Swiss Research Resources Part I: Where to look when all you have is a name

Although there is much written on German research sources, I have not found the same amount of space given to Switzerland sources in webinars or at conferences. I decided to do a Google search and came up with several rich Swiss research source and “how-to” sites.

The first document that I would like to recommend is a research guide from Brigham Young University. A portion of the text was actually a 1969 presentation by Professor Dr. C.H. (Hans Conrad) Peyer, former professor at Zurich University in Switzerland, at the World Conference on Records and Genealogical Seminar, titled “Genealogical Research Sources in Switzerland.” Another portion, “Using Swiss Reference & Research Tools” was written by Barbara W. Whiting.

Dr. Peyer knows how to help the novice doing Swiss research, the person who has a target name but little else. He recommends Familiennamenbuchder Schweiz, translated into English as the Swiss Surname Book. Peyer says this source, first published in 1940, is an alphabetical list of Swiss surnames “with reference to which cantons 

and counties they appear in, and since when. This book is really a key to Swiss genealogy.”

I immediately went to the Family History Library catalog to see if the Swiss Surname Book is available on microfiche for loan. The film number is 6053507 and can now be ordered on-line.

After I had placed my order, I did some more on-line searching and found that The Swiss Center of North America  has put a searchable database of the (all/a portion of?) Swiss Surname Book on its site. I found a whole page of Kreises and most were in the canton of Thurgau.

Another tool is at FamilySearch.org that shows a surname distribution map  created from telephone numbers and address databases for a target name in any country on the list provided. I found that the highest concentration of Kreises was in Thurgau, in two cities that were twenty miles apart: Amriswil and Tagerwilen.

Once you have identified the canton (district) from which your ancestor came, Peyer says “for information concerning the time before 1876, (one) should write to the state archives of the canton.” What is the significance of the 1876 date?

In his book, A Sourcebook for genealogical research, Foster Stockwell explains that before 1876, the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Switzerland registered births, marriages and deaths for their congregants. After 1876, this function was ceded to the canton civil government. Church records from 1834-1875 “were given to the registrar’s office in each of the cantons.”

Since Johannes Ulrich Kreis emigrated from Thurgau, Switzerland in 1866, I googled the “State Archives of Thurgau, Switzerland.” 

I composed a letter to the State Archives in which I presented the pertinent facts I know about Johannes Ulrich Kreis (I have very few): his birth date as given on various documents, his date/port of arrival in the US, and his port of embarkation in Europe and asked if they had any records matching this man. I am very fortunate to have a spouse who is a native German speaker. He kindly translated the letter into German for me. When I hear back from the Archives, I will post my findings.

On the subject of whom to write to for information if you know the canton, Barbara Whiting differs from Dr. Peyer. When you are looking for emigration records, Whiting suggests “For information before 1848 write to the state archive of the canton; after 1848 write to the Swiss National Archives. 1848 is a seminal date in Swiss history as that is the year when the Swiss voted-in a constitution to establish a national government.

With just a change of address, I can use my first letter to the Thurgau State Archives and send it to the National Swiss Archives.

Don’t forget about the “backdoor approach” to identifying your ancestor’s canton that I discussed in a post dated February 1, 2012.

To those new to Swiss genealogical research, I hope this post gives you a starting place. When all you have is a target name, like I had with Johannes Ulrich Kreis, you have several sources to help you zero in on the canton(s) where this name may have started and where it appears today. Once you have the canton, you are off and running. You can proceed with the next step of Swiss research which I will cover in Part II.

Categories: genealogy tools

Revisit, Review, Rethink – the 3 R’s for all your genealogical research

Genealogy is an art and a science. You spend time searching out bits of information like a scientist. Then, like an artist, you arrange these bits together to tell the story of an ancestor.

If you are like me, you have many family files (electronic and paper) where you store documentation. You may also work on a couple of family lines at once (even though many genealogical gurus suggest concentrating on one line at a time). And if you have been interested in your family history for a while, your research been going on for several years.

 Over the years, we genealogists collect evidence about our ancestors’ lives, but this process often happens in dribs and drabs. We may find a birth record for someone one year and nothing else for two years. Then suddenly a death record for that person appears on a database. This is the time to revisit our family file. Take time to reread and review everything that we have found on this ancestor. We may see connections in view of the new information on the death record. As we rethink any conclusions, beliefs, theories that we have made before on this person’s life in view of this new information, several things may happen. We may discard part or all of a former belief or we may find new evidence that solidifies a theory we hoped was true.

So, the first reason for the 3 R’s is that genealogical research is an on-going process with new information showing up at anytime that is then added to the cumulative file.

