Stories
Everything written down
The name, the village it comes from, and what the study has worked out about the people who carried it. Read in any order. The registers were not kept in one either.
Research
All 51 reports →The findings, line by line and parish by parish, each with its sources. A good place to start is the voyage of 1856.
- From Igis to the Pacific Igis to Missouri, 1856 How Luzius Hegnauer took his family from Igis to Missouri in 1856: the gazette notice, the ship and the farm on the Gasconade. 9 min read
- From Igis to the Pacific The Hegnauers in the Civil War Three men of the Igis family in the Union army: two bridge guards on the Pacific Railroad and a cavalryman with three years' service. 27 min read
- From Igis to the Pacific Where did Jacob Hegnauer come from? Where the first Hegnauer at Igis came from: the search, the four new facts it found, and the best candidate. 17 min read
- Switzerland Volketswil, the parish of Hegnau: the Hegnauer families, 1590–1801 The Hegnauer households of Volketswil, the parish of Hegnau itself, from 1590 to 1801. 18 min read
- Switzerland Elgg, canton Zürich: the Hegnauer families, 1553–1875 The Hegnauer families of Elgg from 1553 to 1875: the town's oldest line, chained couple by couple through its registers. 54 min read
- Newspapers Leonhard Hegnauer and Susanna Hirschi in the papers, 1856–1925 Every newspaper item found for Leonhard Hegnauer and Susanna Hirschi, 1856–1925: politics, the bank, the farm and the family. 79 min read
What’s new in the study
All the news →-
hegnauer.family opens
The study has a home of its own: a page for each of its 2,234 people and 6,524 records, a map of where the name has been, a tree of the whole study, and an archive you can sift by decade. It will keep changing. So, historically, did the spelling.
-
Where the name comes from
Hegnauer is a name of origin: "the one from Hegnau", a village in the commune of Volketswil, canton Zürich, first written Hegenowa about 1150. A "C. dictus Hegenower" appears in 1281, when it was still a description, and it had become a family name by the later 1300s. Whether every Hegnauer descends from one man is a question for Y-DNA.
-
Hegnauers in Hegnau's own parish
The registers of Volketswil, the parish Hegnau belongs to, have Hegnauer baptisms, marriages and burials from 1590. That is two years after the registers begin, so the family was already there. The study has now read them from 1590 to 1801.
-
The first Hegnauer of Igis
Jacob Hegnauer is the first of the name in the church registers of Igis, in the Rhine valley of Graubünden, where he married in 1715. Where he came from, and whether Igis ever made him a citizen, is not recorded; the name itself is a Zürich one. His sons Nuttin and Hanss Heinrich very probably headed the two Hegnauer families of Igis, and the family that sailed for America in 1856 would then descend from him.