Tracing New Glarus Roots All the Way Back to Glarus – And Beyond

An article about Glarner Families Worldwide published by New Glarus 360

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For many New Glarus families, the story of how their ancestors crossed the Atlantic in the mid-1800s is part of local memory. But quietly, across the ocean in Switzerland — the same homeland from which so many early New Glarus settlers once departed — one man has been working for years to stitch those stories into a single, enormous family tree that connects Canton Glarus to the rest of the world, including New Glarus, Wisconsin.

Patrick Wild is the founder and owner of a website called Glarner Families Worldwide (glarusfamilytree.com). He lives in Switzerland (on the shores of Lake Hallwyl between Lucerne, Zurich and Basel), and he’s been working for many years on genealogical research focused on the families of the Canton of Glarus, with a special emphasis on their emigration and global descendants.

His website is a structured and searchable database of almost 400,000 individuals with roots in Canton Glarus. Many of those people – or their ancestors – ultimately found their way to New Glarus and other Swiss settlements all over the Midwest.

A Hobby That Grew Into Nearly 400,000 Names

Wild’s interest in genealogy began, like many people’s, with simple curiosity about his own family. His ancestors are of Glarus descent, and the more he learned, the more he wanted to understand how all the old Glarner names connected over time.

“My interest in genealogy began with my own family which is of Glarus descent and as a personal curiosity about origins and how people and families are connected over time,” Wild said. Having roots and a strong interest in the Canton of Glarus, he was naturally drawn to its “distinct identity, its rich documentary sources (church registers, civil records) and the clear pattern of emigration from that canton to places abroad.”

What began as a personal project slowly expanded as he uncovered more data, especially about emigrants. “What started as personal hobby research gradually grew as I uncovered more data, deeper connections and large numbers of emigrant families and their descendants,” he said.

About fifteen years ago, he decided to turn that hobby into a truly ambitious project: “I decided to trace the family connections between the roughly 200 original families in Glarus (as documented in traditional sources) and extend this through the generations and across continents.”

Today, his unified database – a single interconnected tree rather than many separate ones – reaches back to early church records in the 16th century and forward to living descendants spread around the globe.

The Backbone: A 36-Volume Handwritten Genealogy of Glarus

At the core of Wild’s work is a monumental source that few outside archivists and serious genealogists have ever seen: the handwritten “Glarus genealogy manuscript” of Johann Jakob Kubly-Müller, compiled between 1893 and 1923.

“On the website I note that ‘The starting point … is always the outstanding genealogical work of Johann Jakob Kubly-Müller,’” Wild explained. The 36-plus volumes list citizen families of Glarus from the 16th century forward, drawing on church registers and many archival sources.

But those volumes present their own challenges in the digital age. They are handwritten in Sütterlin script, not digitized, and stored in the state archives in Glarus. Wild has had to carefully transcribe, interpret, and standardize this material. “The volumes use older orthography, variant name spellings, and the challenge is to map those into a contemporary database with consistency of names, places, date formats, etc.,” he said.

From there, he layers on civil-registration records (from 1876 onward), church registers, obituary records, official notices, and emigration documents. For emigrant families – the ones that matter most to New Glarus – he works with passenger lists, overseas records, and amateur genealogists around the world. The result is a tree where “each of these persons are inter-connected and have in one way or the other a relationship.”

Why Swiss Records Matter – and Where They Fall Short

In the United States, people often hear that Switzerland keeps some of the best genealogical records in the world. Wild agrees that this reputation is largely deserved.

“Switzerland does have exceptionally strong genealogical records, especially compared with many other countries, and this reliability has been one of the great advantages of conducting research in the Canton of Glarus,” he said. Centuries of parish registers and later civil records provide a consistent framework of births, marriages, and deaths that make his project possible.

But even in Glarus, the record is not perfect. Wild notes that fires in the town of Glarus and in places like Obstalden destroyed portions of early church books. “Entire volumes covering some of the earliest centuries were lost forever,” he said. For some families and periods, gaps can never fully be closed.

At the same time, Switzerland’s political stability meant its archives were spared the kind of wartime destruction seen in Germany, Poland, and Russia. For Glarus, the combination of surviving church registers, civil-registration files, and Kubly-Müller’s work “has provided an unusually stable record base,” allowing Wild to build a “reliable and interconnected family database reaching back to the 16th century.”

From Glarus to New Glarus

New Glarus itself is one of the most iconic examples of the Glarner diaspora. Wild’s research confirms what local historians have long known: the wave of emigration from Glarus between the 1850s and 1880s was driven by economic pressures, population growth, and industrial change, as people sought land and opportunity abroad.

