How the study works

The scope

The study has 2,234 people and 6,856 records. Every mention of a Hegnauer goes into the index, whoever it is about, together with every record cited for anyone in the study, in-laws included. 321 people have a full master record with a written biography; the other pages are put together from the index and say so.

The records run from 1533 to 2026. Most come from FamilySearch; the rest from Ancestry, Newspapers.com, Find a Grave, state and cantonal archives, and a good deal of reading page by page.

• FamilySearch5,383
• Newspapers.com620
• Ancestry248
• Find a Grave103
• FamilySearch Full-Text78
• Staatsarchiv Bern63
• il-state-archives15
• Missouri State Archives7
• familysearch-image6
• blm-glo1

The method

Conclusions follow the Genealogical Proof Standard: a reasonably exhaustive search; a full citation for every source; analysis and correlation of the evidence; the resolution of any conflict; and a written, reasoned conclusion. In practice that means:

• A contemporary register (a baptism, a burial) outranks a later derivative source (a gravestone, an obituary, a family tree) for dates of birth and death.
• Conflicts are written down in the person's research notes, never silently settled.
• Negative searches are recorded too: where we looked and found nothing is evidence of a kind.
• Two people are never merged without the reasoning written into the record.
• Family trees, including WikiTree, are treated as trees, not as sources.

The grades

Every fact on a person's page carries a grade, always with its word and never by colour alone:

proven

The evidence meets the standard: independent records agree, and nothing credible contradicts them.

probable

The evidence points one way and nothing points the other, but it is not yet conclusive.

possible

A lead worth recording, not a conclusion.

Records are linked to people with a confidence of their own: confirmed, probable, possible, or unlinked while the study works out who a record is about. A fact is shown as proven unless its master record marks it probable or possible. Facts on pages without a master record take the best link among the records of the same year, or show as not graded when no record is linked.

Conventions

• IDs. People have H-numbers (H0001) and records O-numbers (O00001). They are never reused or changed, so links to them last.
• Dates are given as the evidence allows: about, before, after, between. A birth known only from a baptism is “before” the baptism.
• Places are named as they were recorded. Swiss places keep their local forms (Zürich, Graubünden); countries and states are written out in full.
• Names appear as written in each record, spelling and all. Person pages list the variants.
• Language. The site is in English. Records stay in their original language, with translations to follow.

The living

People who are alive, or who were born within the last hundred years with no death recorded, appear only as “Living” and a surname, with their place in the tree and nothing else: no first name, no dates, no places. Records about them are kept out of the archive, as are recent records that name them or that may concern someone still living. At present that is 127 people and 332 records.

If you are one of them and would rather not appear at all, the contact form (coming soon) will reach the compiler.

The compiler

Contact

A contact form is on its way. It will send your message to the compiler without publishing an address for the spam robots to find. Corrections are especially welcome: a one-name study is never finished, only better.

Credits

• Aerial photograph of Hegnau, 1946: Werner Friedli, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv / Stiftung Luftbild Schweiz, LBS_H1-008904, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Document images: Staatsarchiv Graubünden (Amtsblatt des Kantons Graubünden) and the Library of Congress (Chronicling America).
• Type: Newsreader, Inter and IBM Plex Mono, under the SIL Open Font License.
• Built with Astro and searched with Pagefind, from the study's own repository.