When a Village's Memory Went Up in Flames

The Rectory Fire in Obstalden in 1834

It was March 4, 1834, when not just a house burned in Obstalden on the Kerenzerberg - but the memory of an entire community.

They were stored in the rectory, neatly kept for generations: baptism, marriage and death registers. Church registers that, from the late 16th century onwards, recorded who was born, who married and who died in Kerenzen. Long before there were state civil status offices, these books were the official civil status archive. Until 1875, the clergy kept these registers in the canton of Glarus; it was not until 1876 that the state took over this task.

When the vicarage caught fire, all the parish registers went up in flames. The Glarus archivist Jakob Winteler later described this loss as "almost irreparable". And indeed, centuries of written records were wiped out in a single fire.

More than just paper

Church records are not dry administrative files. They are social documents. Between the lines, there are references to epidemics, poverty, origins and the social networks of a village. Who married whom, who moved in, which families remained present for generations - all this can be seen in such registers.

With their loss, not only names disappeared. Relationships, biographies and genealogical connections also disappeared. This gap still has an impact today: A coherent genealogy for Obstalden can no longer be fully reconstructed due to the fire.

What could be saved

However, not everything was completely lost. Jakob Winteler points out that Mühlehorn belonged to Obstalden as a parish until 1760. The first pastor of the later independent parish of Mühlehorn had once made excerpts from the Obstalden books. In addition, a copy of the oldest church register later emerged.

However, this replacement record remained fragmentary. There were serious gaps, especially for the years 1700 to 1800. They are fragments - not a complete record.

The story of the chickens

In addition to the archival facts, one anecdote has survived to this day. It tells the story that the parish priest at the time, Jakob Menzi, first saved his chickens on the night of the fire - and only then thought about the church records. By then, however, it was already too late.

Whether this episode is historically accurate cannot be clearly proven. It does not appear to be a direct eyewitness account, but a later tradition. But this is precisely where its significance lies: the story personalizes the loss. It gives the abstract archive fire a face - and a moral point. Such stories often arise where collective experiences of loss are processed. They explain what is actually almost impossible to explain: why the memory of a village went up in flames.

75 years later: An attempt at reconstruction

One particularly revealing source on the history of tradition dates back to 1909, when Johann Jakob Kubly-Müller wrote a handwritten note on the genealogy of Kerenzen. He noted that it had originally begun "in 1594", but that the existing church records had "perished in the fire at the rectory in Obstalden on March 4, 1834". He also passed on the chicken anecdote - an indication that it was already firmly anchored in local memory at the beginning of the 20th century.

His description of the reconstruction work is particularly valuable. The genealogy was compiled from a copy of the oldest parish register, information from older villagers, individual pages saved from the fire disaster and later family registers.

This shows how primary tradition becomes secondary reconstruction. Complete registers become fragments. Official entries become combinations of transcripts, memories and additions.

Kubly-Müller's note is therefore less a report on the night of the fire than a document of memory preservation. It shows how a community tries to piece together its lost history decades later.

A gap that affects almost all families from the parish of Kerenzen

What makes the fire of 1834 particularly poignant is its widespread impact. The lost church records did not concern individual lines or isolated branches of the family - they formed the central civil status records of the entire parish of Kerenzen/Obstalden. From a genealogical point of view, the resulting gap affects almost every family that was resident in the parish before 1834. For many family trees, the secure written tradition ends abruptly or becomes blurred and fragmentary for certain decades. Where elsewhere continuous registers allow an almost complete reconstruction, in Kerenzen often only the approximation via transcripts, secondary sources and indirect evidence remains. The fire is therefore not an individual fate of individual families, but a collective incision in the written memory of an entire region.

The loss affected virtually all long-established families of the parish, including, among others, Ackermann, Britt, Durscher, Dürst, Geiger (Giger), Grob, Heussi, Kamm, Kirchmeier, Küng, Menzi, Schräpfer, and Zwicki.