Zweisimmen is and always will be the Heimat of the Treuthardt family.
In Switzerland "nobody" cares where you are born, they want to know where did the family originate, what is its Heimat? This is the registry place, where the civil records of the family are kept, and where the family name is known. In a perfect system, that means that if someone is born, marries or dies in another place besides the Heimat, the event should be reported to his Heimat, and it is recorded there, as well as in the city where the event occurred. The person's identity is associated for all time with this place, for his life and the lives of his children, etc., regardless of whether he lived apart from it or ever saw it. Switzerland does a good job of keeping track of its citizens this way.
Early in my Treuthardt study, Zweisimmen appeared to be a prime candidate as their Heimat. I thought I was looking for Friedrich's birthplace and place of residence. The former turned out to be true, the latter turned out to be troublesome.
In many genealogical libraries is a book called Index to Surnames in Switzerland. In 1992 I found this book in Plano, Texas at the regional Family History Library of the LDS (Mormon) church. The Treuthardt surname is included in this book and shows the surname having derived from Zweisimmen from "before 1800." There were a few other cities mentioned, of Treuthardt people living in other cantons after that time.
In the same library, however, no Treuthardts were indexed in the data base of the International Genealogical Index, neither the Parent Index nor the Surname Index.
Americans are conditioned to a society which records the birthplace of a person -- not where his family came from. In both America and Switzerland a researcher will or may have trouble finding the residence/s of an ancestor who moved away from his birth family's location (Heimat) and started a family in a new place. Theoretically, the Swiss records should record those other places more reliably than in America.
In 1995 I was brave enough to write and send money to Zweisimmen with a request for information. Herr G. Janz of the Zweisimmen Zivilstandsamt, sent me critical information about the Treuthardt family from the records of the Bürger-registern. Friedrich, his parents and grandparents were listed, complete with names and dates of births and deaths. This was a benchmark day for my family study. I was already about 17 official years into the study, since my interview of Aunt Anna in West Texas.
Only, unbeknownst to me at the time, Friedrich never lived in Zweisimmen. Learning the location of Friedrich's actual residences was a harder problem to solve, and it eluded me.
It was important to me to learn more than just a few dates. I wanted to learn something about Friedrich's family, his two marriages, his wives and all his children. I wanted to know about his profession, where he worked in Switzerland, and detailed information on what he did. I also wanted to know something about his personality and character. At the least I needed to know where he lived in Switzerland. Also, I wanted to visit those places.
I figured, my only hope was to find a key person who could help me. I needed to find a native Swiss person living in Switzerland who spoke English, German and Swiss. I needed help from somebody who was (preferably) retired and who had a little extra time, who cared about the technical profession of my great-grandfather, and who was reliable -- and mainly, somebody who would help some lowly American locate her Swiss family of long ago. I could have more hopefully asked for the moon.
But that story is a few posts in the future.
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