Damian’s Websurf on Swiss Genealogie

Many of you might be familiar with the Australian SBS TV series “Who do you think you are” (http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/whodoyouthinkyouare) wherein celebrities, with the help of a team of experts, research their ancestry. As immigrants to this beautiful country we sometimes wonder where our roots lay. I myself was interested to see whether I could draw my own family tree. Starting with pen and paper, I soon found out how difficult it was, to plot down the information I had previously gathered and how to share my findings with my family. This is until I found www.myheritage.ch which allows anyone to create their own family tree on the web for free. This Genealogie webpage offers a secure and easy platform in which you can research your family history online. It also has fantastic tools that allow you to add in as much or as little information as you might find about your ancestors.

Railway Station in Sisikon Switzerland, my great-grandfather ist the gentlmen in the middle

When I started my research I only had the names of about 30 members of my family, such as uncles and aunts, my grandparents and cousins. After a call to my parents in Switzerland I received more names, such as brothers and sisters of their parents, which gave me a starting point for my purely web based family research.

Donauer family portrait, featuring another great-grandfather

One of my first steps was to use several search engines such as www.google.ch, www.search.ch, and www.bing.ch to see what I could find, simply by typing in the first and last names. This already yielded great results and I was able to add the information very easily into the www.myheritage.ch homepage. I then stumbled across a search engine which takes the hassle out of looking in various spots, www.123people.ch, which is a dedicated ‘people searcher’. It displays on one page all results such as phone numbers, addresses, blog entries, documents and weblinks.

Knowing that my grandfather Alfred Schaller had been a politician for many years in the Regierungsrat of Basel as well as Swiss Nationalrat, I also had a look at the ‘Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz’ (www.hls-dhs-dss.ch) where people and events that are of significance in any way to Switzerland are listed. This fantastic webpage offers many great services, including the Familiennamenbuch der Schweiz (www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/famn/), which lists every single Swiss family name including their town of citizenship and the origin of the name itself. In my case, this proved my mothers suspicion that her great-grandmother came from the canton of Graubünden.

My grandfather Alfred Schaller with colleagues from the Basel parliament

Already I was adding more and more names, dates and events to my online family tree when, after a conversation with some friends back home, the idea came up that every Swiss canton must have its own online archive. This was a very important point, as data within such archives is not displayed in regular search engines, such as Google. I therefore started my research on the Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt (www.staatsarchiv.bs.ch) as this is where my father and his siblings were born. Such archives exist in every state, which means as long as you know where someone was either born, married or has died you will be likely to find something. A good source of information regarding employment or any commercial ventures your relatives have started is the Handelsamtsblatt, the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, which can be found at www.sogc.ch.

My great-granduncle Friedrich Donauer was a writer and Swiss historian and unearthed the Gesslerburg near Küssnacht

Without visiting a single government office in Switzerland or requesting any kind of documents from a birth registry, I have so far with the help of the internet extended my family tree from 30 to 189 members. Even better, the www.myheritage.ch page offers a cross referencing function which checks the data you have entered against over 500 Million other genealogy profiles in the web. Any matches will be displayed for you, which has allowed me to contact distant relatives that have started an online family tree of their own. I trust that their research will help me expand my knowledge of my family name ancestry for Schaller, Rittiner, Kamm, Stüssi, Valaulta, Donauer, Küng and Merz.

After 9 years in Australia, Damian Schaller now lives in Switzerland together with his wife. His regular column “Damian’s Websurf”, featuring interesting destinations on the web relating to Switzerland, appears regularly in the Edelweiss magazine, published by the Swiss Club of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. www.swissclubvic.com