Willy and Werner Marti : Kallnach, CH
Yesterday afternoon, my sister and I travelled through the villages of Kallnach and Lyss, Switzerland, on the way to Basel. In the 1850s, our ancestors, the Bangerters and the Martis, emigrated from these little towns not far from Neuchatel and just inside German-speaking Switzerland to the United States. Their final destination: Utah.
The Martis in our family departed from Kallnach, but the family name is still quite prominent there. The top picture is of Willy and Werner Marti, two brothers who own a Holzbau (wood working) shop. They told me that most their (and probably our) ancestors had been Landwirtsmaenner (farmers). Unfortunately, the town hall was closed for lunch and we couldn't stick around to pick up additional information the Marti brothers told us about, but I'll go back in a few weeks and see what more I can learn.
Burial place of another Martha Bangerter : Lyss, CH
(Click on image to enlarge)
(Click on image to enlarge)
Lyss was a much larger town, but their city hall was closed, too, so we went to the Friedhof (cemetery) to see if we could find any Bangerters. We found several headstones with the name Bangerter. The one that stood out the most to us was the one for Martha Bangerter. The irony of that find is, our grandfather, Eldon Bangerter, married a woman named Martha June Harvey. Like Kallnach, I'll go back to Lyss and see if I can find out more about my ancestors.
Click on the links here to see more pictures of Kallnach and gravestones in Lyss.
Photo copyright: Janet M Kincaid, 1/10
7 comments:
How utterly fascinating, Janet. A lovely photo of the headstone and of your two possible long long long lost relatives. Look forward to the followup of this story.
That is amazingly kewl. I would love to take Ducky to Germany to trace his ancestors (but there's that pesky flying thing.) I didn't get to do any when I was in Scotland and England, I would love the chance to do so in the future.
Do those men look like brothers or what?
I didn't realize that your ancestry is from there...it is soooo cool that you are finding more out about them. A friend in CH who was high up at the Swiss Federal Aviation, still lived in his ancestral home (a town/village near Luzern) - and he had a very old bible with the entries of all births and marriages. I also recall that he had records of his people from early days in a book. You should have a grand time at the town records - Swiss are great record keepers.
My husband's last name is Brubaker - and they were emmigrants from CH too - Bruppacher back there. We tracked down a village (5 houses) on the hills along Zurichsee - did not occur to me to look thru official records.
I also went to Rye, NY last summer, where my mother-in-laws family was from and took photos from the local paper archives of various announcements & of the ancestral graves. So pleasing to have that connection to the past.
Nice portrait of those guys! My mother and I are into genealogy, too!
Fun to trace your roots back and learn more family history.
I don't think I could go back more than a couple of generations, and that's confined to Georgia. I haven't put much effort into it, though.
I think it's great that you and your sister got to go back and see some of your roots!
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