Family Research in Switzerland

Tips on doing research in Switzerland:

• Swiss citizenship is kept on three levels: a national level, the canton level, and the Heimatort, or home community. For most people, citizenship was inherited. Therefore, a citizen’s descendants may never even have seen their original home community. The home community was charged with keeping track of its citizens. If a birth, marriage, or death of a citizen took place in another parish, notice of the event was often sent to the Heimatort.
• Church books are one of the most reliable and accurate family history sources. 
• The number of emigrants who left Switzerland without permission and paying the obligatory “moving-away tax” was fairly high, so  there may be no record of their departure. Passports were not registered  until the mid-19th Century.

In order to research your Swiss ancestors you need to know the following information.  
Civil Status: Civil status documents (birth, marriage, divorce, death) have only been recorded by Swiss authorities since 1876.  Prior to this, civil status was recorded by the Roman Catholic and Protestant (Calvinist and Zwingli) churches. You do want to discover to which religion an emigrant belonged in Switzerland. Records would be held in a Catholic or a Protestant church prior to 1876. It is rare for people to change religion upon emigration, so if in doubt, it can be assumed that the religion practiced overseas is the same as in Switzerland.

 
Place of Origin: Where is their town of origin? This refers to the city, small town or community where civil documents are kept. Town is known as the "Bürgerort / Commune d'origine / Comune di attinenza”. This place of origin is handed down from father to child, and to the wife upon marriage. Until recently, a woman would acquire the place of origin from her husband and lose her own.  
Documents concerning changes in civil status are recorded in the the place of origin, regardless of the location where the event actually took place. This has been true since 1876, although in some cases since the end of the 17th century.  
There is one important exception: the places of origin registers only those documents which are sent to them. In past centuries when a person emigrated it was very seldom that changes in civil status were reported back to Switzerland and therefore the family registers were not kept up to date.  

Switzerland’s data protection regulations have made finding living relatives complicated. The Federal Civil Registry Ordinance requires a cantonal research  authorization, which is subject to a fee which is set by the Canton. The Swiss law on data protection has been translated into English: Federal Act on Data Protection 235.1  

For more information about Swiss records and documents, click here.

The Register of Swiss Surnames provides a comprehensive alphabetical listing of surnames holding citizenship in a Swiss community.  This link will take you to the Swiss surname search engine. Each entry contains information on the place of origin; the town or village in Switzerland where the ancestor held citizenship rights. 

The Swiss Society of Genealogical Studies (SSGS) continues to be our most  important resource in helping you search for your Swiss roots.

The SSGS website has links to research tools and topics and links to regional genealogical and heraldic groups in  Switzerland. Most importantly, SSGS offers a list of members who know how and where to do the research you need for a fee.