35. Treuthardt, Bartolome and Katharina Tritten, both born 1740's-50's (estimated)

They are the earliest known Treuthardts from Zweisimmen parish records. 

Husband:  Hr. Kirchmeyer Bartolome Treuthardt
Wife:        Katharina Tritten

These were Friedrich's great-grandparents.
They are my great-great-great-great-grandparents.
Bartolome and Katharina lived at Zweisimmen.


Bartolome was the Kirchmeyer (Küster or Verwalter) at Zweismmen.

A Kirchmeyer (Küster or Verwalter) is what in English would be called "verger" or "sexton."
He was a worker, administrator, trustee or custodian of the church at Zweisimmen.   Depending on the size and complexity of the church, he may have been the lowliest of custodial workers, or he may have supervised workers who, when called upon, performed many of the duties for pay (small).

The definition of "verger," a word used chiefly in the Church of England, is "a church official who acts as caretaker and attendant, looking after the interior of a church and often the vestments and church furnishings."

The definition of "sexton" is "a person employed to act as caretaker of a church and its contents and graveyard, and often also as bell-ringer, gravedigger, etc."  


A sexton was responsible for the graveyard.    He dug or oversaw the digging of the graves and burial of the bodies in the church graveyard.   He maintained the gravestones, the grass and vegetation, fences, etc., either personally or with help from others.    If animals were involved (e.g. sheep, goats or cows to graze the grass), he would have managed (or borrowed) them too.  

He took care of the church building and, either personally or with assistants, oversaw the cleaning of its interior.    This would have included all the upkeep in maintaining the structure inside and outside.

As the manager of the church's contents, he would have monitored all the activities that pertained to the church, whatever that meant, in order to guard and protect its contents.    He assisted the pastor with the vestments, made sure the textiles were clean and that the proper colors were used at the proper times.   He would have hung and put them away safely (maybe kept locked in a cabinet).   No doubt he oversaw the sewing of new vestments and hangings, when they got worn out.   If there was an organ, he would have kept an eye on it and maybe an ear as well.

Whatever was needed for the performance of church services, such as replacing candles, setting out communion ware, keeping the baptismal font, lecterns and pulpit clean and polished, must have been his responsibility.   The smaller items surely were stored away when not in use, probably under lock and key.    He would have been responsible for the keys.   

If there were mischievous boys around, he would have made sure they didn't put graffiti on those pretty painted walls.    (To clarify here, no Swiss boy would have even THOUGHT of doing such a thing.   He would have been discovered at once and punished with a sound whipping or other memorable painful and emotional display of wrath by a number of prominent villagers). 

The Kirchmeyer was the bell-ringer (and polisher).   As such, he would have known the language of the bells.   Whether that was ringing bells on Sunday morning to call the villagers to the divine service, or for announcing deaths (ringing the number of years of a person's life), or ringing for special occasions, he probably trusted no one else to ring the bells.


The above comments are my interpretation of what a Kirchmeyer at Zweisimmen may have accomplished, based upon the definitions of the words "verger" and "sexton."   Bartolome certainly would have had a large responsibility for the management of the church, if he did all those things.

In one description of a sexton in an English church in the 1800's, I discovered that the sexton worked with the documents of the church, meaning that he served as a type of librarian and caretaker for the archives (i.e., was literate).    In the latter part of the 1700's a book and archive collection would have been precious.    [In the case of this English sexton, his very literate young son had access to the library key and he would enter on his own and read the books.   Sometimes he took the books.   Later he became a good author.]   

Extending those ideas, if our Bartolome did many or all those things, he would have known a great deal about the community in addition to his knowledge of church governance.   Being an original member of the community, more longterm in his position than the pastors (who came and went every few years), he would have trained the new pastors in the goings-on of their church and community.    He may have provided them respectful and reverential counseling.    In these ways, checks and balances were provided to each other by the Pastor (who came from someplace else) and the Kirchmeyer (who was, for the most part, a permanent fixture in the church) for the over-all orderly running of the church.

It would not have been an easy job.   The depths of the responsibilities made this a full-time profession.  Bartolome and Katharina must have lived near the church so that he could spend most of his time there.   It is not unreasonable to assume that Katharina had a part in some of these responsibilities as well, in supporting the position of her husband.   In summary, Bartolome was a glorified servant, and he probably did not feel very glorified when he was performing some of the duties.   Hmmm.   That sounds like a musician.

Speaking of music, I have a feeling that the church had an organ, and that Bartolome was a singer himself.   It is pretty certain that he was friends with the choir director.  

I do not know how many children Bartolome and Katharina had.    Their son Jacob was born in 1779, and he was baptized on December 2.   One of Jacob's Baptismal sponsors was the choir director from Zweisimmen.    

(See my post #46 for another mention of Bartolome.)  

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.  

32. Switzerland, Bern Canton, Zweisimmen -- the Heimat of the Treuthardts

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.   
   

28. Birthday -- Friedrich Christian Treuthardt, March 28, 1834; registry in Zweisimmen, Bern Canton

On this date 179 years ago, Friedrich Christian Treuthardt was born at Echandens, Vaud Canton, Switzerland.   Friedrich was the third and last child of Jacob and Margaritha Treuthardt.   He was baptized at Lonay, Vaud Canton, on 4 May 1834.   He was born on Good Friday.

Let it be known (this is important) that the Treuthardt family "came from" not Vaud Canton, but from Zweisimmen, Bern Canton.   Zweisimmen is the original home of the Treuthardts.   

Every Swiss national has a so called "place of origin" where he (or she) is registered.   Friedrich Christian Treuthardt's place of origin was "Zweisimmen" which is a small town in the "Berner Oberland."   The registry officer of Zweisimmen has found records of Friedrich Christian Treuthardt and his wife, Anna Geiser.  

Nineteen years ago I wrote a letter of inquiry and received the above response from the Bundesamt für Polizeiwesen, Bern, Switzerland -- Federal Office for Police Matters / Tracing Service, in a letter written by Claire Jordi on October 24, 1994. 

In those days, not so long ago, people typed and signed a letter, put it in an envelope, stamped and mailed it.

[Today Friedrich's birthday falls on Maundy Thursday.]