“Yes — New Glarus is one of the classic examples of Swiss emigration from the Canton of Glarus to the United States (mid-19th century),” Wild said. Families arriving in Wisconsin brought their language, craftsmanship, and traditions, and “established communities like New Glarus that retained a Swiss-Glarus identity.” Wilded cited New Ulm (née Elm) in Minnesota, New Bilten in South Dakota, and New Bern in North Carolina as examples. 

Many of those families kept close ties to the homeland through letters, money sent back, and occasional visits. Today, their descendants still “take pride in their Glarus heritage,” even when surnames have changed spelling or been anglicized. Wild notes that in at least one case, his research traced a New Glarus family whose name had changed, revealing a previously overlooked link back to a 17th-century Glarus citizen.

For modern-day residents of New Glarus trying to understand where their great-great-grandparents came from, Wild’s database is a bridge across time and geography.

A Web of Connections that Reaches Charlemagne

One of the most eye-opening aspects of the project is just how far those family lines extend into European history.

“Because Glarus maintained a relatively small and stable population for centuries — and because many family lines intermarried over long periods — it is often possible to trace these lines far back into European medieval history,” Wild said.

By combining his Glarner database with established noble and medieval genealogies, Wild said he could trace nearly every Glarner family back to Charlemagne, the medieval king who united much of Western Europe and was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor, as well as to many other notable historical figures of the early Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Unfortunately, that does not make modern descendants “noble” in any practical sense, but it does demonstrate how the family trees of a small alpine canton eventually intertwine with the broader tapestry of Europe.

“For descendants in New Glarus, this means that their heritage is not only rooted in the mountains and valleys of Canton Glarus, but also linked into the wider tapestry of European history,” Wild said. Those “deep-rooted ancestral pathways” show just how interconnected people really are.

Human Stories Behind the Data

The work is painstaking. With roughly 400,000 individuals in his database, even a small error rate can create a ripple of thousands of incorrect links. Wild spends countless hours checking variant spellings, avoiding duplicate entries, and carefully linking emigrants back to their Swiss origins.

What keeps him going is not just the historian’s desire for order, but the human stories that emerge when lines are finally connected. One example he recalled involved a family whose DNA results did not match the story they had heard all their lives. “The DNA evidence — aligned with records in my database — revealed that the biological father of an individual born more than 50 years ago was not the man the family had always assumed,” he said.

The discovery was not emotional but ultimately healing. “It also showed them that family history is not only about the past but about identity, honesty, and healing,” Wild said. “Moments like these remind me that this work is ultimately about human lives and genuine connections, not just names in a database.”

What New Glarus Can Gain from Glarner Families

For New Glarus, Wild hopes his work will be more than an interesting curiosity. “My hope is that the people of New Glarus (and beyond) will gain a sense of connection: to the homeland of the Canton of Glarus, to the emigrant ancestors who left, and to the broader family network worldwide,” he said.

His website offers more than names and dates. It includes historical and demographic information – from economic history to life expectancy and disease – and even practical help for those planning a trip back to the old country. Visitors will find research guides such as “Sources for Research in USA” and “Family Research in Switzerland,” as well as maps, archive locations, and tourism information.

Wild also hopes for collaboration with communities like ours. “I would very much welcome working even more with the New Glarus community — for example, linking local historical societies, sharing emigrant-family stories specific to New Glarus, or joint articles,” he said.

His vision for the future includes interactive maps that show how Glarus families spread around the world, richer analytics on migration patterns, and deeper exploration of the links between Glarner families and those from other Swiss regions like Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Lucerne.

How to Connect with Your Own Glarner Roots

For New Glarus residents who suspect they have Glarus roots, Wild is open to help. “If someone suspects they have Glarus-roots … they can contact me via the website; I offer to check if their family appears in the database (free initial check) and can assist with possible linkage or guidance,” he said.

The Glarner Families Worldwide website provides glossaries, indexes to church books, emigrant resources for the USA and Brazil, and links to his public tree on Geneanet.org. He welcomes corrections, photos, and family documents that can enrich the shared record.

In a village that proudly calls itself “America’s Little Switzerland,” the work of one researcher on a lake in Switzerland is helping New Glarus families see their story in a whole new light – not just as a chapter in local history, but as part of a centuries-long saga stretching from alpine valleys to Wisconsin hills, and from medieval Europe all the way to the present day.

– If you have Glarner roots or family stories that lead back to Switzerland, consider visiting glarusfamilytree.com to explore the Glarner Families Worldwide project, and think about sharing your own documents and memories. Your New Glarus story may already be part of Patrick Wild’s database – and, if not, it may be waiting to be added.