Some documents of the Ivanaj family were preserved by the Albanian government in the Archives of the State in Tirana. They consists of 55 dossiers for Dr. Martin Ivanaj and 45 dossiers for Prof. Mirash Ivanaj, amounting to over 22,000 pages, which were cataloged and microfiched as recently as 1988.

This collection is in no particular order, as the properties were confiscated by the Italian occupying forces in 1939, and at the end of World War II the residence and its contents were appropriated when Prof. Mirash Ivanaj was arrested and imprisoned for political reasons. These papers consist of personal correspondence, some family photographs and household records, but the majority of the collection represents prepared works of all sorts by the Ivanaj brothers. They include handwritten poetry and literary pieces, in Serbo-Croatian, dating back to 1902, composed during their youth while studying in Belgrade; a full length mythological drama in Italian, written while they attended the University in Rome, Italy, in the 1920's; texts of teaching materials in various faculties, such as literature, history, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and many legal proceedings in civil and penal laws.

Most of the personal -- and now historical -- documents of the family, however, were saved by Giuseppina Ivanaj (Dr. Martin's wife) for several years in Italy, and they were eventually transferred to the United States in the 1970's by their daughter, Drita, who still lives in New York City. In 1998, thanks to an Albanian professor, teaching in Belgrade, Drita Ivanaj obtained photocopies of the works that her father and uncle wrote in Belgrade, which were published in several literary magazines and newspapers in the early 1900's, and are still preserved in the Archives of that city. A recent English version of two poems by Mirash Ivanaj can be seen here. All of the documents in her possession will be sorted, organized, cataloged, and exhibited in the Ivanaj Institute in Tirana, hopefully in the not too distant future, also in cooperation with the National Archives of Tirana.

In 1991 Drita Ivanaj found in Italy a copy of the thesis that Martin Ivanaj defended at the University of Rome in 1921 when he became Doctor of Jurisprudence. In 1993 in the National Archives of Tirana she also found a sketch of the family tree, handwritten by Dr. Martin Ivanaj that traces the male generations of the Ivanajs back 500 years to the time of Skanderbeg. Since then, Drita Ivanaj has researched the family history whenever the occasion has presented itself and more facts continue to surface including the discovery of relatives, who live since the turn of the 19th century in northern Albania and Montenegro, and others that have emigrated many decades ago to the Great Lakes region of the United States.

Martin and Mirash Ivanaj were the youngest of 8 children of Doda and Zoga, who died respectively in 1913 and 1916. They had an older brother, Zef, who, although married, died young in 1911 and left no children, and five sisters, who also lived in these northern regions. Some of them had children and grandchildren, now forming almost six generations. Mirash remained a bachelor, and the only daughter of Martin, Drita, seems to be the last living heir, bearing the family name of Ivanaj.

One of the most prized possession of the Ivanaj brothers, was their personal and private library, the only one of its kind in the country, since there were no public ones available in those days. It comprised more than 16,600 volumes and 20 private manuscripts. The manuscripts unfortunately are lost and the books are dispersed and many of them are now in the National Public Library of Tirana.
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