Schmutz Family of Switzerland-Utah: fixing the past
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006As do most genealogists, I have a few (well, many) projects that I have floating in the back of my head, waiting to be finished. One of these was to compile the descendants of my Swiss ancestors, Johannes (John) Schmutz and his wife, Elisabeth Lehmann. In this day and age, with the fears of identity theft, I know that it’s next to impossible, but we can always dream.Â
In any case, as an individual with LDS heritage, I had ‘inherited’ my family history in its ‘complete’ form. After proving this theory incorrect more times than I could count, I decided to ‘clean’ up some of my family groups - find the original sources, make sure the birth dates and christening dates and places were accurate, etc. And so I began with the Schmutz family. I found all the entries for the children of Johannes and Elisabeth, and continued on to their generation. After I’d gathered all of Johannes’s siblings’ information, I began working on their parents, and made a startling discovery.