Trip to Switzerland (cantons SG & TG) - how to prepare - tour guide sought
I’m going to be traveling to Switzerland in September. I have identified the Swiss towns where my family comes from. They are along the shores of Lake Constance. Rorschach and Steinach are in the canton of Saint Gallen and Egnach and Neukirch are in the canton of Thurgau. I am looking to hire a person to help with a visit to each town and to help me further my research in these towns. Can someone suggest a resource that I can use to help me find such a person? Thanks for your help.
Barbara Gimperling
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The original title "Hello everyone" has been modified to better describe the request.
Answers
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Hello Barbara,
I recommend to consider two aspects separately: 1) how to prepare your trip, and 2) how to find guides.
The problem is: I doubt you'll find people familiar with genealogy research willing to act as guides in a given town, especially as you are talking about specific towns. Secondly: visits to community administrations or churches are usually not efficient - unless you know exactly what you are looking for - and can only be found in the community. Most sources for your research will be kept in the State Archive or (in case of large cities, e.g. St.Gallen) in the city Archives. For St.Gallen many sources may be viewed freely from home (see https://kb.ghgo.ch/) - for Thurgau, however, you have to visit a familysearch Research Centre.
I am not aware of people offering "genealogy tours". Your best bet might be to contact the local Tourist Offices and ask if they can suggest guides with a strong local history background. They may not be familiar with doing genealogical research, but at least will have konwledge about the major families, where they used to live, ... (at least in Rorschach you might get lucky).
As far as preparing the trip is concerned: I cannot give any specific advice without knowing in more detail which families (surname and "Bürgerort") you are interested in, and what you know already (e.g. which century is the time frame you want to research further).
Best regards for now - Wolf
Just as an aside - may sound complicated, unless you are already familiar with that platform. If you register (free of charge and without obligation) with https://www.geneal-forum.com/ you can view the "user map" (which is far from complete as entering your zip code during registration is voluntary). There you can zoom in and find members living locally. To be able to contact them via a Private Message, however, you have to have two posts (this is to make life difficult for spammers). The solution would therefore be to contribute to two topics (either respond to an existing one, or start a new one). OK - sounds like a lot of effort if you only want to be able to send a PM - but in this way you'd get a much larger audience of locally resident researchers for your questions - much(!) larger than this community. Just fyi ... don't feel I want to persuade you 😉.
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For Rorschach I would recommend to contact https://www.rorschachergeschichten.ch/aktuell.html: whilst on the web page they push their publications, the group behind that are people strongly interested in local history.
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