User:Donjgen

Its 2020; I have been working on my Switzerland lines since 2014. In 2014 I started working on my Swiss ancestry. My focus was on Bern Canton, more specifically the areas in and surrounding Melchnau and Bolligen. Much of the ancestry was on the family tree, but it was put there based on the old family group sheet records which were based on Julius Billeters research pre 1950. This meant that a lot of merging was required to bring all the submissions over the past 100 years into one coherent family tree. As I was linking images (births, deaths, and marriage) I realized that I needed an easier way to locate the records, so I started to develop the wiki pages so I could easily and quickly navigate to the records. When I finished in 2018 I had developed 20 parish pages in Bern Canton and linked 100's of images to my ancestors. About this time I developed my first parish in Solothurn Canton as those records were now online. My surname came from Recherswil gemeinde which was in Kriegstetten parish. Kriegstetten is about 15 miles west of Melchnau. The big difference being that Bern was a Protestant canton and much of Solothurn was a Catholic canton. The record content is much richer in Solothurn than Bern. The writing style is different and more Latin is found in the records. In the past 3 years I have developed about 15 parishes in Solothurn Canton. I may develop a page for every parish in Solothurn.

My first experience of volunteer work came in 1999 when I adopted a county in the GENUKI network. My ancestors came from Kirkcudbrightshire in Scotland, so I volunteered to develop the county page and the parish pages. Since then I have put my own genealogy on the internet. I use TNG (The Next Generation) which is a PHP website, and it is like having a genealogy program on the internet. My ancestors can be traced to Switzerland and the United Kingdom. I have traveled to the United Kingdom a number of times and Switzerland one time with the sole purpose of visiting their home towns and gathering records at the archives and record offices. My father side of the family immigrated from the small towns of Recherswil and Melchnau to the United States in the early 1900’s being converts to the Church. My mother’s side of the family can be traced to the United Kingdom. The earliest roots can be traced to Suffolk, England; Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland; and Ireland.

I have created and or managed the following websites:
 * Scogings Mckenzie Genealogy
 * Jaggi Stettler Genealogy
 * DonJaggi.net
 * John James Mckenzie 1868 to 1920
 * Urr Parish Page with transcribed records pertaining to the parish
 * William Bye Scogings 1822 to 1886 - yet to be completed

Every year over the years I have attended various conferences:
 * BYU Family History and Computer Conferences
 * Utah Genealogical Association
 * ICAPGEN and APG Conferences in Utah
 * Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy

Over the years I have belonged to various Genealogical Society’s:
 * Association of Professional Genealogists
 * Dumfries and Galloway Family History Society
 * Suffolk Family History Society
 * Utah Genealogical Association