We met a government official this morning who said that he couldn't help us because we didn't know Ruth's ancestors' "place of origin," which doesn't mean birthplace. He had no further explanation, but he referred us to the university Staadtarchiv (city archives). We made our way there on the bus system.
There, we met a helpful gentleman who had been informed of our coming and directed us to the microfilms of old records that we needed. Then he showed us some special indexed records for the village of Volketswil that were typed up and easy to search. We quickly traced some of Ruth's lines back to the 1600's finding dozens of new direct ancestors and hundreds of aunts and uncles. We reached the end of those lines and were just about start on cousins when the gentleman brought us a Stauber genealogy book with fold-out charts and details of one branch of Ruth's family tree. This took that line back a few more generations to about 1500 and introduced many more aunts, uncles, and cousins. We worked about 6 hours until the archives closed and came away with over 100 photos of documents. It will take a long time to sort them and enter them into the computer when we get home.
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| Ruth Poring Over Ancient Records |
After the archives closed we went to Old Town Zurich and walked the narrow cobblestone streets. We saw the famous Grossmunster Church and the Fraumunster Church and city hall, but only one Swiss chocolate shop with astronomical prices. We ate at a butcher shop/deli. We would have toured more but it was raining and cold. Then we struggled through the maze of Zurich streets, probably breaking some laws, not knowing what were streets and what were sidewalks sometimes.
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| Grossmunster Church |
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| A Swiss Chocolate Shop |
Overall a red-letter day.
Wow! It's amazing how much genealogy you got to do in one day! I bet Mom was in heaven!
ReplyDeleteWe were both astonished and thrilled. We were copying and documenting names as fast as we could. I wanted to try to solve some mysteries along the way, but she kept me going just raking in the "low-hanging fruit." There is a lot more we could do if we had more time.
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