Ancestral Roots in Switzerland





My Dad's Senior High School photo

"Be careful what you think about," my dad used to say, "because you'll probably get it."

  


As such, I guess Dad wouldn't have been as surprised as I was to find myself headed to Switzerland a couple of weeks ago.  I had, after all, been thinking about the area quite a bit over the last year or so.

For several months, I had worked with my clients Steve and Stacey planning their family's panoramic, 3-week summer vacation from Milan to Amsterdam.  At the heart of their journey, Steve wanted to explore his father's birthplace, Switzerland, with stays in both Lucerne and Zurich, plus one night at his father's rustic home town located between those big cities.

Swiss Timbered Farmhouse

While researching hotels, day excursions and trains for my clients, I naturally discussed the plans with Julie, and the more we talked about them, the more amazing their journey sounded to us.  





 By coincidence, my cousin Tami, with whom I hadn't spoken in 30 years, also contacted me about a year ago.  She shared that she had discovered through research that our great, great grandfather Solomon had immigrated from Oberwinterthur, Switzerland.



Wes Crossing the Rhine River

I had previously believed that side of our family tree came from France, based on a conversation I had with my grandmother in the 1970s.  With our German sounding last name, I further had assumed they may have immigrated from the Alsace region along the Rhine River, which has gone back and forth between Germany and France several times over the centuries, depending on which side won the last battle.



Wes in Winterthur

Oberwinterthur, a more rural region that's now part of the city of Winterthur, is very close to Alsace villages and shares a similar culture.  My relatives could have spoken French while living in Switzerland, or traveled to Switzerland from France to get passage to America.

On facebook I sought out Erika, a Swiss citizen who shares my surname, hoping she might be a relative.  She isn't, but she recommended I contact Stadtarchiv in Winterthur, which has access to parish records for birth, death and marriages.  For people born before 1870, the Swiss government has never recorded vital records.  Stadtarchiv verified that someone named Salomon had immigrated as a boy with his family in 1854.  His father, Heinrich, sadly died during the crossing at age 45, leaving his mother, Regula, to raise Sol and his nine siblings in a new country, the United States of America.  Apparently our family went back at least two more generations in Winterthur before that.



My Dad's Dad in about 1926

As you can see, I was thinking about Switzerland quite a bit without really thinking I was thinking about going to Switzerland.  Apparently my subconscious mind (or the universal consciousness, depending on how you want to think about it) doesn't differentiate.

 

We booked flights to Zurich and a room at the Best Western Hotel Airport in Glattbrugg, which turned out to be a very nice 3 star property.  We had a lovely view from the large private patio outside our comfortable and bright top floor room. 

To our bodies, it was bedtime after our long flight, but the clock said it was morning, so we walked to the nearby Optikon Station to catch the S-Bahn train to Winterthur.

Winterthur is more of a sprawling mid-sized city than the picturesque village portrayed in postcards, but it was a pleasant place to spend a few hours strolling about and eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe.




Oberwinterthur, Switzerland

 We took a bus to Oberwinterthur, which is a farming suburb north of downtown before returning to Winterthur central.

With a few hours of daylight ahead of us and already halfway to beautiful Stein am Rhein, we decided to head directly there.  The striking beauty of muraled walls of that medieval village made it obvious why we had visited it (based on guidebook recommendations) rather than Winterthur on a prior trip to Switzerland, when we didn't know of family ties to Winterthur.

Julie with wine in Stein am Rhine

In Stein am Rhein, at a scenic sidewalk cafe which we surprisingly had entirely to ourselves, we drank wine and watched the world go by, but the sun began to set, so we caught the next train back to our hotel. 

Too tired to consistently keep my eyes open to appreciate the scenery, I would swear I could understand the conversation of some locals on the train despite the fact that they were speaking German, but maybe that was just a dreamlike imagining of comprehension.

Without getting into details, I will also superfluously add that we had a lot of wrong turns and missteps that led to frustration as we wandered about, but by the time we settled in at the vintage bar (suitable for a "Mad Men" watering hole) at our hotel for our free "welcome" glass of wine, we looked back on a good first day of our vacation.




Wes at our "private" sidewalk weinstube

The Rhine River, which we'd see much more of soon, at Stein am Rhein