Juan Vucetich : Biography, Legacy Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Juan Vucetich

Argentine-Croatian police official

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Spanish. (December 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Spanish Wikipedia article at [[:es:Juan Vucetich]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|es|Juan Vucetich}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Juan Vucetich

Born	Ivan Vučetić (1858-07-20)20 July 1858 Hvar, Kingdom of Dalmatia, Austrian Empire (now Hvar, Croatia)
Died	25 January 1925(1925-01-25) (aged 66) Dolores, Argentina
Resting place	La Plata Cemetery
Known for	Contribution to fingerprinting

Juan Vucetich Kovacevich (born Ivan Vučetić; 20 July 1858 – 25 January 1925) was an Argentine - Croatian anthropologist and police official who pioneered the use of dactyloscopy (fingerprint identification).

Biography

Vucetich was born in Hvar, Kingdom of Dalmatia, then part of the Austrian Empire, and immigrated to Argentina in 1884.^[1]^[2]

In 1891, he began the first filing of fingerprints based on ideas of Francis Galton, which he expanded significantly. He became the director of the Center for Dactyloscopy in Buenos Aires. At the time, he included the Bertillon system alongside the fingerprint files.^[3]

The first positive identification of a criminal was made in 1892, when Francisca Rojas killed her two children, then cut her own throat in an attempt to put the blame on an outside attacker. A bloody print identified her as the killer.^[3] Argentine police adopted Vucetich's method of fingerprinting classification and it spread to police forces all over the world. Vucetich improved his method with new material; he published Dactiloscopía Comparada ("Comparative Dactyloscopy") in 1904.^[4]

Vucetich died in Dolores, Buenos Aires.^[1]

Legacy

The Buenos Aires Provincial Police academy near La Plata is named the Escuela de Policia Juan Vucetich; an eponymous police museum was also founded.^[2]

In Croatia, the Forensic Science Centre Ivan Vučetić in Zagreb also bears his name. The city of Pula has a memorial marker to commemorate his service in the Austro-Hungarian Navy while stationed there.^[5] There is a bust in his native Hvar. In 2023, a museum was opened in Hvar, named in his honor.^[2]

References

^ ^a ^b "Vučetić, Ivan | Hrvatska enciklopedija". www.enciklopedija.hr (in Croatian). Retrieved 20 August 2022.
^ ^a ^b ^c Anđelković, Katarina. "IVAN VUCETIC MUSEUM OF MYSTERY OPENS IN HVAR". Croatia Total News. Hvar, Croatia. Retrieved 5 December 2023.
^ ^a ^b "The History of Fingerprints". Retrieved 26 February 2013.
^ "Juan Vucetich and the origins of forensic fingerprinting". Visible Proofs. Retrieved 26 February 2013.
^ "Otkrivano spomen obilježje Ivanu Vu?eti?u". www.regionalexpress.hr.