemed to me that the most logical way is to start with a birth certificate and records of the dead in Bihac, and compare them with what I had recorded as oral narratives in the form of video and audio files, and data gathered from the tombstones in the family cemetery in Hatinac. After comparing a number of cases that have appeared to contradict data, I discovered that the data from the registry office burned in the Second World War. The new lists were conducted so that the new government had sent workers to homes to gather the new master data based on the narratives of family fathers.This was a mistake on 'tactics' because even though fathers are the traditional 'head of the family', they often have no idea or just guess when their children were born. Mothers, of course, remember the birth of their children from quite natural reasons. Therefore, in cases where disagreement exist between the data registry offices and mothers sayings, I gave the advantage to what mothers said.

I managed to put together a family tree starting with Began Hoxha Cetic and his wife Feza Krezic, to which are carried furthest oral traditions and written documents from the registry offices.The connection between current Cetic branches in Bihac, which their descendants have in the memory was very clear: Began had two sons, Mustafa and Hasan ( possible daughters still remain a mystery! ). Mustafa's sons Ibrahim and Beco are carriers of today's descendants of Muharram, Hussein, Remzija and Sherrif Cetic. Hasan's descendants are those who belong to a branch of Mehmed Cetic, whom everyone knows as Mehmed Sooty.Branches belonging to the descendants Saban Cetic, aka Dedo, remains unclear at that time. There were some sort of theories and stories but there was no evidence that supported them. For example, aunt, Hadzera Alagic remembers that Hase Nukic called Beco Cetic like uncle Beco. My sister Vesna, which is in the land registry in Bihac, discovered information about the inheritance of property related to this branch (see the link Sources - Izvodi iz zemljišnih knjiga - Jašar ). We finally put together the complete data and went back one more generation in that family branch. This is the first time that the name Jasar Cetic appears, which was probably Began's brother. If we carefully analyze the family tree for generations (horizontal), Jasar and further generations have the best fit to the generations after that, if we assume that he was the brother of Began. At this point I have no hard evidence for this assumption, but I hope the additional information about Began in the Vienna archives, which is being explored, will help.

Of course the question of all questions is from where and when did the Cetics appeared in Bihac? It has long been known that there was a wealthy family Cetic of Orthodox faith in Prijedor before the World War II. We know from the story that the Prijedor and Bihac Cetics visited each other, but what their mutual family connection is we did not know exactly. How did it happen that some of the Cetic family are Orthodox and some Muslim?

One day I was searching for Serbo-English dictionary on the Internet, and it ran on the writing of HP printers in the PC Press. The author was Milan Cetic! Without any intention, or hope, I sent him an email as the man with the same surname, and got an answer how and when Cetics are actually incurred! From Milan I found that Cetics, according to the story of his great-grandfather, originated in the eighteenth century. In a place called the Majkica Japra in the mountain Grmec at that time there was some sort of local conflict, the presumption is against the Turks, after which a family escaped and changed their surname to Cetic. It is not entirely positive, but there is a good chance that the prior surname was Majkic. Some ended up in Bihac, and others in Prijedor, where a few families still live in Resavci ( see the link Sources - Milan Cetic). Interestingly, some descendants of both branches between the two world wars, were very rich and lived well. Cetics from Prijedor were the owners of the biscuit factory "Cetic" (see thei link Sources - Fabrika keksa Cetic). while those from Bihac had produce shoes. The biscuit factory in Prijedor is still working very successfully under the name of 'Mira ' ( the majority owner of Kras - Zagreb ), while the shops producing and selling leather products burned and disappeared forever from Bihac after the Second World War.

According to the book Nikola Radic - Old Bihac families, Cetics came from Lika. This cannot be fully explained though. It is possible that Cetics first fled from Majkica Japra to Lika, and then their descendants have appeared in Bihac! ( see the link: Sources - Nikola Radic - Stare bihacke porodice, 2008) . According to the testimony of aunt Aida Smigic and the story of Dusan Cetic from Belgrade, there are Cetic families in Konjic since the early nineteenth century. Some descendants of these Cetics underway World War II converted to the Catholic religion and live in Capljina. ( see the link Sources - Aida Šmigic - Porijeklo Cetica ).

Finally, a logical question: how and when did the Majkic’s appear? I could not find a better answer than the one offered by Karanovic Nikola in his study "Pounje in Bosanska Krajina":

According to this book the ancestor of our family Cetic was some Gvozden. From the war he brought the iron in his leg and so he was named Gvozden (Iron Man). He had three sons: one had the name Marko, but they called him Marjan, the second (they don't know his name) was called Majka (Mother), and the third was too wise, so he was called Mudrica (Wise Man). Of those sons have become families Marjanovic, Majkic and Mudrinic.