33. Switzerland, our family trip in 1993

Exploring Switzerland in 1993

Eddie and I took our three young children (Benjamin, 16, Bryce, 12, Angelyn, 8) to Switzerland and Germany for three weeks.   We rented a 5-passenger sedan, a Peugeot, and made jaunts into areas where the Kriegs and Treuthardts had lived.    Those areas included Zweisimmen and Aubonne and Lausanne.   (Love those double consonants!)  

Zweisimmen (zwei = two) is situated at the confluence of the Simme and the Kleine Simme Rivers, thus it is "Two Simme's."   Being in Zweisimmen on a Sunday morning, we went to the village church and participated in a German service.   We made a mistake right away.   We sat in somebody's pew.    The family came in, stood at the pew and wondered what to do.   We offered to move, but they declined and sat in another place.    Benjamin was already taking German in high school and could understand the topic the pastor talked about.   The church is (of course!) all wood, and there is a large clock on the steeple.    The walls have old artwork painted on them, as well as Scripture verses (in German) written in large letters.   A lovely organ was being played masterfully for the liturgy and hymns.    At the offertory, and at the end of the service, the organist played while the people sat quietly.   (This doesn't happen so often in America, as people don't have that same etiquette for music.)  After the service we stayed awhile and talked to a couple of people, so they would know who we were.    

Also we walked around the cemetery and saw a few tombstones with Treuthardt names engraved on them.   Since these stones are relatively recent, we surmised that there were still Treuthardts living here.   Margaret had been to Zweisimmen before us, and she had found out that there were two elderly men named Treuthardt living a little ways apart from the town, who did not speak English.   That is more than 20 years ago.       

The "language line" was right outside Zweisimmen.   On one side of that line inside the village, the highway signs were in German.   On the other side, the highway signs were in French, which is what people spoke there.   Here were indications of the language fluency of the Treuthardts, and it is easy to see how the Treuthardts could speak more than one language.   What they really speak is the "Swiss" or rather Allemanisch, which is another subject.  

We drove around the north side of Lake Geneva, up to and through Aubonne briefly.    In the neighborhood, east of Aubonne is Morges, where there is a museum in a fortress called Château-arseneaux, Musée Militaire Vaudois -- The Military Museum of Canton Vaud.    We toured the museum and got an inkling of the history of the military of the Swiss, situated as they are in the middle of the continent with potentially hostile nations all around them.

With a name like Krieg (generally thought by our family to mean, "war"), we certainly felt right at home.

In Lausanne we walked to the Cathedral.   It is the largest Gothic cathedral in Switzerland, consecrated in 1275 A.D.   After admiring the interior architecture and art, and the large organ, we climbed a steep staircase to the roof of the Cathedral and marveled at the vistas of the surrounding Alps and Lake Geneva in the crisp air.   Lausanne retains the quaint ancient nightly practice of a watchman atop the cathedral in the middle of every night calling out the hours in all four directions, from 10:00 o'clock p.m. until 2:00 o'clock a.m.

Driving around the cities and country roads, seeing the beautiful countryside and taking in Swiss history and culture as we could, gave us a sense of what those people must have missed when they came to Texas.   Texas has its charms, but it doesn't have Alps and glacier valleys or crystal blue lakes and rivers and beautiful vistas at every turn.    These images were impressed in my mind as this family study progressed.

The Swiss people left Switzerland for Texas in the 1880's because of economic hardship and severe times.    We were visiting the same regions that the Treuthardts left 110 years earlier.
Thanks to Eddie for doing this trip for me!     

~Taken from my writing of April 27, 2004

"Friedrich Christian Treuthardt, 

the Family History Study for Great-Grandfather" 

 

But there is a twist to the reasons that the Treuthardts left Switzerland.    For them it was not all economic hardship.