The second reason to revisit, review and rethink our family information is a fact of the human brain. It seems that no matter how closely we study records that we find, we often miss some fact or another. And on the second, third or fourth reading (spread out over time), a piece of information will suddenly jump out at us that we have overlooked before. Or something we have read over and over will take on a new significance due to some new record we have found.

A big part of genealogical research is consulting online databases, such as FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com, to name two of the largest and most commonly used. These databases are not static; new additions are regularly being added to the collections. An example is the 1940 US Census that has just been released and will be added. This ever evolving nature of databases is the third reason for the 3 R’s – we need to revisit and review the genealogical record collections for each of our ancestral lines in order to be sure we don’t miss new information. We need to rethink our search parameters. Who knows what exciting family facts we can uncover. This is what happened to me recently.

I have searched Ancestry.com for information on my paternal great, great grandfather, John Kreis several times over the years. I have searched under “John Kreis” and just “Kreis” in the general search window. I have located John in several census records and in a naturalization record. I learned that he was born in Switzerland but I have not yet found what village/town he was from.

 In my post of 2/1/2012 I discussed looking at old Swiss birth records in FamilySearch.org for men named “Johannes Ulrich Kreis” (which is my John’s original German name) and discovering that all of these men were born in the Thurgau District of Switzerland. This gave me the idea that my great, great grandfather was likely born there also. But I needed more documentation. What about military records?

In the past, I searched on Ancestry under military records and found a WWI draft registration card for John’s son, Henry Kreis, who was my great grandfather, but not a card for John Kreis. Here is where the rethinking comes in. Why not try a search for a WWI draft card under a different parameter? What about widening the search for any man with the last name of Kreis and the birth place of Switzerland? Maybe I could find a cousin/uncle of my John whose records might have more detail than John's. Maybe I could find the district or even village in Switzerland where the Kreises came from.

Back to Ancestry.com. On the search tab on the first screen, I moved my mouse to “search.” On the drop-down menu, I chose “military.” At the bottom of the next screen, I clicked on “US WWI Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18.”  When the search screen came up, I put only “Kreis” in the “Last Name” field and “Switzerland” in the “Birthplace” field.

 “George Kreis” appeared at the top of a long list. He was from “Hoboken, Hudson County, New Jersey.” Now this was interesting. My John Kreis had lived in Essex County, NJ which is adjacent to Hudson. When I clicked on the name “George Kreis”, his draft card came up. His place of birth was Switzerland with a district given! It was St. Gallen. A look at a Swiss map showed St. Gallen (SG) to be the district next to Thurgau (TG). 

Permission to copy granted under Free Software Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Swiss_cantons_brown.png

I decided to do some more digging in the Ancestry Swiss databases.   This led me to the Swiss Overseas Emigration, 1910-1953 database and this is where I struck gold. I found the emigration card for George Kreis and on this document was written the Swiss village where he was born. It was Neukirch in the Thurgau District! His last place of residence before he emigrated was St. Gallen.

So now I had a person to research who shared a surname with my ancestor, who lived in the same area of NJ, and who was born in the area of Switzerland where I theorized my ancestor came from. This new and crucial information led to another discovery – a living Kreis who descended from George. I will discuss this outcome in a later post.

I had a whole new avenue to pursue because I followed the 3 R’s of genealogical research: revisit, review, and rethink. Try it and see the benefits for yourself.

Categories:  census, document types, genealogy professional

Can’t Find the Answer? Derive It!

Budget makers often talk of “backing into a number". In other words, you don’t start with the number; you derive it or calculate it from the data you have.

This same thinking process can be used with genealogical research. You may have a piece of information but not the whole story. You may need to derive part of the story that is missing by looking at the data you can find and drawing a conclusion.

My great, great grandfather, Johannes Ulrich Kreis, called “John” in America, was born in Switzerland. This information came from several records, including census documents from 1910, 1920 and 1930, his naturalization card, and his death certificate.

Like most genealogists, now that I had the country he was from, I wanted to know more – where in Switzerland was he born?  After looking for months over the records I already had and scouring the internet for any ones I had missed, I still was no closer to finding John’s birth town.

This is the point where I decided to try “deriving” the answer from existing data. I went to FamilySearch.org and put in the name “Johannes Ulrich Kreis” as I was hoping to find some European records. I was surprised to find pages and pages of men with this name, born between the 1700s and 1900s. What was most interesting was that all the persons were from the same district of Switzerland – Thurgau -- see upper right hand corner of country bordering on Lake Konstanz (Constance) in map below:

From Nations Online Project http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/index.html

Now I had something to go on. I had narrowed the field. Suddenly my search for John Kreis’s birth town had become more focused – there was some evidence that he was born in Thurgau. I could focus my efforts on one district in Switzerland instead of laboring on all the districts which would be overwhelming and so time consuming!

