Mike's Mathom Collection - Frutigen
One of my great-great-great grandfathers, Friedrich Bohler (born 1826), emigrated from Frutigen, Switzerland along with his parents Johannes and Margaretha (Reichen) and perhaps 4 siblings sometime around 1830. (His next younger sibling Susanna was born in Frutigen in January 1828, but the sibling after that, Daniel, was born in Pennsylvania in April 1834.)
Many hearty thanks to a superb website that collected all the church parish and civil records in the Frutigen area, frutigergeschlechter.ch, and made them available for free. (They seem to have been combined recently — late 2020 — with the larger Historisches Familienlexikon der Schweiz.) I have been able to construct a nearly complete ancestry of Friedrich going back 11 generations to the start of the 1500s (or even the 1490s). So even though I am only 3% Frutiger, nearly 21.2% of my current genealogy database (which includes my wife's tree and all the modern non-ancestral relatives) is filled with his Frutigen ancestors (559 of 2633). Compare that to my next best documented ancestor, my Swiss-Mennonite grandmother Anna Zimmerman (of which I am 25% — 3 generations closer); the Swiss Mennonites are also well documented and have several massive databases available (for example, the Swiss Anabaptist Genealogical Association). Her ancestors occupy only 14.1% of my database (371 of her ancestors), though it is true that some of her ancestors have been traced even farther back in time.
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