The Swiss Federal Archives are the national archives of Switzerland (officially the Swiss Confederation). The archives are located in the city of Bern. There are millions of records relating to the history of Switzerland going back to medieval times as the Swiss Confederacy first began to develop. There are a mass of documents and records available at the Archives for genealogical studies and family history. Many of these have been digitized in recent years and are available online. However, owing to the somewhat unusual historical development of Switzerland as a confederation and that as a federal union, many demographic records are still held locally in the archives of individual cities and canton across the country.[1]
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History of Switzerland
The Federal Archives in Bern hold records relating to the Swiss Confederation, the union of city states or cantons that make up the country. This reflects Switzerland’s unusual historical development. The geography of the Alpine country has ensured that Switzerland developed in a different manner to the countries surrounding it. When the Romans began to expand into Northern Europe in the second and first centuries BCE, for instance, they left the Helvetii tribes of the Alps independent for a time, instead only reducing the Alps to their rule from the 50s BC when Julius Caesar needed to secure supply routes over the alps to central Gaul.[2]
Similarly, when Napoleon Bonaparte was expanding his empire across Europe in the 1800s, he allowed the Swiss to withdraw from French subjugation and largely left them to their own devices, the view being that conquering the mountainous country was simply not worth the resources that would be required.[3] This is also perhaps why no country decided to breach Swiss neutrality during the First World War and Second World War, even as countries like Belgium experienced constant occupation despite their efforts to remain outside of the conflicts.[4]
This combination of its mountainous terrain and limited strategic and material value shaped how the Swiss nation developed. In the Early Middle Ages, the Alpine region was incorporated into the empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. However, during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries a number of city states or cantons (an Old French word derived from the Latin cantus meaning ‘corner’) in the Alps became broadly independent of imperial rule. Then, in order to oppose any effort by the Holy Roman Emperors of Germany to re-impose imperial rule, some of these cantons began joining into unions of mutual defense with each other from the late thirteenth century onwards.[5]
The first such agreement was the Federal Charter of 1291, concluded between the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. Despite efforts by the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors to prohibit such alliances, the Swiss Confederation grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as cantons and cities like St Gallen, Zurich and Lucerne joined the original members. By the early sixteenth century the Swiss Confederacy had become a powerful alliance of the Alpine cities and cantons, one which successfully resisted outside interference in its affairs and had even become known for the quality of the its pike mercenaries throughout Europe.[6]
The Swiss Confederation of today is the successor to the Swiss Confederacy of the late medieval period. This was a wholly unusual historical development, making Switzerland a federal state when monarchies otherwise dominated Europe. Over time other things came to define Switzerland, notably its position as the home of Reformed Protestantism (Calvinism) in the second half of the sixteenth century and later its growing emergence as a center of political neutrality. The latter development has seen many international bodies such as the Red Cross, the World Trade Organization and Médecins Sans Frontières base themselves out of the Swiss Confederation.[7]
The Swiss Federal Archives
The Swiss Federal Archives were first established all the way back in 1798 when the Helvetic Republic was briefly created in Switzerland as a sister-republic to revolutionary France. The archives were itinerant for the first half a century of their life as the administrative center of Switzerland changed from time to time. From 1848, when the modern Swiss Confederation came into being after the Sonderbundskrieg, the Swiss civil war, the archives found a permanent home in the city of Bern where they remain to this day. There are millions of records here relating to the functioning of the federal government in Switzerland since the first federal union between some of the cantons in the thirteenth century.[8]
Genealogical information at the Swiss Federal Archives
The Swiss Federal Archives hold many documents of genealogical value when it comes to the functioning of the federal government. However, because of the peculiarities of the Swiss political system, many classes of documents are held in other archives and repositories. Most notably, the federal censuses which have been carried out every ten years in Switzerland since 1850 are now the preserve of the Swiss Federal Statistics Office, which is based in the city of Neuchatel.[9]
In a similar vein, the records of censuses which were carried out in individual cantons and cities going back into the eighteenth century are often held in the local archives of cities like Zurich and Bern. Microfilm copies of some of these records are available at the Federal Archives. Many of them are extremely useful for genealogical studies, with the municipal authorities of Zurich, for instance, carrying out religious censuses as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century.[10]
See also
Explore more about the Swiss genealogical records
- Switzerland, Baptisms, 1491-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Switzerland, Marriages, 1532-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Switzerland Burials, 1613-1875 records collection on MyHeritage
- Switzerland, Zurich Marriages, 1524-1800 records collection on MyHeritage
- Switzerland, Bern, Civil Registration of Births records collection on MyHeritage
- Switzerland, Bern, Civil Registration of Deaths records collection on MyHeritage
- The “Forgotten” Immigrants: The Swiss to America at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.bar.admin.ch/bar/en/home/about-us/the-federal-archives.html
- ↑ James Thorne, ‘The Chronology of the Campaign against the Helvetii: A Clue to Caesar’s Intentions?’, in Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 56, H. 1 (2007), pp. 27–36.
- ↑ https://www.napoleon-series.org/military-info/battles/switzerland/c_switzerland.html
- ↑ https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/foreign-policy/international-law/neutrality.html
- ↑ Frederick H. Cramer, ‘Switzerland: Federalism Triumphant’, in Current History, Vol. 16, No. 91 (March, 1949), pp. 143–150.
- ↑ J. Wayne Baker, ‘The Covenantal Basis for the Development of Swiss Political Federalism: 1291–1848’, in Publius, Vol. 23, No. 2: Communal and Individual Liberty in Swiss Federalism (Spring, 1993), pp. 19–41.
- ↑ https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/foreign-policy/international-organizations/international-organizations-switzerland.html
- ↑ https://www.bar.admin.ch/bar/en/home/about-us/the-federal-archives/history-of-the-federal-archives.html
- ↑ https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home.html
- ↑ http://files.lib.byu.edu/family-history-library/research-outlines/Europe/Switzerland.pdf