But I found that I could narrow the target (John’s possible birth place) even more. As I looked over the search results, I saw that several towns or villages kept reappearing in the list: Arbon, Egnach, Ermatingen, Neukirch an der Thur, Sitterdorf, Weinfelden and Zihlschlacht.

Now I had some data that was narrow enough to actually do something with. I needed to see if any living Kreises were to be found in those seven most commonly occuring towns. This is where the old fashioned telephone directory, now on-line, comes in handy. I first went to Numberway which is a “free…guide to telephone directories on the web.”  It is “the easy way to find phone numbers all around the world.” When I selected “Switzerland” on the Numberway search page, I was directed to the official Swisscom White Pages. In the search window, I put “Thurgau, Switzerland” and searched for Kreis as the last name. I searched by several first names in until I had quite a number of people to contact. To narrow the field, I filtered by town/village, looking only at the seven towns of interest.

Now, here is where I have some special help that may not be readily available to many genealogists. My husband, Bert, is German and is totally bi-lingual in German and English. What good luck for me that my Kreis line is from German-speaking Switzerland! Instead of me calling the Kreis men on the list and hoping they can speak English, Bert will call in German!

I created a script that Bert could use to begin his conversations. He then translated the script into German. In order to capture main points in the conversations, I created a “recording form”.

Now the preparations are ready and Bert can begin calling. As we collect some data, I will be able to write a post about our experience. And just maybe I might be able to dervive some answers to my Kreis family history puzzle.

Categories: research terms

Serendipity in Genealogical Research

Have you ever noticed how diligent working on records can only get you so far in hunting for information on your ancestors? So many times we search for years for tiny glimpses into the lives of our forbears. Sometimes it seems that we go for weeks or even months without seeing any light on a particular question we are trying to answer.

But then, voila, something incredible happens. We get a lucky break. We find a massive clue in a place we wouldn’t ordinarily be looking. We find a person, just by chance, who has valuable information to give us. This wonderful phenomenon is known as “serendipity”.  

 

Just a few weeks ago, in early November, I had a serendipitous experience. I was doing a Google search on my Kreis line. I have been confused about John Kreis’ birth place as it is stated as “Switzerland” in some documents and as “Germany” in others. Just on a whim, I typed “Kreis surname: Switzerland” in Google. The second item that came up was the “Krise Surname DNA Project”. 

And right under this title were these words:

“Another surname in this group is Kreis. ... in the Habsburg project, two more matching profiles in the FTDNA databank belong to living Swiss men named Kreis. ...”

Well, this certainly got my attention. I clicked on the “About this Group” tab at the top of the page. There I found the purpose of the group:

 “The Krise Surname DNA Project has been established to create a databank of Y-DNA profiles of families with variations on the surname Krise. The primary purpose is to provide a basis for documenting and distinguishing different family lines which share a common surname.”

Now I was really excited; I wanted to communicate with this group. Here I might find another research tool.

 On the same page I found the name of the project administrator, Gary Kriss, and his e-mail address. I e-mailed Gary and introduced him to my Kreis line, starting with Johann (John) Ulrich Kreis and mentioned that I would like to join his project. Gary responded on the same day.

First, he said that he would welcome me to the group but the only way to get in was to get a yDNA test from a Kreis male cousin. Now, this was perfect timing! I had wanted to ask my cousin, Frank Kries, to take a yDNA test. I guess I was just waiting for an opportune time. I called Frank and he agreed. I was on the phone ordering the test from FamilyTree DNA.

In his first message, Gary gave me some invaluable background on the Kriss/Krise/Kreis/Kries surname that he had done. He said that he tended to believe that Switzerland was the origin of his Kriss forbears and perhaps mine also. And he offered this startling fact:

“We have living genetic cousins in Switzerland who spell their name Kreis. Since the Habsburg Project identifies our deeper roots in Switzerland and your family tradition recalls Swiss roots, there is a good chance that you are part of our genetic family. But the only way to prove that is with Y-DNA.”

This was the first glimmer of hope that I had in trying to pinpoint where John Ulrich Kreis was born. I will find out more when Frank takes the DNA test.



Gary also told me that his family’s American origins are in Pennsylvania and Maryland. I know that one of the families that the Kreises married into, Hausmann/Hannaman, also landed in PA on their way to NJ and IL. Perhaps the Kreis clan also spent some time in PA.

I feel so lucky to have found Gary Kriss and the Krise Surname DNA Project. It is wonderful to find others who have been bitten by the genealogical bug. This one lucky break has moved my research on the Kreis line a step forward.

Categories: DNA