RUDISILL FAMILY HISTORY Our Swiss Beginning: In the desire to cronicle the history of our family in America, it seems appropriate to start with a description and background of the family of our common progenitor, Hans Rudisuli. The following was researched and written by Pastor Weiser following his examination of many Swiss church and census documents. First of all, we are fairly sure that the name orginated from "Rudi's Ulrich", where Ulrich may have been a resident of the village of Ruthi, located about 6 kilometers from Frumsen, or he may have been related to a Rudi (Rudy or Rudolph) as a member of his family or employed in some other capacity. We have no knowledge of when this name originated, as the existing records as we now know them start in the early seventeenth century. However, since there were quite a good number of people having derivatives of this name when our records began, it is possible that the name had been in use for several centuries. The spelling of the name is almost always "Rudis-Uli" in the early 17th century and later simplified to "Rudisuli". The first families so named apparently came from the village of Frumsen, located along the Rhine River as it flows north and within eyeshot of the principality of Lichtenstein and it's capital, Vaduz. Today, all the principal groups of this family can be shown to have their roots in this town. Frumsen is part of the church parish of Sax, a nearby town, and within the Kanton St. Gallen. Sax and Frumsen were in Kanton Zurich in the 1600's because the rulers of Zurich took over the principality of Sax-Forstegg from 1615 until 1798. In order to clarify the ancestry of Hans, the records of Frumsen were examined. The oldest surviving Sax Evangelical Reformed Church register there was begun by a new pastor, Hans Jacob Freytag, who began his ministry on 5 December, 1638. He calls it clearly as a "new" register, so that there was an earlier, and presumably lost record. In addition, there are census lists of the population which survive from 1635, 1637, 1640, 1643, 1646, 1650, 1671, 1678 and later. There is also a set of lists of persons who have left the parish, written in 1657, which is of direct pertinence to our inquiry. From these documents, it becomes clear that Hans Rudisuli, who later migrated to Germany and finally settled in the town of Michelfeld, whence his grandsons and great grandsons came to Pennsylvania, was baptized as an infant at Frumsen on 20 April, 1643, the son of Thomman and Ann Torgklerin Rudisuli. In the census records for several years we can gain insight into the growing size of this family, and if we wished, into the other families of this name living in this village which had 329 souls in 1678. Source: The Rudisill Genealogy by Edward L. Rudisill Picture Source: Alvin & Janice Rudisill from 2001 Trip!
