Foreword
One of my favorite childhood memories is of paging through a copy of the 1961 edition of the “History of the Harry Family.” I was fascinated by the stories about Johann Heri and his pal Wolf, their adventures in Napoleon’s army, and of the travails of Viktor and Maria Heri’s family as they struggled to establish a new life in the United States. There was a pride that came with locating my name on the page charting the relationships between all the family members and knowing that I belonged.
For the last 20 years, I have been updating that early record of the family. I hoped to reconnect with the Swiss branch of the family. I wanted to learn more about the country our ancestors left from in the decade before the American Civil War. I also wanted to discover more about the various American branches of the family and what life was like beyond the pages of that earlier work.
The following pages are the results of my “on and off again” efforts over the intervening years. I did manage to visit Switzerland and walked around the towns where the Heri’s have lived for centuries and even photographed the house that Johann built for his family. I was privileged to meet Elisabeth Heri, a distant relative residing in the town of Solothurn, who allowed me to copy the generational listings her father had researched. Many years later, I returned to meet the Peter Ingold family and Beat Heri of Zurich, with whom I had exchanged letters since the early 1980’s and e-mail as we moved through the 1 990’s. The years also afforded me the opportunity to make several trips to Alma where I had the opportunity to meet other relatives, hear more stories, and explore the area Viktor and Maria journeyed to from Switzerland.
In order to aid the efforts of some future family genealogist, I have attempted to list my sources of information. While I was fortunate to have government and family documents in both Switzerland and the United States to lend authenticity to the project, I also found the information handed down verbally from generation to generation almost always proved to be accurate when documentation was subsequently uncovered. A debt of gratitude is owed to those family members who had the foresight to pass on the family history orally and to those who captured family members on film. They made the more formal research contained in these pages possible.
You may find slight variations in the details of some stories you heard growing up. Such is an expected hazard of trying to capture stories in a family history. You will also certainly find errors in dates and names. Those are my fault, casualties of the sheer volume of data compiled over the last two decades.
The final goal I had in collecting and printing the information was that other family members would feel some of that fascination, pride, and sense of belonging that I felt learning about the family. I hope you help make that goal come true by making copies of these pages, distributing them among the extended family, and updating the story as the years go by. The lives recorded here belong to all of us– in fact, they are very much a part of each of us.
